How Dentsply Sirona moved dental labs and clinics off paper and onto one connected platform.
Dentsply Sirona is the world’s largest manufacturer of professional dental products. Inside its DS Core platform, dental labs were still taking orders on paper. The ordering portal and onboarding designed for DS Core moved labs and clinics onto one connected system.
The project in ten seconds.
A connected-dentistry platform that only works if both sides join it.
Dentsply Sirona designs and sells professional dental products and technologies in more than 150 countries. Its strategy is connected dentistry: integrated hardware and software that span the clinical workflow from diagnosis to manufacturing.
DS Core is the cloud platform that ties that ecosystem together. It stores data and connects dental clinics on one side with dental laboratories on the other, so its value depends entirely on getting both sides onto the platform and working together.
Dentsply Sirona brought in a freelance product designer to help consolidate an existing design team and accelerate DS Core. Within a larger group of designers and developers, the ordering portal and onboarding were owned end to end.
Orders ran on paper, and information got lost.
Labs traditionally placed their orders on paper. That made the process slow, costly, and error-prone, and communication between a lab and a clinic was fragmented enough that information regularly went missing.
For a platform whose entire value comes from connecting both sides, a manual paper-bound entry point was the core obstacle. If onboarding and ordering were not effortless, neither side would stay.
The people who felt this most were the clinic assistants and lab staff doing the manual work, and the business itself, whose product retention depended on adoption.
Success meant labs and clinics could onboard themselves and order without friction.
Dental clinics
Self-onboard onto the platform.
Organize orders through a dashboard.
Manage patients in a CRM-like view.
Securely share patient files: scans and related information.
Dental laboratories
Self-onboard onto the platform.
Receive and organize orders digitally.
Communicate securely with clinics and exchange patient records.
Dentsply Sirona
Increase product retention.
Make the sales team’s work easier, since a well-designed product is adopted and recommended more readily.
A regulated healthcare product, used under time pressure.
This was a healthcare product used by clinic assistants and lab staff who have no time for ambiguity. Clarity was a hard constraint: any cognitive load that could cause an ordering error was unacceptable.
The work happened inside an established team and framework rather than greenfield, so it had to fit existing patterns and ship incrementally with each release. Scope was specifically the ordering portal and onboarding, plus the dashboard and secure messaging that supported them.
Where the work sat within the team.
The product-designer role covered the entire ordering portal and onboarding on DS Core, within a larger group of designers and developers.
Day to day the work ran hand in hand with a project manager who gathered client needs and data, a user researcher who ran usability testing, and the development team building the platform. Design ownership spanned onboarding, ordering, the clinic and lab dashboard, patient file sharing, and the secure messenger.
Prototype the solution while the problem is still being explained.
The process started with the project manager, gathering existing data and the needs clients had expressed, alongside the usability-test reports the research team had already produced.
Prototyping happened live during the calls themselves, sketching a solution in the room while the problem was still being described, then refining it in Figma afterwards. That rhythm let the team iterate quickly and ship improvements with every release.
01
Treat clarity as a primary constraint
The interfaces had to be understood instantly by assistants and lab staff, not just power users. Comprehension was designed for first and validated through testing, so any cognitive load that could lead to an ordering error was removed before it shipped rather than patched after.
02
Prototype live, refine later
Rather than going away to design, a working prototype was drafted during the call, grounded in the research team’s usability reports. The tradeoff was rougher first drafts. The return was speed and a tight feedback loop with the people who actually knew the workflow.
03
Make onboarding self-service and data-rich
Onboarding was designed so clinics and labs could integrate themselves with minimal manual support, and so the platform captured as much structured data about them as possible. Self-service lowered the barrier to joining and fed the business goal of retention at the same time.
What shipped, and the problem each piece solved.
Onboarding flow: self-service integration for clinics and labs, automated and data-collecting, replacing manual setup.
Ordering portal: a digital flow to order dental products from laboratories, replacing the paper order.
Clinic and lab dashboard: order organization plus a CRM-like view of a clinic’s patients.
Patient file sharing: a secure way to exchange scans and patient information.
Secure messenger: a communication channel between labs and clinics so nothing gets lost between them.
Self-service onboarding. Clinics and labs integrate themselves through a guided flow that also captures structured data about them as they go.
Pricing inside the ordering portal. The cost of an order stays explicit at every step so labs can decide with full information.
Checkout. The step that replaced the paper order, kept deliberately plain so an assistant can complete it without second-guessing.
Secure messenger. Labs and clinics exchange patient files and questions in one thread, so nothing gets lost between them.
Mobile onboarding. The same self-service integration condensed into a focused step-by-step sequence for small screens.
Self-service onboarding. Clinics and labs integrate themselves through a guided flow that also captures structured data about them as they go.
What changed because of the work.
Grew with each release
Live prototyping
Renewed by client
One of the core values within our UX team is 'continuous improvement'. Lucas not only embraced but also personified this philosophy in his work. Over the past several months, I have observed Lucas consistently deploying a structured approach to deliver impactful design solutions. He has supported our existing framework by offering great ideas and suggestions to enhance our internal workflows. If I were to describe Lucas in a single word, it would be 'sharp'. He is quite knowledgeable of best practices and industry standards. Additionally, he's always ready to step in whenever a team member encounters any issues, making him an enthusiastic and valuable asset to our team. Our ongoing collaboration with Lucas is a cherished privilege that we will continue in the future.
What worked and what carried forward.
The approach worth repeating is prototyping live during the call. In a healthcare product where clarity is everything, putting a concrete artifact in front of the people who know the workflow surfaced misunderstandings on day one rather than a sprint later. The lasting lesson is treating comprehension as a measurable design constraint, tested explicitly, on every screen where an error has a real-world cost.
The work outlived the engagement.
The freelance engagement ran from May to December 2023. Adoption improved with each feature shipped, and Dentsply Sirona’s Head of UX described the collaboration as one they intended to continue.
DS Core remains part of the company’s active connected-dentistry offering.