Straumann Orders, CT Scanners & Capnography: A Dental Practice Manager's FAQ

If you're trying to set up a shop Straumann login, looking for a part in the Straumann product catalog, or deciding whether to buy a CT scan machine and an intraoral scanner, you're in the right place. I'm a dental practice manager who's been handling equipment and supply orders for six years. I've personally made (and documented) four significant mistakes, totaling roughly $14,000 in wasted budget. Now I maintain our team's ordering checklist. This FAQ is the stuff I wish someone had walked me through before I started spending.

How do I order Straumann products online? And what's the catch with the login?

Searching "shop Straumann login" brings you to the customer portal, but the portal doesn't show you much until your account is fully verified. My first mistake was registering with my personal email instead of clinic credentials. That landed me in what I'd call the "public" tier—basically marketing pages, not real inventory, no contracted pricing.

What most people don't realize is that the portal separates consumer access from professional/clinical access. Once your clinic registration is verified with the right credentials, you see the full Straumann product catalog, actual stock status, order history, and the pricing your clinic actually has. If you can't find products you're expecting to see, your account is probably stuck in the wrong tier.

Take the 20 minutes to get verified properly. I lost about two days trying to place an order through a partial account before a Straumann rep sorted me out. It's one of those fixes that sounds dumb when you say it out loud, but nobody tells you upfront that the logins are tiered. If you have a local Straumann representative, just call them first. That one call saved me more time than every help page combined.

How do I find what I need in the Straumann product catalog without losing my mind?

The catalog is genuinely massive, and most of the time when colleagues tell me they can't find something, the issue isn't the catalog. It's the search term. Searching 'abutment' gives you a wall of options, and most of them won't fit the implant you're restoring.

In January 2020, I ordered 25 abutments without confirming the implant platform. It looked fine on my screen. The result: they didn't match any implant line we use. 25 items, about $3,200, straight into the bin. That's when I learned to always verify compatibility, and to search by part number rather than product name.

Here's a workflow that's been working for us: save the part numbers for the products your doctors actually use in a spreadsheet, or in the portal's favorites. When you order, search by part number, confirm the compatibility listing matches your implant platform, then add to cart. We cut our ordering time by maybe 60%, and the error rate dropped immediately. It also made it easier to onboard a new front desk person when our previous one went on maternity leave.

When does buying a CT scan machine actually make sense?

This is the question I get most. Everybody wants the in-house CBCT. I get it—it's a visible sign that your practice takes implant surgery seriously. But I learned the hard way that the purchase price is just the opening bid.

We bought ours in September 2022. I had a spreadsheet with the machine price, projected scan volume, and a tidy ROI date. Then the real numbers showed up: radiation shielding upgrades for the room, a reinforced floor, a dedicated power line, staff training, and a maintenance contract we hadn't budgeted for. The add-ons came to roughly $11,000 above the machine price, and I honestly didn't see them coming.

Looking back, I should have spent a week talking to other clinics that already owned a CBCT and asked about their hidden costs. At the time, the machine's clinical benefits felt so obvious that I skipped that step. My fault.

Bottom line: if you're placing 10 to 15 implants a month and referring out your scans, buying your own scanner is probably worth it. Not just for convenience—patients perceive your practice differently when the equipment is in-house. If your volume is lower, keep referring. The ROI math doesn't work, and the machine becomes an expensive piece of furniture.

What's the real cost of an intraoral scanner?

The intraoral scanner is honestly the best digital purchase we've made for patient experience. Patients love avoiding the goopy impression material, and case acceptance went up once they could see their teeth on the screen. But the invoice isn't the whole story.

Here's something vendors won't tell you: the first quote is almost never the final price for ongoing relationships. The scanner hardware is the entry point. Then you get the annual software subscription, replacement scan tips, maintenance, and sometimes an integration fee to connect the scanner to your practice management system. We budgeted for the hardware and basically ignored the recurring costs. That's been about $5,000 to $8,000 per year, depending on how much we use it.

The second hidden cost is training. If only one person on your team feels confident scanning, you've bought yourself a very expensive way to take impressions. We had a trainer come in for one session, and honestly, that wasn't enough. It's not that the scanner is hard to use—it's that you need reps before it becomes smooth, and that takes time away from other patients. Three trained people minimum, or it won't stick.

The good news: patients notice the difference. The practice feels more modern, more precise, and that perception feeds directly into how patients talk about you. That part of the ROI I didn't calculate upfront, and it's been real.

What is capnography, and why does a dental clinic need it?

Capnography measures the amount of CO2 in a patient's exhaled breath, in real time. Basically, it tells you whether a patient is breathing and whether their ventilation is effective. If you do any sedation cases, this is the monitor you want in the treatment room.

I didn't know what it was for far too long. I assumed capnography was hospital-only equipment, something anesthesiologists use, not a dental clinic thing. Then I read the protocol reviews and talked to our malpractice insurer, and it clicked: capnography catches respiratory depression much faster than pulse oximetry. The CO2 waveform changes within seconds of breathing stalling, while oxygen saturation takes longer to fall. For sedation dentistry, that head start matters—it gives you time to intervene before a situation becomes urgent.

We added a portable capnography unit in early 2024. It wasn't a huge investment, and our insurer was glad to see it on the equipment list. If your practice does sedation and doesn't have one yet, I'd make this a priority over the next gadget. It's one of those things where you hope you never need it, but you really don't want to need it and not have it.

What's the most important thing nobody warns you about with Straumann products?

Compatibility. That's the thing nobody warns you about. The Straumann system is broad—implants, abutments, scan bodies, healing caps, surgical kits—but not every part is interchangeable across implant lines. The BLT surgical kit is designed for BLT implants. A scan body for one platform won't snap onto another. You can't assume "it's all Straumann" and be safe. You verify every time.

And here's the second thing: "orderable" in the catalog doesn't always mean "in stock." It can mean your order is accepted and added to a queue. We ordered 25 TiBase abutments once and found out they were backordered for eleven weeks. The website had said "orderable" the whole time. Now, before any order, we check three things: the part number matches our case plan, the compatibility guide confirms the connection, and our Straumann rep gives us a real stock ETA. That third step has saved us at least twice.

Since we started this checklist in Q1 2024, we've caught 47 potential errors—though I might be overshooting the exact count, since some were small. But a few would've meant thousands in redo and delayed patient care. If you're a practice manager, build your own checklist before you need it. Trust me on that.