CureMint: eProcurement Specifically Designed for the Dental Industry

Years of experience at the highest level of military operations provided Brandon McCarty the insight on what an efficient procurement process should look like. Similarly, over 11-years working as a dental manufacturing industry executive with Danaher and Implant Direct, and having built the industry’s first online marketplace to sell dental implants, Fawad Rashidi witnessed the problems caused by the lack of digitization in the procurement process for the dental industry. Brandon and Fawad combined their knowledge and performed consulting workshops with customers to further understand the challenges of the current processes. The duo realized that with the change the industry has undergone from solo practices to consolidated organizations with 20 to 100+ dental practices associated with it, the procurement process has grown in complexity, but the systems have not adapted to keep up. Manual data entry is the chief complaint of both the practices and suppliers with some still using email, phone calls, and even faxing orders. It was in 2017 that Brandon and Fawad co-founded CureMint to automate the dental procurement process and developed the first and only all-in-one marketplace and spend management software designed specifically for the unique needs of the dental industry.

The conventional dental procurement process involves the recognition and specification of need, determination of suppliers and the associated price and terms, placement of the order, delivery of supplies, inspection, invoice approval, and payment followed by record maintenance. The process is manual, cumbersome, and time-consuming with a lack of technology for ensuring efficiency and economies of scale as consolidation takes place. Both suppliers and dental organizations have been challenged in solving this problem in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Brandon and Fawad undertook detailed consulting and research and developed an out-of-the-box solution, the CureMint application, facilitating a streamlined e-procurement process using cloud-based technology; it is easy-to-use, curbs rogue spending, and delivers increased operational efficiency. It provides dental offices with their own organizational Amazon-style marketplace simplifying the procurement process overall to save time, and offering an approval/review system to curb spending, as well as, an opportunity to save money by ensuring the customers formulary is being fully utilized.