The Four Agents in Your Tray: Hands-Off Data Management

A digital-dentistry workflow is mostly data movement. A scanner writes an STL into a folder. Someone drags it into an email. Someone else drags it out of the email into another folder. A designer opens it, designs around it, saves a new file, drags that one back into a portal. Multiply by 30 cases a day. The clinical work is the smaller share of the time.

The Cympha Agent Manager exists to delete that overhead. It's a small Windows tray app — one install, four agents — that handles the file motion for you. Configure it once, then go do the work that actually requires your attention.

This cookbook walks through what each of the four agents does, framed as the manual task it replaces and the configuration that makes it hands-off.

What the Agent Manager actually is

A roughly 11 MB Windows installer. After install:

It lives in the system tray. There's no main window most of the time; you only see it if you right-click the tray icon.
Pairing starts in the tray, not the browser. Right-click the icon, choose Pair to Cympha…, type your Cympha account email, click Send pair request. No browser page opens. In the Cympha tab you already have open, a dialog titled Cympha Agent pair request appears, showing the machine name, operating system and agent version — and it will not let you dismiss it without choosing Approve or Deny. Approve, and the agent is bound to your account and stays bound — across reboots, across reinstalls of the web app — until you choose Unpair from Cympha. There is no sign-out.
When something in Cympha needs the agent and the agent isn't running, the web app starts it for you in one click. You don't have to remember whether you launched it this morning.

Four sub-agents run inside it. They share a single tray icon and a single pairing, but each one tackles a different category of manual work.

1. Cloud Monitor — the portal you never log into

The manual work it deletes. A designer's old day: open the lab portal, find the case, click each file, save each one to a folder, switch to the design app. After designing, switch back to the portal, click Upload, drag each finished file in, click Upload again, wait for confirmation. Every case pays that toll twice — once to bring the files down, once to send them back — and none of it is clinical work.

What Cloud Monitor does. You pick a workspace folder on your computer (anywhere; D:\Cympha\Workspace\ is a common choice). From then on:

Inbound. Cases assigned to your account land inside that folder, organised by category and by patient. The files (STLs, CBCTs, photos, treatment notes — whatever the doctor sent) are already there when you open the design software. You never visited a portal.
Outbound. Files you save into a case folder are picked up on the next scan and listed in the Cloud Monitor panel under New in workspace, with Upload on each row and Upload all for the batch — so you see exactly what is about to leave your machine before it leaves. Two things skip that click because they are self-contained design output: anything inside a dispatchable category folder, and any .zip or .gvw file. And when a .gvw review file reaches Cympha through the agent on a case sitting in Designing in an approval category, the case moves itself to Awaiting approval, records the request in the case history, and emails the doctor — no lab click needed. The same file dragged in through the browser deliberately does not advance the case, so a design you are still checking stays exactly where you put it.

New assignments show up on disk in under a minute of being assigned, usually within seconds. You don't need to refresh anything.

Hands-off means. You configure the workspace folder once. From then on, the portal effectively doesn't exist for you. Every operation that used to require opening a portal — download case files, upload finished design — happens in the file system, where your design software already lives.

2. File Monitor — the scanner-to-case path

The manual work it deletes. A clinician's old day: scanner exports an STL to C:\Scanners\3Shape\Exports\. The clinician opens that folder in File Explorer. Finds the file. Right-click → attach to an email or upload to a lab portal. Or: drag into Cympha case-creation form, after manually navigating there. Either way, multiple context switches for what is one moment of clinical decision: "this scan, that case."

What File Monitor does. Pick the scanner / CBCT export folders you actually use; Configure folders… in the tray's File Monitoring submenu does this. From then on:

The agent watches those folders and their subfolders. Anything already sitting there when monitoring starts is never surfaced — only what arrives afterwards.
When a new file appears you get a tray notification, Cympha Agent — New files. Click it, or Show pending files in the tray menu, and the New files detected popup opens beside the tray: each file with its size, an eye icon that opens it in the 3D viewer without uploading it anywhere, and two footer buttons — Create a Case and Ignore. The popup never steals focus, and files arriving while you are mid-procedure queue up in it instead of interrupting you again.
Click Create a Case. Cympha opens in your browser, you choose Clinical Case or Lab Case, and the files are attached to the new case for you. Add the patient, choose the lab, type the description in your own words — the AI reads it — and submit.

Hands-off means. Once your scanner folder is configured, the path from "scan finishes" to "case submitted" is the popup's Create a Case and the form's Submit. The intermediate steps — knowing where the file went, navigating to it, attaching it — are gone. And because you can open any watched file in the 3D viewer before it becomes a case, you can confirm you are sending the right scan, which is the small certainty that stops a case coming back a week later.

3. AlignerBot — the design that happens while you sleep

The manual work it deletes. Aligner cases are a sequence of repetitive steps: open the scan in OrthoPlus, repair the mesh, segment teeth, set up the initial alignment, stage the movements, generate attachments. None of it requires clinical judgment from a senior technician; all of it requires their time. That setup is identical on every case, and it is where a senior technician's day quietly disappears.

What AlignerBot does. AlignerBot is part of OrthoPlus and ships in the Starter tier, so reaching it does not mean buying up; the tray submenu appears only once OrthoPlus is installed on the machine. Inside your workspace folder there is a dedicated subfolder for aligner work. AlignerBot scans it for cases that have a paired upper + lower scan but no finished design yet. When it finds one, it launches OrthoPlus and runs the treatment-planning pipeline unattended. When OrthoPlus produces the design output, AlignerBot marks the case done and hands the result back.

Two details that make this practical:

Parallel by default. AlignerBot runs several cases at once, with the count scaled to what your machine can comfortably handle, and new cases are staggered so the machine stays responsive instead of seizing up.
Plays nicely with the other agents. While AlignerBot is busy, Cloud Monitor backs off so the two aren't competing for the same files. As soon as AlignerBot finishes, Cloud Monitor picks back up and uploads the outputs.

Hands-off means. Let Cloud Monitor route assigned aligner cases into the aligner folder, and leave the machine on overnight. In the morning the designs are done, the review files have gone back to Cympha, and every case that arrived there through the agent has already asked its doctor for approval — each request written into that case's history, so nothing rests on anyone's memory. Your time goes into the clinical judgement on the cases that need it: the part of the work worth putting your name to.

4. Upload Agent — the keep-it-local-but-share path

The manual work it deletes. Sometimes you need to attach a one-off file to a case that's not part of the watched folder or workspace flow. The old path: download it from wherever it is, then upload through the web. The agent makes that round-trip native.

What Upload Agent does. From a case page in the web app, click Upload via Agent. The agent shows the same native Windows file picker you'd see from any Windows app — pick the files — and they upload directly into the case.

About mesh repair: in earlier versions, the agent itself repaired STL/PLY scans before they were uploaded. That step now happens in your browser. When you preview an STL or PLY in Cympha Studio, Studio detects mesh issues and offers to fix them right there before the file leaves the page. Same outcome, fewer moving parts.

Hands-off means. The local file picker is the file picker you already know. The upload happens through your existing browser session, with the auth already in place. No portal, no progress page, no second tab.

How the four agents work together

Each agent owns its slice and signals the others when coordination matters:

Cloud Monitor is the orchestrator for "what's on disk vs. what's in the cloud."
File Monitor is the orchestrator for "what's in scanner export folders that hasn't been turned into a case yet."
AlignerBot is the orchestrator for "what aligner cases need design setup that doesn't need a human."
Upload Agent is the path from "right now, this specific file, attach it to this specific case."

They share one tray icon, one pairing, one local HTTP server. When AlignerBot is running, it tells Cloud Monitor to hold the workspace scan. When Cloud Monitor downloads a new aligner case, AlignerBot picks it up next tick. When File Monitor surfaces a file, it knows whether the user already has a case open (and adjusts the popup accordingly).

The coordination is invisible to you. The benefit is that you can leave the machine running and the four agents won't trip over each other.

What the agents change about your day

There is no stopwatch figure to quote here, and we are not going to invent one. What can be described precisely is what stops happening. The designer no longer logs into a portal, no longer downloads a case, no longer hunts for the folder they saved it in, no longer drags finished files back through a browser. Cloud Monitor and the Upload Agent absorb all of it; what is left on the designer's desk is design.

For the clinician, File Monitor collapses scan-to-case from a multi-step navigation — find the export folder, find the file, attach it somewhere — into a notification and a form. The scan reaches the right case because the agent carried it there, not because someone remembered the filename.

For both, the deeper change is what they're not doing anymore. The data motion stops being a thing the human carries; it happens in the background. And that is worth more than the minutes it returns: files stop going missing, the wrong scan stops reaching the lab, and nobody spends Sunday evening wondering whether a case actually went out. You get to spend the day on work you would be happy to sign — the work that actually came up in dental school.

That's what "hands-off data management" means in practice. Not "the system replaces you" — the system stops asking you to copy files between folders.

Cookbook #5 in our series. Install the agent from your dashboard sidebar at app.cympha.com (the Download agent row); preview files in Cympha Studio. Next: how Cympha's AI proposals actually work under the hood — the proposer service, the auto-apply policy, and what we deliberately do not let the AI decide.