Sunstone and American Standard: A Sum Greater Than Its Parts

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Interview with Anaya Vardya and Matt Stevenson

American Standard Circuits’ CEO Anaya Vardya and Sunstone Circuits' vice president and general manager Matt Stevenson took a break from the company transition to talk with I-Connect007 about why the merging of these two leading industry brands is so important—for both customers and the two respective companies. 

Nolan Johnson: You recently announced that American Standard Circuits and Sunstone are becoming one company. What was the motivation?

Anaya Vardya: The motivation was to provide a total solution for our customers. This gives us access to Sunstone’s great front-end automation. We have some customers that want just one or two printed circuit boards, and we weren’t competitive for them. Now we are able to do that. 

We can now offer design tools. Customers can use the website to price out and order their boards. We also have a partnership with Screaming Circuits, which will really help NPI engineers who are looking for one solution. They’d rather order their boards, components, and assembly all in one fell swoop. Doing that through the website provides a better total solution.

We were attracted to this opportunity because the two companies are complementary; our strengths are in completely different areas, and we can each start to leverage those strengths. 

Johnson: Matt, what was Sunstone’s motivation?

Matt Stevenson: The owners of Sunstone, Rocky Catt and Terry Heilman, were ready to move on to the next challenge in their lives. They desired to divest to a company very similar to Sunstone—culturally, strategically, and with the same vision. American Standard Circuits was that company. 

The cultures we’ll meld together are cohesive; each company now finds its missing pieces in each other. Geographically, our locations and customer sets fit together. We’re not overlapping customer sets with this acquisition: American Standard Circuits customers were not historically Sunstone customers, and vice versa. Now they can see the real advantages of what American Standard brings to a Sunstone customer and what Sunstone can bring to the American Standard customer. It's the right fit at the right time for Sunstone.

Johnson: One of the historical challenges of being a quick-turn specialist is working with customers in the initial part of the design process. How do they leverage the production details from the prototype when transferring to production? That’s not always easy. This provides a different option, doesn't it?

Stevenson: We can keep the customer for a longer piece of the lifecycle: design phase, prototypes, quick-turn prototypes, quick-turn assembly, into mid-volume and high volume, all at a lower cost. We can take a project truly from cradle to grave.

Johnson: It’s been a real achievement that Terry Heilman and Rocky Catt helped create this online, quick-turn marketplace.

Vardya: We are fortunate that Terry and Rocky will be around for a while, helping us with the transition.

Johnson: The transition means bringing together two different facilities, two different companies. There seems to be great overlap in the culture, and a lot of complement in the product offering and skill sets. How do you see this coming together? What's the transition plan? 

Vardya: We have two very different business models, and we want to keep them distinct. At the same time, we want customers to utilize the parts of the business model that makes sense for them in the lifecycle of their product. Early on, for example, there may be things that are advantageous with the Sunstone model. As the product matures, it might be better in the ASC model. 

It's all about the customer; the customer will ultimately choose how they want to do things. We might help them with that process, and we need to take our cue from them to ensure we're doing a good job of serving them. There will be changes, but the goal is not to make drastic changes anywhere. That said, we're planning to grow the technology in both places. 

For example, we've talked about getting some flex quoting based on the Sunstone quoting models so that customers can have flex circuits quoted instantaneously. That’s likely to be one of the first places that service is available. Matt, is anybody else even quoting flex online today? 

Stevenson: Correct. Flex has not been well adopted in the online quoting model. With ASC’s experience in flex and Sunstone’s experience with automatic quoting, we have the resources and tools necessary to make that happen.

Speaking of company integration, the businesses will pretty much run as they have been, with some zipper points between them. Our sales and marketing teams will determine a unified strategy so that all the Sunstone customers can take advantage of the ASC technology, and vice versa. We will integrate some of the financial reporting, and we will strengthen our communication between sites—both in terms of talking to each other, but also in terms of the actual product, what’s moving where, and what the capacity is on any given day.

We've both been very successful at circuit board manufacturing, just doing it differently. We don't want to ruin what makes each of us special; instead, we want to grow from that and take advantage of it. We’ll take the strength from Oregon to Illinois, and vice versa, as we increase technology levels, capacities, and speeds on both sites to where we want to be.

Johnson: One of the drivers is U.S. government legislation aimed at reshoring, creating a more robust supply chain, in general. How will this merging of your two skill sets have an impact in a marketplace with the potential for more international business coming back to the United States?

Stevenson: ASC has done a good job building up its certification portfolio across multiple industries—automotive, medical, and military/aerospace. As the work is reshored, ASC will be a very attractive source for longer-term, U.S.-produced products. 

We can leverage that with what Sunstone does well with prototyping, etc. It will paint that model for customers that are reshoring products, as well as those that never left and want to continue here.

Johnson: Tell me about the expertise and staff expertise you have on the staff now, and what types of changes do you expect in senior leadership?

Vardya: With this merger, we now have some great marketing and software experience that gets added to our portfolio. We've added quite a few CAM and customer service representatives as well. 

Management is often hesitant to invest in the software support side: I give Terry and Rocky kudos for investing in that softer side of the business, because that's one of the hardest decisions to make as a CEO. Those things take a long time to pay off. I was slow to make that investment at ASC, and I commend them for that level of advanced thinking. 

We had a senior manager meeting yesterday, and the energy in the room was just phenomenal from both sides of the table. You can just see the level of excitement; everybody's looking at it in terms of “we're in the process of reshaping our future.” I think that makes for a much smoother startup and transition. When we couple the customer support services with the huge amount of technology resources from American Standard Circuit, we create a top-notch manufacturing team.

A couple of years ago, American Standard Circuits partnered with private equity to help us escalate our growth. This is exactly the kind of activity that we were hoping to get accomplished, so we're very pleased with the way everything's coming together. 

Stevenson: Having talked with the Sunstone team on the floor, they are pretty excited to have additional internal resources to help problem-solve challenges with technology, growth, etc., and to benchmark what ASC has already gone through as we continue to add technology at Sunstone. That will be beneficial from a morale and skillset standpoint. We're excited about all the new toys, if you will, that are coming to the company.

Johnson: Is the Sunstone brand going away?

Stevenson: We are keeping the Sunstone brand. We're adding to our logo that we’re a division of American Standard Circuits. Sunstone has too much brand recognition to let it go away, and it would be a disservice to American Standard Circuits if we were to eliminate the Sunstone brand.

Johnson: In the earlier audio interview that we published, you made mention of Sunstone’s partnership with Screaming Circuits. Can we expect that that will continue as well?

Stevenson: Yes, we've had multiple discussions with the owners of Milwaukee Electronics, which owns Screaming Circuits. That was important to both Sunstone and ASC—and to Screaming Circuits. We have a lot of brand recognition and sales on both sides because of that partnership. We all felt it was important to maintain that service offering to our customers, as well as a channel for potential sales and new customers.

Johnson: How do you want customers to describe the new combined American Standard and Sunstone company a couple of years from now?

Stevenson: I would like customers to view our partnership, our merger, as the go-to solutions provider for printed circuit board technology and thought leadership.

Johnson: Gentlemen, thank you. This has been a great conversation.

Stevenson: Thank you, Nolan.