Nearly 18 months into becoming part of Danaher Corp., life is different at Sybron Dental Specialties Inc.
“Sybron was really a sales and marketing focused organization and operations (were) part of supporting that,” said Don Tuttle, president of specialty products for Sybron, which is moving from Orange to Anaheim next year. “What Danaher brought to us, and has been successful with, is bringing us an operations focus.”
Washington, D.C.-based Danaher bought Sybron for $2 billion in May 2006 to increase its business selling products for dentists. Danaher is perhaps best known as the maker of Craftsman tools sold at Sears stores.
Sybron’s operations include: Ormco, a maker of braces and other orthodontic gear; Innova, its dental implant business; SybronEndo, which makes endodontic, or root canal, products; and AOA Labs, a Racine, Wis.-based dental laboratory.
Tuttle oversees the four businesses. He reports to Daniel Even, president of Sybron.
Another Sybron business is Kerr Dental, which makes cements and other products for dentures.
Sybron, for most of this decade, ranked among the middle tier of public companies based in Orange County. It was created in 2000 through a spinoff from Apogent Technologies Inc., which was then known as Sybron International Corp.,a Milwaukee-based maker of medical laboratory gear.
Apogent then moved to New Hampshire and eventually was acquired by Fisher Scientific International Inc.
Sybron had yearly sales of $650 million at the time it was bought by Danaher.
Within Danaher
It now falls under Danaher’s medical technologies unit, which accounted for $2.2 billion, or 23%, of the company’s $9.6 billion in sales last year.
The company doesn’t break out sales for Sybron but said it saw “low double-digit sales growth” in 2006.
Danaher’s medical technology business,including Sybron,has “impressive prospects,” wrote Richard Eastman, Robert Mason and William Harrison, analysts with R.W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee, in a research report.
The report was issued after the company had an analyst meeting to highlight its medical business.
“Over the next couple of years, we estimate (medical technology) organic growth should track at, if not slightly above, the high end,” the analysts said.
With the Sybron buy, Danaher got growing products, including braces that don’t need elastic or metal ties. Ormco also uses new technology such as metal and ceramic injection molding to make its devices, Tuttle said.
Under Danaher, Sybron now has 29 facilities, including one in Glendora. It sells in 30 countries.
“We have had a broad focus on becoming more in tune with operations,lean manufacturing,” Tuttle said.
Sybron has adopted principles known as Danaher Business Systems, which he called a “playbook” to make the company run as a more efficient team.
It’s centered on “kaizen,” a quality improvement process that grew out of the teaching of W. Edwards Deming.
The focus on manufacturing and operations, combined “with our sales and marketing expertise (has) made us a much stronger company,” Tuttle said.
To grow, Sybron is looking to expand globally as well as targeting the adult braces trend, he said.
“Orthodontic (treatment) starts in the U.S. are down to flat and have been that way for the last three or four years,” Tuttle said. “The challenge is to go after the adult market.”
One of every five new orthodontic patients are adults, according to Tuttle.
“In order to increase that, you have to have a compelling product line that will attract adults to having orthodontic treatment done,” he said.
Sybron’s Damon braces, unlike traditional ones, don’t require small rubber bands to secure the brackets on the teeth.
Instead, the system has what’s called a “trap door” to hold the arch wire, which helps shape the teeth.
“It can treat children and adults and virtually (eliminates) the need to have the teeth extracted,” Tuttle said.
Marketing Braces
The Ormco unit is marketing to consumers for the Damon braces in three test markets. The ads feature braces on a teen daughter and a forty-something mother.
Meanwhile, Sybron is readying for a move of its local operations.
The company signed a 10-year lease valued at $17.3 million for almost 167,000 square feet near Disneyland back in May. Sybron is set to move in 2008.
It is moving administrative, marketing, sales and some manufacturing into that building, which once served as the headquarters of Odetics Inc., a onetime aerospace company that melded into an incubator of other businesses.
Odetics no longer is in business.
Sybron should be moved into the new building sometime by the second quarter, Tuttle said.
The company was supposed to move in January, “But we’re going to miss that by a month or so,” he said.
“We’re signing a long-term lease in Anaheim,” Tuttle said. “Orange County is our home.”
Tuttle joined Sybron shortly after the spinoff from Apogent and worked his way through the sales management side of the business.
He became Ormco’s president in early 2006 and assumed his current job this past January.
