Episode #39: Casting a New Future: Alcon Industries and the Resurgence of US Manufacturing with Chad Woods
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, host Matt Horine talks with Chad Woods, Director of Operations at Alcon Industries, a Cleveland-based metals manufacturer. Alcon Industries has been a trusted name in specialty alloys and nickel-based castings for over 50 years. Chad discusses Alcon's recent innovations, including a more flexible workforce and the adoption of new technologies, that have enabled the company to reduce lead times and outperform competitors in quality and precision. He also highlights the importance of reshoring, the role of labor flexibility, and the company’s unique capabilities in casting various metals, including centrifugal casting. This episode provides an in-depth look at how Alcon is staying competitive domestically and contributing to the broader reindustrialization effort in the US.
Links
- Chad Woods on LinkedIn
- Alcon Industries
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Veryable Shop
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to US Manufacturing Today
- 01:06 Meet Chad Woods: A Journey in Metals Manufacturing
- 02:15 The Ohio Advantage: Reshoring and Reindustrialization
- 03:16 Alcon Industries: Core Business and Unique Processes
- 05:12 Operational Excellence: Reducing Lead Times and Flexibility
- 09:04 Centrifugal Casting: Expanding Capabilities
- 13:29 The Broader Industrial Picture: Reshoring and Competitiveness
- 15:32 Conclusion and Future Outlook
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome back to US Manufacturing today. The podcast powered by Veryable where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing landscape policies, and more.
Our guest today is Chad Woods, director of Operations at Alcon Industries, a Cleveland based metals manufacturer that's quietly redefining what an American Foundry can do in 2025 for more than 50 years. Alcon has been a trusted name in specialty alloys, nickel-based castings and engineered metal components.
But what's happening there right now is remarkable. They're winning market share, shortening their lead times and shoring critical metal capacity that's vital to US manufacturing. Chad's leadership has been central to part of that growth under his direction. Alcon has built a more flexible workforce, adopted new technologies, and found ways to outperform competitors.
Feed quality and precision. Today, we'll talk about how that's possible from casting to flexible operations, and how Alcon's story reflects the broader renaissance happening in [00:01:00] American manufacturing. Chad, we're excited to have you on and welcome to US Manufacturing today. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Let's jump right into it. First and foremost, we'd like to know a little bit more about your background and you spent much of your career in operations and manufacturing leadership. Can you start by sharing your journey and what brought you into metals manufacturing and ultimately to Alcon?
Chad Woods: After graduating high school, I fell into it.
My dad, he was a metal shop manager for a place called AMG Vanadium, so I knew a little bit about the steel industry. Then one of his friends offered me a job at the largest steel foundry in the world at that time called Columbus castings, and I went there and worked. And then first time I ever saw mold metal being poured, I was fascinated by it.
It was like part science, part chaos, and then the craftmanship that goes into it. After that, I started on the production side and worked my way up through the operations at a MG and metal tech. I eventually took over as a metal shop manager at AMG. And at Metal Tech, I was over their centrifugal division for petrochem.
I [00:02:00] realized through all that I really enjoyed building teams, fixing all the broken processes that were there, and helping people grow themselves and stabilizing all the operations.
Matt Horine: That's a great story and one that's at the heart of where Alcon is based in Cleveland, Ohio State. That's been at the heart of American manufacturing and steel for over a century.
But what's special about operating in Ohio today, especially as we see more reshoring and this drive towards Reindustrialization, I'm sure it's home to you, but there's something special going on there.
Chad Woods: Ohio. It's a manufacturing state of heart. It's never really went away from Ohio. We have the talent in Ohio.
We have the work ethic and a lot of the infrastructure's already here.
Matt Horine: I love that it's something that people have talked about like reshoring and reindustrialization, but companies like Alcon and stories like yours of people who really drive it and build it. It never really went away. I think we talk a lot of, with our guests that things have been offshore or they've been, they need to be reshored, but it's still there.
It's the heartbeat of manufacturing and your story is fascinating 'cause it's one, like we've talked about on this show a [00:03:00] lot. People see that molten metal, they see that type of steel work and it just clicks and makes sense.
Chad Woods: Yes, it does. It does for sure. It's fascinating. It's still fascinates me when I go out there on the shop floor and see 'em pouring and seeing what comes out of the sand molds and stuff.
That's pretty amazing thing.
Matt Horine: Specifically your company for the Alcon story, it dates back to the seventies, but the company's evolution over the past few years has been. Quite dramatic from what we understand. And for those unfamiliar, can you describe alcon's core business, what you produce, who you serve, and how your process stands apart from the typical foundry, like a job shop,
Chad Woods: We do different things from heat treat to retort tubes to baskets. We have centrifugal tubing, we do investment parts for fine detailed castings. In our investment area, and the good thing about Alcon that makes us different than most places is we have everything on the roof. So we can make an investment casting with a sand casting and then make something in centrifugal and send it to our fab [00:04:00] shop, and we can put it all together under one roof.
That in itself tests down our lead times, gives us better quality and fewer handoffs where we don't have to ship it across and have somebody else do a different process on it.
Matt Horine: That's a pretty critical part of it, just because many metal producers are facing challenges with cost sourcing talent. You highlighted that.
The state has the talent. Alcon seems to be in growth mode. Is there because it's all under one roof, and that strategy, is that what you're doing differently or are there other things that are keeps to the success? There
Chad Woods: comes down to alignment and the discipline that we've set here. Kevin, our president, he sets the direction that we're trying to go, and then Justin keeps us connected to the market and the customer.
Then Jake, he's the HR director. He helps us keep the correct workforce and culture on the operations side. I try to focus on keeping strong systems flexibility and not growing faster than our processes can handle.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's a really great point. People love the growth that they need to have the plan for it, right?
[00:05:00] That's something that without the proper planning and those processes can tank everybody. If they're outgrowing and they don't ever want to turn down a job. Tying into some of the central themes that you were, that you were highlighting there. You know about speed and flexibility. One thing that stands out is in our past discussions is your ability to reduce lead times, which is no small feat in metals manufacturing.
What operational changes or innovations really made that possible?
Chad Woods: So there's no really one single thing that's done that, but we improved the scheduling here, tightened the communication between our sales and operation, which was a nightmare when we first got here. We built stronger processes and discipline on the floor, but a huge piece of that was our labor flexibility with Veryable.
We don't have to panic anymore if we have call offs or if we know that we have a huge workload coming forward, or our demand spikes because it's such an up and down industry. One week you'll have a ton of orders that you gotta get out in the next week. That workload can go down drastically. It's an up and down thing.
Matt Horine: Yeah, no, that's something that we see a lot of in the market. And obviously [00:06:00] you guys are Veryable users and can you share how your team has used that flexible capacity to maybe take on new business and. Scale up without sacrificing quality. I know that's really important to you all. Like you said, Veryable's played a big role in that.
Chad Woods: The foundry life is unpredictable. Sometimes we need people tomorrow, sometimes we don't. With Veryable, we can fill the gaps quickly when we have search work and call offs.
Matt Horine: It's a very dynamic environment right now. There's a lot of big things happening on the global stage where material may cost more, may be subject to tariffs.
People have used all kinds of material management strategy to try to mitigate that. But our point of view is certainly one, that the labor flexibility and the ability to take on the capacity lies at the heart of labor strategy. In your viewpoint, how important is that flexibility for US manufacturers maybe trying to compete globally?
And full disclosure, I'm not sure how global, much global business y'all do, especially against low cost, high volume offshore producers. Has it set it apart and are you seeing a little bit of a shift back to US based production?
Chad Woods: Yes, I have. It's critical. Offshore [00:07:00] producers compete on the labor cost and volume.
Domestic manufacturers compete on speed, quality, and control. Workforce flexibility protects that. Like use a Veryable, using it as a tool.
Matt Horine: I can see that because a lot of what we've talked about on this show, the labor arbitrage that took place over the past three, maybe four decades, in a lot of ways, gutted manufacturers across the Midwest, across the country, because it was just an arbitrage play for labor is basically like how much, how low can we get the labor cost?
And some of the quality may be a caught up from overseas, but it is subject to all those types of things. We talk about, which include those macro conditions like tariffs and depending on what the geopolitical risk is and all of that. I'm certainly no strategist, but it's something that had left a lot of exposure that's just making itself apparent over the past decade.
I'd love to get into talking a little bit more about what it is you all do and learning more about the casting process, because I think it's something that's very interesting for our audience and some of the innovative things that you're doing. Let's dig into the technical world a bit. What makes [00:08:00] Alcon's casting process unique?
Chad Woods: So what makes our process unique is we aren't just locked into one process where we have sand investment and centrifugal castings. A customer can actually just come to us and even on a piece of paper and draw something and we'll give it to our engineering team. They'll run a full analysis and scale of what we can do for them.
They'll put it all together. We do a lot of new product work and stuff, and the thing is, we can do it from the start to the finish of whatever a customer needs. We can do it in-house. Very little do we ever send anywhere else. And the flexibility allows engineering and sales and operations to work in alignment and move quickly and we don't cut any corners doing so.
Matt Horine: Yeah that goes all back to that theory of under one roof, right? Where some people talk about it as vertical integration. Some people talk about it as adding on different things for the whole process or prefabrication or those types of things. It's just bit by bit. But it sounds like you guys. Have that great strategy put together on under one roof.
One [00:09:00] thing about casting, this is very interesting to me and I've learned a little bit about it. We had a great episode with Merrin Muxlow, who is part of the investment casting institute, but she highlighted investment casting and some of those things, but centrifugal casting, but key development on the horizon for you guys with some more capabilities for those outside the industry.
What does that process look like and how will it expand what Alcon can do for their customers?
Chad Woods: So. Centrifugal casting is spinning a mold while you're pouring mold metal, and what that does, it creates a dense, high integrity structure. It pushes out the slag and the impurities to the outside of the mold, which does the integrity part and makes it more dense.
It's ideal for pressure vessels, wire components, energy applications. Special tubes production, and not a lot of places do that anymore.
Matt Horine: People talk about the capabilities of businesses that are onshore right now or are industrial capacity. It sounds like there's a lot of end user benefits for this type of process.
Are you [00:10:00] seeing new demand from reshoring defense energy? Does that demand look like it's building up? Just mostly because there's been concern over the past. A couple months with various economic data. A lot of, a great example of that would be the jobs reports getting revised by a million over the past 12 months.
There's some integrity issues with that, right? We've said on this show it's either a, a confidence crisis or something worse. Can we have confidence in it or is it a competency crisis? And so a lot of the manufacturing numbers we see, we just don't know about anymore. But are you seeing demand from your viewpoint on the shop floor?
Up from new sectors or picking up from new points of interest?
Chad Woods: Yes, we're absolutely seeing a higher spike in demand. Centrifugal has our highest backlog. We've actually got customers here in Cleveland that went offshore to get there, and now they have came to us here recently.
Matt Horine: That is great news and something that runs a little counter to the narrative on the national scale because people are saying, oh, we don't see this great reshoring movement wave all at once, and it's something that took decades to offshore and I think we're probably moving at a [00:11:00] faster pace now to reshore it.
So it's a really great insight from you in Alcon to note that demand is there because manufacturing traditionally leads the rest of the economic indicators, right? Yeah.
Chad Woods: Remember we got that. We brought in was the biggest order we had got in a couple years and one single order.
Matt Horine: That's great to hear. It's something that we know that the pent up demand is there, right? And people have been on the sidelines for a couple of years now. I think it's pretty fair to say that manufacturing has probably been in some sort of recession for at least two to three years prior to 2025. Numbers are just now coming out.
Everybody's been on the shop floor, knows the real story, but now the rest of the country may be catching up. Competing through this type of central control, and what is these capabilities under one roof? From what we've heard, you're not just in that position where it's, you know, a lot of companies that we hear today surviving.
You're in control of your growth trajectory. What do you think was fundamental to reaching that point? I know there's those capabilities and your adaptability and flexibility, but are there other things that were part of that?
Chad Woods: It just really started from our leadership [00:12:00] standpoint. We got clear leadership from Kevin.
The commercial side is very strong alignment with the operations from Justin and then the workforce strategy with Jake and myself and with the flexible labor, we're very able, we're able to like really compete with anyone. And outdo lead times labor was a huge issue when we first got here. Once we tackled the labor part of it, with Veryable's help, it helped us get rid of so many bottlenecks and helped us with our scheduling.
It helped. The control and growth became intentional rather than reactive. We were constantly being reactive.
Matt Horine: That's a great story because so much of what we hear in manufacturing all over the place is that there's these waves that come through. It feels like there's not really a lot of control over it.
And so for as an operations leader, what does it mean to you to truly own your capacity and choose your partnerships in today's market? It sounds like you're in the position to get to choose the bright partners and to choose. The order of March on your customers, what does that mean? And [00:13:00] for you as an ops leader,
Chad Woods: so it's knowing your limits, right?
It's also choosing good partners with stability and rather than chaos. What advice would you give to other manufacturers looking to reach that level of stability and control? Don't mask your broken processes with overtime and heroics. Fix your flow, build your strategies collaboratively, and use flexible labor as a tool.
Matt Horine: And that's really good advice, especially on the, the masking or hiding problems, right? They just get worse as time goes on. It's not gonna not gonna go away. Let's take a look now at the broader industrial picture across the board. Your success and all kinds of success seems to reflect the larger truth that American manufacturing can compete when it's agile, skilled, and empowered.
What do you see happening across the metal sector right now? You've got competitors, you've got probably vendors and customers and others, but what are you seeing from others right now that's indicating some signs of positivity, that there's a real opportunity for fast flexible discipline manufacturers?
Chad Woods: To make a comeback. Customers, they can clearly see the differences.
Matt Horine: I think when you've lived at [00:14:00] day-to-day for years in the industry, that's a really encouraging sign. We've talked a lot on this show about reshoring and the local production. Are you seeing evidence that more customers want to buy American made castings and components now, or that they're more conscious of it than they were beforehand?
Chad Woods: I absolutely do. Customers want control, predictability, and accountability, and they even want to go and see the places that they're doing business with and stuff and have tours and see the whole process and the people that they're buying from. So yeah, absolutely, I do.
Matt Horine: That's such a great point, because I think that for far too long that was just given up on.
When stuff is offshore, you think that there's not much we can do about it, and the winds have change, have carried away from us, and we don't have control. And as soon as it comes back, you see that level of interest from your customers and your partners, right? They wanna see where it's made, they wanna see how it's made.
They wanna see how you do it. It's a great story.
Chad Woods: They're eager to build relationships. They're eager to see things and how it actually goes and how it actually works.
Matt Horine: It's such a positive sign and a total indictment [00:15:00] on the offshoring movement that happened throughout the nineties and the early two thousands, even as part of the 2010s, because people just chased the labor costs, like lower the labor costs, and that's our bottleneck.
And it's not because you sacrifice quality there. That kind of overcame itself, and I think that in a lot of ways the labor costs have probably gone up overseas. But to really give American manufacturers a fighting chance at a level playing field. That's what we're seeing and that's what we believe in because I think that's really what's been taken away is that people didn't think that they had a fair shot or the chance to compete.
And so it's very encouraging to hear that from the market. How do you see all kinds work contributing to the broader US reindustrialization effort, both economically and culturally? And I'll preface that with, we see it as it's a fight on the shop floor. There's a lot of buzz around like the defense sector or this sector moving this plant or that plant back.
How do you see Allcon part of this in contributing to that?
Chad Woods: We're just creating skilled jobs, growing domestically, supply chains, and we're proving that American manufacturing can compete when it's ran with discipline.
Matt Horine: What's the next [00:16:00] stage in your growth right now? Or what kind of customers are you looking for?
Who, if people wanted to find out more about your business or how they could potentially partner with you, where could they go to do that and what's next for you guys? So they can go to
Chad Woods: alconindustries.com, get ahold of us. We can pretty much do anything.
Matt Horine: That's great to hear because there's so many people who have forfeited that to contract manufacturing or said we have to have this type of lead time from something overseas.
So the end-to-end build out that you guys have created is just an inspiring story. We are really glad to have you on the show today, Chad, and excited to see what's up next for Alcon.
Chad Woods: Thank you. I enjoyed being on the show.
Matt Horine: Alcon story proves something powerful, that speed, flexibility, and quality are still the real competitive edge, and that made in America can mean better, faster, and smarter.
To our listeners, visit alconindustries.com to see how this Ohio based team is pushing metals manufacturing forward.
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