Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio, a periodic podcast where Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, discusses cutting-edge topics with industry-leading personalities. Below, you can either listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or you can read an edited version of the transcript. To see a complete list of other Heat Treat Radio episodes, click here.
Audio: New SECO/WARWICK CEO Speaks Out
In this conversation, Sĺawomir Woźniak recounts his history with SECO/WARWICK. Heat Treat Today publisher and Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn puts the questions to new SECO/WARWICK global CEO, Sĺawomir Woźniak regarding the direction of SECO/WARWICK in North America. Hear what this long-time SECO employee, now CEO, has to say about global manufacturing, technology developments, and the impact of augmented reality (AR) on the heat treat world. The interview took place at the world’s largest heat treating event in Germany, Thermprocess, in late June of this year.
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Transcript: New SECO/WARWICK CEO Speaks Out
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
In June of 2019, the parent company of SECO/WARWICK Corporation and SECO/VACUUM Technologies, both located in western Pennsylvania, appointed a new CEO at their Poland location. In late June, less than a month after taking the reins, Sĺawomir Woźniak sat down with Heat Treat Today at Thermprocess in Düsseldorf, Germany, to talk about his vision for the company and specifically what plans he has for North America.
It was very hot in Düsseldorf at the end of June this year, so Mr. Woźniak and I were glad to be inside at the world's largest heat treating event, Thermprocess 2019. The Thermprocess event is held every four years in Düsseldorf, and SECO/WARWICK was there in a major way with one of the largest, if not the largest, displays, and a full-on contingent of people. The global headquarters for SECO/WARWICK is in the sleepy-sized city of Świebodzin, Poland, about halfway between Berlin, Germany, and Warsaw, Poland. Originally, an American company, SECO/WARWICK is now one of the major global players in the heat treat market with manufacturing or sales locations in nearly all major industrial countries, including India, China, Europe, and North America.
Taking the reins of the company is a longtime SECO employee, Sĺawomir Woźniak, or "Slawek" for short. After attempting to pronounce Mr. Woźniak's name, I got the thumbs up and then he gave us the history of his time with SECO.
Slawek: I have been working for SECO/WARWICK for more than 20 years. I started from floor level, being an electrician. When I was in high school, I started working for SECO/WARWICK as an electrician making control panels, wiring equipment, and so on. When I graduated from university, then I started in the service field. At that time, SECO/WARWICK was a quite small organization; this was 1999. I had an opportunity to service vacuum furnaces, atmosphere furnaces, and aluminum processing equipment.
Also, that particular year, SECO/WARWICK transferred know-how for CAB—control aluminum brazing equipment—from SECO/WARWICK Corporation to Poland to send up European market for SECO/WARWICK. It was also a time when I started to be more involved in CAB product line. I was working as a service engineer for the first project SECO/WAWRICK built in Poland for CAB. Gradually, we also had more projects, and we restructured our organization and had a team structure. We created, at that time, what we called the "aluminum team." When we say aluminum, it was aluminum process and control atmosphere brazing equipment for brazing of aluminum heat exchangers.
I held the position of project manager, then again I was moved to service and became a service manager over the team for that particular product line. The more projects we had, the more people we hired for our team. When the team was quite large, we decided to restructure our team there. We separated the aluminum process with control atmosphere brazing equipment as a separate team, and I became the deputy team leader and Piotr Skarbinski was at that time the team leader of aluminum brazing equipment.
In 2010, when SECO/WARWICK decided to open a new joint venture in China, then I moved to China and became a vice general manager over our Chinese operation there. From that time, I started to learn how to really manage a business, complete a P&L, and so on. A year after that in 2011, my former boss left our corporation and I then also became managing director of SECO/WARWICK Retech in China. I managed the company, and in the meantime, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to be involved in our India operation. I had been in charge of the India operation as a residence managing director for a couple of years. Then we created a holding company in Poland, so I also took responsibility as the operational excellence director. I was in charge to transfer some good practices between the companies in our group.
That led me to a position later on as executive director of Asian operations. Since 2010, I have been more on the operational side, especially for Asia and subsidiaries. We had two companies in Asia at that time; there was an Indian operation and a Chinese operation, and I overlooked both of those companies.
Doug: Slawek went on to describe some of the restructuring and operational improvements that were executed in Asia which brought us up to June 5, 2019, which was a day that Mr. Wozniak's candidacy for the position of CEO of the global company was accepted by SECO/WARWICK'S advisory board.
I next asked Slawek to discuss plans for the North American market.
Slawek: We have a very strong footprint on various locations geographically, and we actually would like to be on every continent but not necessarily with manufacturing. Nowadays, the economic situation for many companies, not only our company, requires them to restructure operations and to focus on the fabrication of the equipment of the location where we can be cost-effective. The location where we still see big opportunities to run the business between the others obviously is America, we would definitely like to have a strong presence, but not necessarily fabrication. We would like to focus more on product development, which is actually what we are still doing, and we will continue concentrating on the vacuum metallurgical equipment which is Retech, services, and aftermarket activities.
Today we have three locations, three companies in the US. We have a Retech located in California, a subsidy of SECO/WARWICK Group. We have two companies in Pennsylvania, obviously—SECO/WARWICK Corporation where everything started, the whole story of SECO/WARWICK. Our focus is very strongly on development, on time to run this business, but absolutely I would like to express with 100% confidence that we are not going out of the business in the US. We like to be there. We would even like to build some equipment but not necessarily in-house. This is actually what we do now: we still build equipment in the US in SECO/WARWICK Corporation, some aluminum process equipment, aluminum melting equipment, but we do build our equipment through our subcontractors.
We have a good database of subcontractors. Within the last few years, we were developing the subcontractors because there was a long-term strategy in the back of our heads that we would restructure our operation in the US in SECO/WARWICK Corporation. And that is what happened last year. e decided to shut down in-house manufacturing in SECO/WARWICK Corporation, but we are still in business. We are hiring people. We would like to develop our products. We concentrate mainly on aluminum process and thermal processing equipment. We have good technology and we have good database and customers and we would like to keep a relationship.
We felt that our activities in aftermarket were not that strong, so we are now increasing our activities. This week we made an announcement on the global level that we promoted Robert Szadkowski as vice president for aftermarket, and I assigned Robert to be responsible for the development of the American market for aftermarket. We would like to reinforce our operation there as regards to the services, so we just recently hired a new sale/service person and have sent him to Poland for a couple of weeks for training. We are really looking forward to rebuilding our market position regarding the supplier of goods, rebuilds, services, and spare parts. Obviously, we are keeping in mind that we would like to still continue with the fabrication of the equipment and delivering projects to current customers.
The second company we have in our group is SVT, SECO/VACUUM Technologies, which is also located in Meadville, Pennsylvania. This company is mainly focused on serving North American customers by providing vacuum furnaces solutions and nitriding furnaces solutions. The furnaces are purely built in Poland and exported to the US or North American market and then delivered by SECO/VACUUM Technologies, and all axillary equipment can be delivered from US market. All of the services, including installing and commissioning, can be purely done by our colleagues from the SECO/VACUUM Technologies.
The companies in Pennsylvania, we will continue with them definitely. We changed our business model, but it is not a downgrade of our operation. We increase our strength in Poland because we want to build more equipment in Poland, and then we send this equipment to the US to compete with other companies which actually round the business in similar model.
Doug: So where is SECO going globally? I asked Slawek to comment.
Slawek: We would like to see our company grow as a leading supplier of heat treat equipment, and we would like to provide a complete solution and added value to our customers. We would like to be recognized on the market as a reputed supplier with very good and strong service. And finally, we would like to continue with our presence on every continent as we already decided to be in India, Asia, and North America. We would also like to double up our business partners, like sales agents in various locations.
Speaking about India, although we closed in-house manufacturing and we do not have full operation in India, we still have a footprint there. We have a good performing small sales and service-oriented company, and we can deliver some equipment from other locations to that plant, even from China where we have manufacturing. We would like to reinforce ourselves in sales and service in various locations, whereas manufacturing, we would like to maintain where it is cost-effective and we can say that we have competence. We can keep our engineering and we can develop our products.
Doug: Slawek comments further on the company's commitment to research and development of new products.
Slawek: SECO/WARWICK grew up from the engineering background, and we are an innovative company. We don't want to just be a follower. We would like to innovate, we would like to create something new on the market. This is why we have to spend a good part of our income on R&D and we are doing it.
Doug: I asked Slawek to comment more on the company's commitment to R&D. Here's what he had to say:
Slawek: As of today, I can say that we have two R&D centers in our group. One is located in US, mainly for vacuum metallurgical products and the other is located in Europe for other business lines. We are still running our R&D projects. Even at this show, we are presenting two new products: Super IQ and UCM 4D Quench, which is a very nice product. Tomorrow we will have a speech by Dr. Korecki who will present this new idea to the market. I strongly believe that these two products can be very successful, not only in the European market but especially in the US market where the economy is improving and we see a lot of good activities from the US market.
Doug: At Thermprocess, SECO unveiled, among other things, SECO/Lab, which I asked Slawek to comment on.
Slawek: SECO/Lab is a philosophy that we would like to provide to our customers as well and share our experience with our customers. We developed equipment in Poland in our laboratory. As I mentioned, we have three laboratory testing furnaces in California, and I would like to see even more equipment to be installed in the US. Since we don't have manufacturing in the US for vacuum metallurgical equipment, we would like to still convince our customers that our idea know-how is there. We are creating equipment that is designed in the US and made in Europe. We would like to develop even further our R&D presence in US especially for this business segment.
We have a very nice laboratory in Poland, in Świebodzin, our main location in Europe. We can do the testing in our equipment and then also test the samples, like a microstructure. We also have a relationship and even some agreement with universities, so if we cannot do some tests or some research in our laboratory, then we can cooperate with some university and then we can continue our trials with help of universities.
Doug: I next asked Slawek to say something about what SECO/WARWICK was doing with respect to augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and generally, the Internet of Things.
Slawek: That is a very good question because you can hear about augmented reality or the Internet of Things or Industry 4.0 almost everyday everywhere. This is an area we addressed a long time ago and we are working on some new products. We are about to launch a predictive maintenance product which will be the product which will support our customers and equipment especially, to predict some potential failure of the equipment which can lower the maintenance costs or break-down costs of the equipment. You probably have heard of SECO/Lens, so this is a combination of Microsoft Hololens with augmented reality or you can even operate our equipment using this technology, which can be also a potential future to cope with the shortage of goods, services, talents, or service engineers. Giving such a solution to the customer can be like an extension of a good, experienced service engineer so the operator can go around the furnace and use this SECO/Lens technology to operate the furnace and to maintain or even fix the problem on the furnace, like a maintenance tool. This is under development at the moment, and I believe this is the future.
Doug: As a final question, we tried to get a glimpse of what excites and motivates this new CEO. I put the question to him: When you're lying in bed at night, and you're thinking about the future of SECO/WARWICK, what excites you?
Slawek: I always love the challenge. When I had the opportunity to move to China in 2010, the green field, the new company, take my family—two kids (five years old at the time) and my wife and move to China and live there for a couple of years, that was my first challenge. The second challenge I had was when I took the opportunity to be a nonresident managing director of the Indian operation. I was living in China, flying to India every other week, and that was another challenge. After those two challenges, I would say that to take a challenge to be the CEO of SECO/WARWICK group, you have to just do it, yes?
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