ATI is a heavy-metal band with a global audience
In this photo from 2020, metal slabs made at ATI’s Canton Township facility are packaged and ready to be shipped.
Courtesy of Allegheny Technologies Inc.
Manager Scott Armstrong oversees operations at Allegheny Technologies’ Canton Township plant.
Courtesy of Allegheny Technologies Inc.
In this 2020 file photo, flat-rolled materials go from furnace to furnace, resulting in an orange glow, at ATI’s Canton Township plant.
Courtesy of Natalie Gillespie
Participants in a recent Washington County Manufacturing Assoc. tour got a glimpse of the mill operations office at ATI’s Canton Township location.
Courtesy of Natalie Gillespie
Manager Scott Becker, center, explains operations at ATI’s facility in Canton Township.
A union contract was scheduled to expire Saturday and a tariffs issue may lead to a plant closure, but operations at Allegheny Technologies Inc. – in the company’s words – “are sustainably profitable.”
“We are involved with aerospace, defense, energy, medical … We hold strong positions in growing markets,” said Scott Armstrong, manager of four ATI facilities in Southwestern Pennsylvania, including the plate mill in Canton Township near Interstate 70.
ATI is a specialty materials manufacturer based in Pittsburgh, with 8,200 employees at 58 locations worldwide, 35 of them in the United States. The company, according to spokeswoman Natalie Gillespie, had $4.12 billion in revenue in 2019, up 2% from the previous year.
The Washington plant, as ATI refers to it, has a workforce of 250, about 200 of whom are members of the United Steelworkers. The mill is responsible for producing flat-rolled materials.
“We’re not a steel company anymore. We’re now a metals company,” Armstrong said last month, during a tour with members of Washington County Manufacturers Assoc.
Steel is ATI’s local heritage, though. The Canton location started in 1901 as Jessop Steel, which existed until 1993 when it was acquired by Allegheny Ludlum. ATI was formed three years after that, when Allegheny Ludlum merged with Teledyne.
Armstrong, who organized the tour, is familiar with the turf. He grew up nearby and was a soccer star at Trinity High School, then at the University of Pittsburgh. Armstrong is running this mill and those in Rochester, Monaca and Zelienople.
Before the Canton walk-through, he reviewed safety measures and discussed technology the visitors would see inside the massive plant.
“This is manufacturing at its finest,” Armstrong said. “It’s fully integrated. Every operation is running.”
He led his group through the rolling process, which begins with heat. “We heat – I’m Columbia Gas’ No. 1 customer – then roll, then go through the annealing (flattening) operation. Then it’s finishing,” with the pieces ending on palettes to cool off.
He said the metal pieces “need a certain thickness and width as they go furnace to furnace. We heat to an appropriate time and temperature.”
Armstrong said upgrading the annealing process was part a $60 million investment ATI made at Canton more than a decade ago. It provided a proverbial shot in the arm for a company that, several years earlier, was in peril.
Speaking at an event in October 2018, Armstrong said, “We were close to being out of business” in the early 2000s. “We were not competitive, so we started to leverage some of the production we had. We did a great job of increasing production and lowering costs.”
The company also invested wisely in people and other operations and lifted itself up. In March 2015, it completed construction of a new hot rolling and processing facility at its Brackenridge plant in the Allegheny Valley, a $1.2 billion project.
Tariffs have been a contentious issue at ATI, which has requested a tariff exemption from the federal government. The Commerce Department, however, has yet to respond. A negative outcome could lead ATI to shutter its Midland plant, costing about 100 jobs.
The company reported its fourth quarter and full year 2019 results during a Feb. 4 earnings call, and it included an $11.4 million impairment reserve for ATI’s A&T Stainless joint venture. Included in that is the company’s share of an impairment charge on the value of the Midland facility.
Kim Fields, executive vice president of Flat Rolled Products, said during the call that ATI has paid more than $40 million in tariffs for imports of stainless slabs from Indonesia over the past two years.
She added: “We continue to operate the joint venture, focused on minimizing the losses, as we await the outcome of our second tariff exclusion request. Without relief, the Midland, PA plant will likely close, impacting hundreds of U.S. jobs, U.S. steel capacity utilization and national security.”
And four years after ending a labor lockout, ATI and the USW members were negotiating a new contract last week. An agreement had not been reached as of Friday, the deadline for this article. The contract was to expire at midnight Saturday.
From August 2015 to March 2016, about 2,200 union employees at 12 locations in six states were locked out of their jobs after the two sides could not reach a contract agreement. Then after they did, the company laid off about 250 nonunion employees.
Gillespie said Tuesday: “We are looking forward to negotiating a contract with the USW.”