Astro-Med expansion bringing new jobs to Ocean State

INTO THE FUTURE: Astro-Med CEO Greg Woods says the company’s business is currently 70 percent domestic, 30 percent international. / COURTESY ASTRO-MED
INTO THE FUTURE: Astro-Med CEO Greg Woods says the company’s business is currently 70 percent domestic, 30 percent international. / COURTESY ASTRO-MED

Greg Woods has been the heir apparent at West Warwick electronics manufacturer Astro-Med since being hired as chief operating officer in the fall of 2012, as part of the company’s strategic growth plan. Around the same time the Rochester, N.Y. native officially took over as CEO at the end of January, Astro-Med announced the $6.7 million acquisition of competitor Miltope Corp.’s line of aviation printers. It was the first of what Woods hopes will be a series of expansion initiatives and will bring manufacturing now done in Alabama to the Ocean State. The average consumer will likely never come in direct contact with Astro-Med’s specialized printers and data-acquisition devices, but Woods says they have a bright future.

PBN: How did Astro-Med come out of the recession and how does it fit into your current strategy?
WOODS: I came in 2012 and we were already out of the recession by that point. It did affect us like everyone else, but to a certain extent we are a little immune. Some of our businesses are not cyclical. When I came onboard we were in four different businesses and we sold the medical products business a little over a year ago. … While it was a nice help getting through the downturn, it was a slow-growth company. … We decided to use the cash to grow our other platforms. That was the strategy we put together in 2012 and said we want to transition from a stable company growing at slow-to-moderate pace to one growing more rapidly. Organically last year we were growing at a double-digit pace and just acquired Miltope’s printer-product line, which was a competitor.
PBN: Is the growth strategy focused on capturing market share in your three existing markets or branching out into new areas and product lines?
WOODS: Primarily the former. What we are looking to do in those product lines – quick-label systems, data acquisition and aviation printers – we are looking to grow market share. That is part of the three-year plan. We might expand beyond that, but 2014 is year two of this plan and we want to focus on building up the business within those three product lines. That will keep us busy. While we are growing the top line we want to improve the profitability of the company and that has a lot to do with operations excellence, what some people call “lean,” to improve the daily operations.

PBN: Are you hiring or are operational efficiency and lean allowing you to grow with the same headcount?
WOODS: The nice thing about lean and Astro-Med is the company is growing so you can do lean and still grow the workforce. If we didn’t do lean we would have to grow at a faster rate. We would be less competitive. We are hiring and the nice thing about the acquisition is Miltope is in Alabama and we are moving all of the operations to West Warwick. So we are hiring roughly 10 people for that acquisition.

PBN: How far along are you on moving operations from Miltope up here?
WOODS: We are right in the middle of that. When we announced the deal in January we said it would take six to nine months.

PBN: Is there a reason airplanes need to print out information and a reason that market won’t see erosion from digitization?
WOODS: It is a very important part of the flight deck. The last two major contracts we won for commercial aviation were the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787, the two most modern planes, and when we win these contracts it is for the life of the plane. The printer is part of the [Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System], a way for airlines to send information to the crew. If they have to send a long, complicated message to the plane, instead of tying up the radio frequency for a long time, because the crew has to repeat it back, they send it through the printer. The other thing they can do is print out maps. A lot of things they like to have printed out in advance in case there’s an electrical failure and the screen fails.

PBN: On the manufacturing side, is Astro-Med moving toward automation at the same pace as some industries?
WOODS: I think it is mixed now. Early on it was just, “We want a robot,” even if people didn’t know what to do with it. It went from robotics was the “in thing” to a good way to automate things and they found ways to use them productively. … We don’t have any robots here. We make our own circuit boards, so we have the machines that put components in circuit boards that you could call a type of robot. There are some things where you want to place thousands of components per hour, which is tough to have a person do that.

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PBN: Do you expect growth to mostly come from the United States or expansion to overseas markets?
WOODS: In the aviation business you know who is making airplanes and flying them. In the label business it is really an international business. Our business is roughly 70 percent domestic, 30 percent international. Global channel expansion is another top priority for us. We are already well set up in western Europe, the U.S. and Canada, and last year we opened up an office in Monterey, Mexico, which will move us into the Latin American market. I just got back from China. We have an initiative to expand our sales channels into the Asia Pacific region. We want to have direct presence in Asia. •

INTERVIEW
Greg Woods
Position: President and CEO of Astro-Med Inc.
Background: Woods started out in physics, but was instinctively drawn to the factory floor rather than classroom. When assembly lines started turning to robotics in the 1980s, Woods worked for several large industrial companies before moving into management.
Education: Bachelor’s in physics from Colgate University in 1981, bachelor’s in computer and mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College in 1983, MBA from the University of Rochester in 1993.
First Job: Apprentice tool-and-die maker
Residence: Medfield, Mass.
Age: 55

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