Warren Boley, Jr.
With manufacturing capabilities that have cut costs and production times, Warren Boley, Jr. has seen Norsk Titanium turn the aerospace industry upside down.
Parts manufacturing is in Warren Boley, Jr.’s blood. He grew up in a family business that was a machine shop, which produced components for heavy equipment for the oil and gas, and mining industries. It was a key supplier to Caterpillar, manufacturing more than 3,000 different engine parts for the business. "I come from a background that has given me an appreciation for what it means to be a critical supply-chain partner," he says.
"When you’ve got that mutual dependence, it’s got to be a win-win. My success has to be their success, and vice-versa."
Warren took this perspective with him when he left to join Pratt & Whitney, where he worked for 27 years. When he left to join Aerojet as its President, he took Pratt & Whitney’s rocket division with him and transformed it into new business, Aerojet Rocketdyne. He had only been there for 3 years when Norska Titanium came knocking.
"This was very exciting," Warren says with great enthusiasm. "It was like being in a Silicon Valley-style start-up in aerospace — so lots of appeal. I was involved in the infancy of additive manufacturing at Pratt, and its adolescence at Aerojet Rocketdyne; and the head-scratching problem has always been the transition to production. It was very good for prototyping, but what I found at Norsk Titanium was a technology that was 100 times faster. What took me 2 weeks to do at Aerojet I could do in 2 hours here. So the path to production was now much clearer. The dilemma of making one part every 2 weeks was working out how many pieces of equipment you would need if you were trying to make fifty a month for a customer. But with this new technology came the ability to make one part every 2 hours, and I could see a true path to industrial-scale production."