“We can’t miss a shipment,” said Troy Thomas, 51, the veteran plant manager. “Or we shut down big companies that are producing billions of dollars of metal a day.” Sogefi’s travails are mirrored across industrial America. Manufacturers complain of “record-long lead times, wide-scale shortages of critical basic materials, rising commodities prices and difficulties in transporting products,” the Institute of Supply Management said earlier this week. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell told reporters in late April that supply chain “bottlenecks” are slowing goods production and will likely contribute to a temporary rise in inflation. “The supply of various inputs into...