In 1853, inventor John Henry Manny began building horse-drawn mechanical reapers in Rockford, and within a generation the city had become the country's number-two furniture-manufacturing center, trailing only Grand Rapids, on the strength of Swedish immigrant furniture cooperatives. The city has been a predominantly manufacturing community since World War II, shifting from agricultural machinery and furniture toward fasteners, automotive parts, and aerospace components that now generate real packaging automation demand. Automotive suppliers in the metro also feed parts to an assembly plant in neighboring Belvidere, and the aerospace side runs deep enough that a manufacturer with deep aerospace ties built a $200 million campus in nearby Loves Park in 2012 for energy-control and optimization products.

Our automatic case packers and PackMaster cobot palletizing cells fit that same manufacturing discipline, giving the fastener, automotive-parts, and aerospace-component plants across the Rockford metro's industrial parks a way to box and stack finished product at line speed. Our Illinois location page and our case-forming machines page cover packaging automation across the wider region, and our palletizing page and our automatic case packers page go through the specs; our solutions page covers what a Rockford fastener or aerospace plant should expect from first quote through startup. Rockford doesn't have a PLAN IT location, but the fastener and aerospace plants across the Rock River Valley deal with us directly for this equipment and its upkeep.