Food products sold under more than 40 different brand names, in over 30 states, move through a wholesale distributor headquartered in Troy before they reach a shelf, product that started on the same kind of packaging line PLAN IT builds equipment for. That's the food-and-beverage side of the city's economy, and it sits alongside a much deeper concentration of industrial automation companies. Troy is also where Michigan's Industry 4.0 trade association is headquartered, a group with more than 1,000 member companies across an eight-county region anchoring the state's Advanced Manufacturing Hub. An industrial mobile-robot and automation integrator is based here. So is the U.S. arm of a robotics integration firm that works exclusively with one of the major industrial robot manufacturers. A Danish company that builds autonomous mobile robots for factories and distribution centers runs a North American office out of Troy as well. That's real depth.

That concentration of robotics and automation firms doesn't put them in the same business as PLAN IT, since packaging machinery and factory-floor robotics solve different problems on different equipment. It does mean Troy's manufacturers already think in terms of automating repetitive line work, the same conversation we have with food and beverage producers about packaging lines. If you're a food or beverage producer in this part of Michigan, that shows up as Mars Series VFFS baggers that form, fill, and seal your bags at line speed, and automatic case packers that load and close cases without an operator standing at the end of the line. We've helped a food producer in a similar position scale production by replacing manual case packing with automated equipment, the same kind of upgrade that fits a distribution-heavy operation like the one already based in Troy. We don't keep an office in Troy, but working alongside robotics integrators and automation firms already headquartered here means we speak the same technical language as our customers.