One Jacksonville-based company is striving to become the leading electronic manufacturer in the Midwest.
CCK Automations Inc., located at 500 Capitol Way in Jacksonville, continues to see growth as one of the top manufacturing companies in west central Illinois.
As part of manufacturing week, CCK’s Chief Operation Officer Tyler Aring joined WLDS’ AM Conversation to discuss the business’s progress. Aring breaks down the company’s history, which dates back to 1999.
“CCK was started by J.J. and Sherri Richardson, and at the time, we were developed on the heels of Richardson Electric. A lot of what we initially began to manufacture were industrial control panels, which we still do today. A little bit of our history has turned and we now focus a little more on print and circuit boards. The way that started was some of the industrial control panels have print and circuit boards. We’ve continued to grow, and in 2015, we ended up acquiring ASTM, America Springfield Tool & Molding in Springfield, and now we have injection molding at our facility as well,” says Aring.
Rather than having their own products, CCK manufactures specifically for their customers, which Aring says separates them from other companies.
“That’s the thing that makes us so unique is that we don’t have our own products, we manufacture for our customers. So one day you could be making a censor that counts seeds going into the ground, or the next day you could be manufacturing an electronic device that acts as a firewall for people’s houses,” explains Aring.
Aring says CCK has experienced significant growth over the past year, which they hope will continue into the future.
“So far this year we’ve seen almost a 46 percent growth from the previous year, so obviously that’s kind of hard to maintain, but we’re projecting another approximately 40 percent growth over next year. One of the reasons for that is we’ve continued to diversify our customer base. Originally we kind of started looking at things at realizing we were extremely heavily ag-based, for no other reason that we’re in central Illinois and a lot of our customers are from central Illinois and we’re in the grain belt. So we continued to diversity that, getting into some of the protein side of ag as well as we’ve gotten into the internet side, or IOT side of what’s going on in the technology around the world today,” says Aring.
CCK Automations currently has 112 employees at their Jacksonville facility with further growth anticipated. To learn more about CCK Automations, listen to our full interview with Aring online at WLDS/WEAI.com.