PPBIC is a non-profit organization that assists in the retention and development of companies in five designated industrial corridors on the Northwest Side of Chicago.
With the support of our members and the City of Chicago’s Local Industrial Retention Initiative program, we provide a variety of services, including facilitating city services, marketing and assisting with public incentives, providing educational and networking opportunities, promoting the area and local business, and planning and advocating for the long-term vitality of the industrial corridors.
PPBIC is partnering with the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) to provide a new array of resources, grants, and opportunities for manufacturers in its service area including the Elston-Armstrong, Knox, Northwest Highway, Peterson-Pulaski, and Wright Business Park Industrial Corridors.
Manufacturers can take advantage of this for free through 1-on-1 meetings with the Peterson Pulaski Business and Industrial Council & IMEC staff. These meetings can be customized to your needs. Topics could include leadership, strategy, customer engagement, operations, workforce, and measurement and results.
For more information, contact Janita at 773-860-3929 or jtucker@ppbic.org.
About IMEC.
The Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) serves as the state’s U.S. Department of Commerce NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership center. IMEC is a team of industry improvement specialists dedicated to providing Illinois Manufacturers with the solutions, tools, and resources to create sustainable, competitive futures. IMEC drives growth through enterprise excellence, helping organizations become more effective and efficient through tailored solutions and support. In 2024, they assisted over 2,800 companies and helped create or retain over 7,736 jobs, resulting in an over $872M aggregate impact on the Illinois economy.
For more information, visit https://www.imec.org, contact Tom Grant at 773-919-8200 or tgrant@imec.org, or click here to schedule a meeting.
Your Membership is More Important than Ever! The success of PPBIC’s mission and the value of membership multiplies with each business that joins, whether an industrial or commercial business or a service agency. Each unique voice lends PPBIC a clearer understanding of the challenges faced by the business community so we can better assist and advocate on its behalf. JOIN HERE!
PPBIC is your first stop when you need anything from the City including zoning guidance, help with licensing or advice to navigate inspections. We partner with aldermen dedicated to maintaining the corridors in their wards and assisting businesses working their way through the City’s legal and regulatory hurdles.
Chicago Manufacturing. For more than 100 years, Chicago has been one of the world’s premier manufacturing and job centers. From meatpacking and steelmaking to industrial incubators and advanced manufacturers, the industrial sector continues to thrive and provide high-wage jobs that sustain Chicago families. PPBIC is committed to continuing that legacy and improving the growth of Chicago industrial companies.
Local Industrial Retention Initiative (LIRI). We are one of ten LIRI organizations located throughout Chicago with the mission of retaining and attracting industrial businesses. We work closely with the businesses to identify their needs and help access City programs, services and funding. We also provide the City with key insights to help plan infrastructure and other investments in the five industrial corridors we serve.
Not Just Peterson-Pulaski. Established in 1991 to assist Peterson-Pulaski Industrial Corridor businesses, recently the PPBIC service area expanded to include four more industrial corridors: Elston-Armstrong, Knox, Northwest Highway, and Read-Dunning (Wright Business Park).
In a manufacturing landscape increasingly defined by consolidation, offshoring, and the erosion of family enterprise, Stanley Spring & Stamping is a living counterargument. They have competed on quality rather than costcutting. They have invested in their workforce rather than replacing it. They have stayed in Chicago — on the same northwest side where Stanley Banas bent metal in a garage — rather than chasing lower costs elsewhere.
Founded in a Garage. In 1944, Stanley Banas was working as a spring coiler set-up man when his entrepreneurial instinct led him to start his own operation out of the family garage. No outside investment. No corporate backing. Just skill, discipline, and a belief that quality would speak for itself. It did. When his sons Ron and Stan took over in 1954, they inherited not just a company but a philosophy. Today, third-generation President Reb Banas leads the business with the same values his grandfather instilled — and Stanley Spring & Stamping stands as one of the largest family-owned producers of custom springs, stampings, wireforms, and fasteners in the world.
A Workforce Like No Other. With more than 100 skilled operators working in a 100,000 SF facility, Stanley Spring & Stamping is a significant employer on Chicago’s
northwest side. But the numbers that truly set the company apart are these: every operator averages at least 15 years of experience, and the average length of employment companywide is 26 years. In an era of chronic workforce turnover, that figure is extraordinary. These are career craftspeople — people who have spent their professional lives mastering the tolerances, materials, and machines that define precision metal manufacturing. Their expertise is not a resource the company manages. It is the company.
World-Class Capabilities, Made in America. The facility houses 30 punch presses of up to 200 tons, alongside wire forming equipment, four-slide machines, spring coiling machines, and CNC wire bending technology. Working across steel, stainless, brass, bronze, galvanized aluminum, and more, Stanley Spring produces torsion, compression, and extension springs; wireforms; curved washers; spring clips; and precision stamped components for the automotive, consumer appliance, electronics, and outdoor power equipment industries. Every part is manufactured in America, from American raw materials. Nothing is outsourced — ever.
Quality as a Discipline, not a Program. Stanley Spring & Stamping holds ISO 9001:2015 certification and the rigorous IATF 16949:2016 automotive quality standard — the gold standard for automotive supply chain quality management. Full inspection reports accompany 100% of jobs produced. These certifications reflect what three generations of the Banas family have always practiced: quality is not a process you install, it is a commitment you sustain — in every part, on every shift, for every customer.
The result is a company whose customer relationships span decades, whose employees measure their tenure in generations, and whose reputation in the spring and stampng industry is genuinely global — built entirely from Chicago.
The Data Manufacturers Didn’t Know They Were Missing. Every manufacturing floor tells a story. In the hum of a CNC machine, the rhythm of a press cycle, the idle time between shifts there is a constant stream of information that determines whether a company is truly performing at its potential or quietly leaving money on the table. For most small and midsized manufacturers, that story has gone unread for decades, locked inside machines that have no way to share it.
VoxSomnia, Inc., a young and fast-growing Chicago engineering company, has made it their mission to change that — and they are doing it in a way that is as practical as it is
transformative. Founded in 2023, VoxSomnia Inc. is a project-based engineering company specializing in custom data acquisition and controls solutions for small to mid-size manufacturing companies. Launched with a vision to make transformative technology accessible and affordable for every company, VoxSomnia strives to be the catalyst that catapults Midwest manufacturing into the industrial titan it can be, by helping create incredible value for their customers and reinforcing the growth of technical job opportunities.
What They Build — And Why It Matters. VoxSomnia’s core offering addresses one of the most persistent and underappreciated problems in manufacturing: the gap between machines that produce data and operators who can actually use it. The company specializes in data acquisition, control systems, and test data analytics for R&D and manufacturing environments, and also offers training on testing best practices, statistical methods, and data analytics.
Their flagship product, Trellis, brings this capability to the broadest possible audience. The Trellis platform is designed to unify all critical factory data into one place, offering a
customizable dashboard where manufacturers can see the output of all connected devices at a glance, set custom alerts via dashboard, email, or SMS when machines go down or drift outside performance targets, and connect ERP systems to tie order and model information to production data.
Crucially, Trellis is designed to fill the gap between off-the-shelf solutions that are easy to implement but lack real customization, and enterprise solutions with vast capability but prohibitive cost and complexity. Trellis offers customization and scalability without the enterprise price tag and time investment — a perfect fit for manufacturers whose needs fall between those two extremes. The impact is measurable: customers have reported an 80% time savings on post-processing data after switching to the Trellis unified dashboard. And Trellis isn’t limited to modern, digitally-connected equipment. It can connect to a wide range of shop floor equipment — CNC machines, presses, test stands, assembly stations, and packaging lines — and supports both modern PLC-controlled machines and older equipment that may not have digital interfaces, using sensors, simple input devices, or operator interfaces to capture production data throughout the entire operation.
For Chicago’s many manufacturers still running equipment from a prior era, this is not a minor detail. It is the difference between being included in the data revolution and being left behind by it.
Beyond Trellis, VoxSomnia’s services span the full spectrum of custom automated test and measurement systems, including software-driven control and data collection, controls hardware and panel builds, and expert integration of machine and test data into higher-level systems. Their industries served include fluid power, automotive, defense, and research — a breadth of application that reflects the depth of the team’s engineering roots.
A Company That Embodies Chicago’s Manufacturing Future. The VoxSomnia team represents something the Chicago manufacturing community needs urgently: a new generation of deeply technical, locally-rooted engineers who understand what manufacturers actually face — not from a whitepaper or a sales deck, but from years spent working alongside them — and who have built a company dedicated to solving those problems with practical, affordable, and genuinely impactful technology.
They are not chasing the enterprise market. They are not building products for companies that already have teams of data scientists and IT infrastructure. They are building for the shop on the northwest side that has twenty machines and no easy way to know which one is underperforming. They are building for the family manufacturer who knows something is wrong but can’t see the data to prove it. They are building, in other words, for the very heart of Chicago manufacturing.
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