John McCormick built Proco Machinery from the ground up

By Bruce Geiselman 

John McCormick began learning the basics of machine building during an apprenticeship in the UK, and he regrets the lack of similar apprenticeship programs (especially in North America) today because it makes it difficult to find skilled workers. 

McCormick, who speaks with a Yorkshire accent, said his apprenticeship program helped provide him with the skills needed to launch Proco Machinery, which specializes in automation equipment for the plastics blow molding industry. McCormick founded Proco after starting a company three years earlier that developed and sold customized and general automation systems. Some of those were unusual, like an automated system for counting and packaging live earthworms. 

Eventually, McCormick started landing contracts to build automated machinery for blow molding clients, and he concluded this was a market where he could succeed by selling a standardized product line rather than developing custom automation systems for each client in a variety of industries. 

McCormick recently spoke with Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing Senior Staff Reporter Bruce Geiselman about his upbringing, what led to his founding Proco Machinery, and what the future holds for the company. 

Where were you born and raised? 

McCormick: I was born in the U.K. in Halifax, Yorkshire. That’s where I was brought up. I was there until about age 24, and then I moved to Canada. 

What is your educational or training background? 

McCormick: I’m a bit old-school — I went through an apprenticeship program in the U.K.  back in the ‘60s, and I qualified as a machine builder. All my experience since then has been by the seat of my pants. I’ve learned how to design, build out, wire, plumb and program. 

The apprenticeship system in the U.K. was very comprehensive compared to today. We had to attend college three nights a week and one day a week to learn the technical parts of the business. We learned machining, welding, plumbing, designing. We learned how to heat treat metal and many different things. It was a six-year apprenticeship. When you became 21, as long as you completed all the programs and all the college requirements, you were given a certificate of apprenticeship. 

Why did you move to Canada at 24? 

McCormick: Just to find a new horizon. The U.K. was quite limited, for me anyway, for starting a new business. It would have been difficult in the U.K. with a kind of old-style, European way of doing things. Starting a new business was not very easy to do. It was almost unheard of. You just didn’t have that kind of opportunity available. I felt there were more possibilities for me in Canada. I moved here. It was a good move. 

Were there challenges when you moved to Canada? 

McCormick: Absolutely. But when I moved to Canada, I found that people seemed to appreciate that I was a creative type of person right from the get-go.  

I had very good skills and a knowledge of machines and machinery in general. I’ve always been of the opinion that not having an engineering degree was helpful insofar as I wasn’t constrained by any kind of limitation in my way of thinking. I have worked with many engineers, and they are kind of limited in their way of thinking. They have a very narrow vision of life and how things should be. I can think outside the box and try different ideas that an engineer would not want to try, and many of them worked. 

What did you do prior to founding Proco Machinery? 

McCormick: I worked at several companies when I came to Canada. I worked in the packaging industry. I worked a little bit in the construction industry. 

A pivotal point in my career was when I found a job with a character here in Mississauga. His name was Del Beamish. He was a professor-type character with a long beard, and strangely enough, his background was in commerce. He was involved in the sugar business. He would tell me stories about going to Cuba and negotiating deals for sugar. 

During the war [World War II], he was involved in a division to do with tanks. Then, for some unknown reason, he ended up in the automation business. He had a small company with about three employees. He got government contracts to work on almost impossible tasks. They were done on a best effort basis, meaning there were no guarantees that anything would work. 

I went to work for him, and it just fascinated me how creative we could be. We did crazy things. We tried to make sausage rolls, cabbage rolls, and we tried to sort sardines into different sizes. Everything failed. We tried to sort cherries with stones from cherries with no stones. 

That’s where I learned the design part of the business. We had a design engineer. He was very good, and he showed me the ins and outs of designing. Eventually, the designer left, and I was the only designer. I was designing and building all the machines. I learned how to wire relay panels. That’s where I really got the bug. 

Eventually, the guy, I always call him the old professor guy, passed away. I worked as a freelance designer and I worked a couple of other jobs, but I had this bug to start my own business. The last job I had was in the blown film industry, where they were designing cooling rings and dies.  

I left there and started my own business in 1979 designing any kind of automation. We designed a machine to count earthworms for a guy who made his living selling worms. He had people who went out on golf courses at night with cans duct-taped to their legs. They would walk along with a flashlight, pick up earthworms, throw them into the cans, and then deliver them to this guy. He had ladies in a warehouse who put them in little containers with soil and sent them to angling [fishing bait and tackle] shops all over North America. We built a machine to pick up a certain number of earthworms and put them into a container. That was probably one of the craziest jobs I did. 

We made a machine to put a wire into a piano hammer. We made a machine to test air conditioner coils. I made a pizza conveyor.  

Eventually, I got a call from a company in Canada that was making peanut butter jars from PVC in the early ‘80s. They changed everything over to polypropylene, but then they needed to flame-treat. They wanted me to make a machine that would take the parts out of the molding machine, stand them up, and take them through a flame treater. I built it for them. The information was passed on, and I ended up building flame treaters for a bunch of different people. It blossomed into a product line.  

Another guy requested a takeout to take parts out of a blow molding machine, deflash them, and put them on a conveyor. That led to another product line. We made deflashers, leak testers, flame treaters, and conveyors. From there, we developed the Robopik system in the early ‘90s, which I patented in ’95 and has been kind of our workhorse machine for the past 25 years or so. [The Robopik is an automated system that removes containers from shuttle-type blow molding machines, orients them, and incorporates deflashing, leak testing and neck trimming). 

Then it grew into packaging — mostly packaging into boxes. We used industrial robots initially, but they were big, heavy machines with steel frames. Then we came across collaborative robots, and we started using collaborative robots, which was not quite as easy as they say it is, especially the guys selling them, who say they are easy to program. It’s involved. You have to learn all the ins and outs of what you can do, how much tooling you can add, what you can pick up, and cycle times. We went through that process and developed the Cobot Palletizer. We also redesigned the Robopik to use a collaborative robot, which has a lot of nice advantages over the old system. 

It sounds like the automated flame treatment system for peanut butter jars was the turning point that led to the founding of Proco Machinery. Is that correct? 

McCormick: That was where I got introduced to the plastic container industry and blow molding. This was the point where we decided that this was an area where we could streamline and develop a real product line instead of having to design custom machines every single time. It worked really well. 

Could you describe the history and growth of Proco Machinery? 

McCormick: When we started, we had two or three employees and were in a 1,200-square foot facility. Then we moved to 5,000 square feet, and then we moved to our current facility, which is 15,000 square feet. We’ve been here since 1992. 

At 76, do you still work full time, and do you design all the equipment? 

McCormick: I work full time, but we have a design team now. We have four full-time designers on staff, and I work with them on concepts. If I develop a new concept, these guys do the CAD design and make the drawings. I work with our technical team to do the programming and the functionality and debugging the machine. That’s mainly what I do on a day-to-day basis. 

How has plastics automation changed over the years? 

McCormick: It’s changed dramatically from when I started. There were a few people involved in plastics automation, but not too many.  

It was a growing industry as there was a lot of transition from glass to plastic — all the salad dressing jars and peanut butter jars. Everything was in glass at that time. There was a huge transition. Even ketchup transitioned from glass to polypropylene blown containers, and that involved the sales of machinery. Bekum, Fischer, they all had offices in Canada. But then all those people pulled out. 

Then the consolidation [in the packaging industry] started. I had personal relationships with many customers — smaller companies that were owned by individuals. Slowly, they were all gobbled up by the big companies like Altium, Pretium and Graham. So, the number of customers that I have has shrunk dramatically. Also, the number of players in the automation business has grown considerably. Now, there are a lot more people vying for the same amount of business. It’s changed quite a lot. It’s a whole different business climate now.  

What are the most significant changes or improvements to automation equipment that you’ve witnessed? 

McCormick: When I go back to the beginning, we didn’t even have PLCs. We used to wire relay panels. The first PLC that I used had six timers and six counters and it probably didn’t have as much memory as my wristwatch does today. The growth of that kind of automation and the controls part of the business has been a major factor. 

Even when we developed the Robopik in ’95, servos were still in development. We’ve seen that change. 

Many companies have developed more robust systems and user-friendly components that make automation much easier. There’s not been a lot of change in the kind of bearings, in the structural part of the machines, but it’s mainly in the controls and the HMI. That kind of thing that has changed dramatically and allowed us to do a lot more with the control systems. 

Robots have been around for many years, but industrial robots were difficult to program, and they are dangerous. An industrial robot can be a lethal weapon in the wrong hands. The development of collaborative robots makes it a lot easier to do this type of automation, and it’s much safer. I feel more comfortable using collaborative robots and putting them in the hands of a shop-floor person. They can’t really do much damage with it because it has limitations on the amount of force. Even if they make a mistake and crash the robot, it won’t damage anything. With an industrial robot, you can smash tooling and break things. With collaborative robots, you can design and build without guards. It’s making life easier. It’s making automation more accessible for many companies, and it’s a lot more cost-effective. 

What major business challenges have you faced as your business grew? 

McCormick: The main problem has been hiring the right kind of people. It’s much more difficult now to find qualified machine builders. I came from an apprenticeship in the U.K,, and that kind of training has evaporated over the years. People who have that knowledge and qualifications are not around anymore. People from Europe that were qualified, from Germany and from the U.K., they’re just not around anymore. The apprenticeship program in Canada is kind of flaky at best.  

When we hire people to train, they train just long enough to gain enough knowledge to move on and get a higher rate of pay, and they quit. 

Was there a particular milestone in Proco’s history? 

McCormick: The development of Robopik in ’95 was a milestone. We sold so many of those during the ‘90s, the 2000s and we still sell them today. It was a great product and a milestone for Proco. Previous to that, they would drop the parts onto a conveyor, and they were hand trimmed and hand packed or hand oriented. Whatever they needed to do. Robopik automated it. 

We developed the Robopik to be as user-friendly as possible. We’ve built a reputation for building a good, solid machine that is reliable and easy to fix. We try not to use any kind of special component parts. We use standard parts that are available. 

How would you like to be remembered? What legacy would you like to leave? 

McCormick: I’d like to think that we provided good, solid quality equipment. We made life easier for our customers.  

Over the years, we've probably saved our customers millions and millions of dollars in costs. I’d like to know that we did a good job. We've always treated everybody with fairness and respect and our employees the same. We have many people who have worked for me for 25 years, and they're still here today. I like to think that we treat people fairly, with respect, and the same with our customers. 

Is there anything you would like to add? 

McCormick: We are a family business. My daughter, my son, my wife, they all work in the business. We have plans for the future. While I am obviously reaching the end of my career, it’s not going to be the end of Proco. We’ve got good products that we have developed, and new products, like our cobot palletizer, are being well received in the industry. We have lots of new products coming online, and we’re certainly not letting the grass grow under our feet.