Year Three of the Manufacturing Express brings us to New England. We kicked off our 2026 tour with a stop in Norwalk, Connecticut, a coastal city on the Long Island Sound. Long winding roads through wooded neighborhoods and cosy shoreside villages appeared out our windows as we drove through the southwestern part of the Constitution State.
The city has a long history and legacy dating back to before the American Revolution. In the modern era, it is home to the North America headquarters of two significant companies in the equipment manufacturing industry: Terex Corporation and SmartEquip. Both companies came together in partnership for this event to celebrate the importance of American manufacturing and the people who build, power, and feed the world.
This is Terex’s second time on the Manufacturing Express. Our first visit was in 2024 at their Terex Utilities manufacturing facility in Watertown, South Dakota. This visit was to their corporate headquarters in Connecticut. This office oversees the full suite of Terex products and brands, which covers everything from aerial lifts, garbage trucks, ambulances, and more.
Terex is a global manufacturer of specialized equipment and solutions that help build, maintain, and protect communities around the world. Through its portfolio of industry-leading brands, Terex serves the fire and emergency response, environmental services, infrastructure, materials processing, and aerial work platform markets. The company designs and manufactures a broad range of products, including fire apparatus, ambulances, mobile elevating work platforms, materials processing equipment, environmental solutions, and utility equipment, supported by a global network of service, parts, and digital solutions. Since 2024, the company’s headcount has more than doubled.
Ask the team at Terex and they’ll tell you that seeing that tangible product that makes an impact on people’s everyday lives is their favorite part of the job. And that extends to the people operating them as well. “We’re giving our end users a quality vehicle that they may be in for 12 hours throughout the day operating it. So we are making sure that they’re comfortable and they’re safe and they can do the best job possible,” said Julie Nuernberg, Senior Director of Corporate Communications for Terex. “Part of our safe, essential work that we do is working with first responders and those that use our vehicles to keep people safe. And so, there’s a lot we do to keep them safe as well.”
During their stop on the Manufacturing Express, Terex celebrated that work alongside their office neighbor and fellow AEM member SmartEquip. SmartEquip is unique among the companies participating in this year’s tour, as they support the end users of the equipment and the fleet managers who own and service them.
SmartEquip is an asset productivity solution built for equipment owners to increase equipment uptime and consolidate service, repair, and maintenance support across the suppliers relevant to their fleets. Additionally, service technicians, parts specialists and account managers can seamlessly purchase parts and other equipment-related items from within their service workflow, customized to the serial number of each individual asset.
The company started 26 years ago, when founder and president Alex Schuessler noticed the lack of business efficiency in the equipment rental market. Schuessler correctly identified that the service and maintenance side of the business had become especially complicated and costly, most evident when a fleet involved complex equipment from dozens if not hundreds of different suppliers. As the company has grown, their network has expanded to link hundreds of equipment owners with the parts and service support they need from over 800 manufacturers and dealers worldwide, bringing operating costs down, increasing uptime and expanding the lifecycle of machines. Today, over $2 billion in parts are ordered through the SmartEquip annually across more than 70,000 equipment locations.
“We are so grateful for AEM to looking to us as a digital solutions company to being part of the fabric of the Manufacturing Express,” said Schuessler at the event. On partnering with Terex for this year’s kickoff, Schuessler was thrilled the two companies could unite for a celebration: “It is incredible how we all know of each other and rely on each other. Partnerships take many different forms. Cohosting an industry event is a great one!”
As one of many AEM members on the SmartEquip Network, Terex Corporation and its brands have long made their respective parts catalogs available to equipment owner customers leveraging the solution. With both companies sharing a headquarters in the same complex in Norwalk, this local connection naturally sparked a collaborative and supportive partnership to host the AEM Manufacturing Express tour stop together.
These two companies may be very different from each other, but their partnership for the Manufacturing Express truly highlights how diverse the careers and businesses in the manufacturing industry are. It takes everyone, from the men and women on the shop floor, to sales, software development, and everything in between.
Equipment manufacturing being successful requires all of us doing our part to get these machines built, serviced, and keep operators protected. It is only fitting that we kicked off this year’s tour with a joint event celebrating those who get the job done.
