Inside Six Working Plants: The Off-Site Tours at Automation Fair 2026

You can watch a demo cell run a flawless cycle on any show floor. What you can't see there is what happens when that same technology has to run every shift, on real product, in a building laid out decades before anyone said “digital transformation.” That gap is the whole argument for the off-site tours at Automation Fair 2026 — and this year Rockwell Automation is running six of them out of the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston.

Both passes include the off-site tours at no additional cost. You get exactly one. Here is what's behind each door, and what it costs you in schedule.

Cambridge Water Department: a PLC-5 to ControlLogix migration you can walk through

Billed as “Uptime Meets Upgrade,” this tour covers a control migration from PLC-5 to ControlLogix at a purification facility rated for 24 million gallons per day. The route takes in the watershed, the treatment facility, the laboratory, the distribution system and the process floor.

If you have PLC-5 or SLC hardware still in service and a migration plan that keeps getting deferred another budget cycle, this is your tour. A municipal water plant cannot take a two-week outage to swap a control platform, which means whatever Cambridge did, they did it live. That's the part worth asking about.

1.5 hours inside the facility • 3.5 hours total, transportation included

Downeast Cider: Plex running on a mid-size beverage line

“Brewing Smarter Growth” puts you inside a 125,000 barrel-per-year cider house where Plex and Rockwell Automation PLCs handle smart manufacturing across the production phases. Taproom sampling closes it out.

This is the most useful tour on the list if you're evaluating MES for a plant that isn't enormous. Downeast is at the scale where an MES decision is still reversible and the integration effort is legible — which makes it a far better reference point than a Fortune 100 rollout.

1.25 hours inside • 3 hours total — the shortest tour offered

Harpak-ULMA: packaging machinery with your hands on it

“Packaging Automation Unpacked” runs at the Harpak-ULMA Customer Experience Center and covers connected automation and machine-building practice across food, medical, pet food and industrial packaging. Expect interactive stations, live demonstrations of sealing, thermoforming and weighing, and hands-on training.

This is the OEM and machine-builder tour. If you build or specify packaging machinery, it's the one place that week where connected-machine architecture gets argued in front of equipment that's actually running.

2 hours inside • 5 hours total, including lunch

RightHand Robotics: AI piece-picking, plus how the gripper gets built

“A Gripping Look at Autonomy” takes you into RightHand Robotics' headquarters to see intelligent piece-picking, where AI, robotic gripping and item-identification technology drive order fulfillment. Beyond the live demonstrations and operations, the tour opens up control system development, gripper manufacturing and the testing cells — the parts most vendors don't show anyone.

At 2.5 hours on site, it's the most facility time of any tour on the schedule. If unstructured picking is anywhere in your roadmap, that's where the schedule is worth spending.

2.5 hours inside • 4.5 hours total, including lunch

Teddie Peanut Butter: a hundred-year-old plant getting digitized

“Spreading Smarter Operations” follows Plex integration across The Leavitt Corp's operations — a century-old family business. The walk covers the receiving dock, roasting, mixing, grinding, filling, labeling, packaging and quality inspection.

The value here is brownfield reality. Data capture layered onto processes and equipment that predate the concept of data capture is the situation most plants are actually in, and it looks nothing like a greenfield reference architecture.

1.5 hours inside • 3.5 hours total

Rockwell Automation Chelmsford: iTRAK and MagneMover LITE where they're built

“Where Intelligent Motion Lives” opens the Advanced Motion, Safety and Sensing business: engineering labs, sensing labs, and 16 exclusive demonstrations covering color sortation, RFID, automatic queuing, real-time dispatching and advanced safety, built around iTRAK and MagneMover LITE.

If independent cart technology is on your evaluation list — or if you're weighing ICT against conveyors and AMRs for a transport problem — this is the deepest look you'll get in a single afternoon. It's also the longest day out of any tour on the schedule.

2 hours inside • 5.5 hours total, including travel and optional lunch

Budget the day, not the tour

The headline durations are time inside the facility. Total time away from the convention center runs 3 to 5.5 hours, and that's the number that decides what else you get to do.

Chelmsford at 5.5 hours is effectively your entire day. Cambridge Water and Teddie at 3.5 hours each leave you a working afternoon. One scheduling note worth acting on: Monday is the only day of the show with no Expo, so Monday is the cheapest day to be off-site if protecting Expo time matters to you.

The rules, before you pick

• One tour per attendee. Availability is limited and it's first come, first served.
• Included with both the General Access Pass and the General Access + Advanced Training Pass at no additional cost.
• Transportation to and from the convention center is included.
• Distributors, students and educators are not able to register for off-site tours.
• Host facilities reserve the right to restrict access based on perceived competitive interest.
• Tour windows run Monday 7:30am–5:30pm, Tuesday 8:00am–5:30pm, Wednesday 7:30am–4:30pm and Thursday 8:00am–2:00pm.

Pick the tour, then build the week around it

The tours are the one part of Automation Fair you cannot reproduce later from a recording or a spec sheet. They're also the part that fills first and can't be rescheduled. If one of these six lines up with a project on your desk — a deferred PLC-5 migration, an MES evaluation, an ICT-versus-conveyor decision — register for it before you sort out the rest of your agenda.