CHAMPAIGN — A company that specializes in power distribution equipment is creating a new plant in north Champaign, with plans to be up and running by August.

Raptor Power Systems is setting up shop at a building in the Apollo Drive industrial area that totals over 65,000 square feet and includes a warehouse.

"We manufacture equipment that transforms, distributes and monitors power inside of data centers, typically ranging from ... 500,000 watts to 1.2 million watts per unit," President Evan El Koury told The News-Gazette.

The company currently has two manufacturing facilities in New Jersey, and the Champaign site will be their largest site yet, he said.

The local facility will mainly focus on making the company's "flagship" power distribution units, which are typically about 1 million watts, and also testing the units once they're assembled.

El Koury said the company has already hired a plant manager and wants to "scale" to about 50 skilled manufacturing employees in the coming eight to 14 weeks.

He estimated that the plant will employ about 75 people by the end of the year, with the figure also including administrative staff and maintenance employees.

He expects their first product to be off the line by August. In the meantime, items on the to-do-list include hiring and training employees, as well as installing automation equipment.

"Fortunately for us, a lot of the manufacturing that we do is done by people and not by machines," El Koury said. "So even though those automation equipment exist within our production, it is by and large a human process to put our units together."

He also noted that The Atkins Group took care of a “fit-out” of the space, helped the company customize the interior, and aided them in upgrading the site’s power service to facilitate testing.

When asked what brought Raptor to Champaign, El Koury said that his wife grew up in Savoy, and the two of them moved to the area about 15 years ago. 

He previously worked out of an office space on Staley Road.

"We decided to open the factory here not just because I'm here," he said, "but because, basically, the talent pool that exists in the Champaign area is ideal for the type of work that we do, where you have that kind of skilled labor that you saw from places like Kraft or Caterpillar or places like that, but also the engineering talent that you kind of have at the school, mixed with a reasonable cost of living and available industrial space. It was kind of a match made in heaven for us, actually."