Service area · Fort Payne, DeKalb County
Fort Payne runs on manufacturing. Its systems should keep up.
OneBody serves Fort Payne and DeKalb County — about a 45-minute drive from our Jackson County base. DeKalb runs more than 135 manufacturing operations against a civilian labor force of 31,256, and Fort Payne is the county seat. We work on what those businesses run on day to day: automation, paper records, cybersecurity, and IT modernization, at fixed fees against written scope.
The sock capital, after the socks
Fort Payne called itself the sock capital of the world for a reason: by the 1990s the area produced more than 3 million pairs of socks a week and employed roughly 5,000 people in hosiery, per the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Most of that moved overseas in the 2000s. What replaced it is more varied and, from a systems standpoint, more complicated — in the 2020 figures, the city’s largest employment sectors were education and health care at 25.2%, manufacturing at 22.6%, and retail trade at 10.0%, per the same encyclopedia entry.
Who's hiring in DeKalb County now
The county’s own industry directory (DeKalb County Economic Development Authority, May 2026) puts a truck-body plant at the top: Heil Environmental at 1,215 in Fort Payne, building garbage-truck bodies. Behind it are The Children’s Place distribution center at 900, Koch/JCG Foods’ poultry processing at 800 in Collinsville, and Moriroku Technology at 581 in Rainsville making vehicle seats and interior trim. The socks never fully left either — ten smaller hosiery and knitting firms still run across the county — and Fort Payne carries a real steel-fabrication cluster: GH Metal Solutions at 380, Nucor-Vulcraft at 332, Valley Joist & Deck at 142. Every one of these has a supplier and contractor network underneath it, and that network is where a 15-person company gets handed a vendor security questionnaire with a due date on it.
What we do for businesses here
Document Digitization
Paper travelers, packing lists, and quality records captured once — piloted on one real record type before anything else moves.
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Automation & Custom Software
The re-typing between the order, the floor, and the invoice, removed. Buy-before-build: no custom code where a product already does it.
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IT Modernization
A roadmap that tells you which machines can connect, which must be isolated, and what order to spend money in.
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Cybersecurity & CMMC
Backups you've actually tested, MFA that's really on, and a straight answer for the customer asking about your security.
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About 45 minutes away
Fort Payne is roughly 45 minutes from the Jackson County base. On-site days are scheduled in advance, and what happens on them is written down before they start.
Frequently asked questions
Our plant floor equipment is 20 years old. Does that rule us out?
No. Old equipment usually connects through its controls, its network, or the paperwork around it. Where a machine genuinely can't be connected or patched, the right answer is to isolate it properly and modernize around it. The IT modernization roadmap says which is which, machine by machine.
We're a supplier, not a manufacturer. Does any of this apply?
Often more so. Suppliers absorb their customers' requirements — delivery windows, quality evidence, security questionnaires — without the staff to absorb them. That gap is exactly what automation and document digitization close.
How long before we see anything?
The assessment is two weeks, fixed fee, and ends in a written report you own. Build work is quoted from that report, not before it — which means the first number you get is based on your systems, not on an average.
Two weeks to find out where the hours are going
Fixed fee, ranked findings, and fixes you can do yourself included at no cost.