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It's a pretty quiet operation, except for the five forklifts that buzz from one row of inventory to the next throughout the day, filling and emptying trucks at 11 loading docks.

In fact, if you don't know what you're looking at, this warehouselike building seems unremarkable -- no different from any other distribution facility that stores and ships any kind of product. But look a little closer, and you'll find that here in Tinley Park, Illinois, one hour's drive from Chicago, there are more caskets stacked in one place than you've ever seen in your life: more than 2,000 caskets, to be exact, with room for 4,000 more.

This is the busiest distribution hub of the nation's biggest casket company, the center from which Batesville Casket Co. (BCC) ships thousands of caskets of all shapes, sizes, and colors to funeral homes throughout the Midwest every day. It's a large, complex, impressive operation -- but it's only a small piece of a much larger system. In fact, BCC's lifeblood pumps from the largest of the company's five manufacturing facilities, located in Batesville, Indiana -- a small, rural town (population: 4,000) that stretches down Highway 46, a quiet, single-lane road that lies halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. In Batesville, the century-old operation manufactures more than 1,000 metal caskets daily.

To most people, the casket industry is not, to put it politely, a top-of-mind topic. If anything, it is a subject to be avoided -- both for yourself and for those you love. After all, there is something innately morbid about products designed to be used only once -- if permanently -- as receptacles for dead bodies. And yet, death is an unquestionable certainty; it's completely inevitable -- and positively big business. Every year, more than 2.2 million people die in the United States, and collectively families spend more than $11 billion annually on funerals and related products and services. In this industry, BCC is the biggest player of all: More than 40% of all funeral homes in the United States use BCC products.

Since 1906, Hillenbrand Industries Inc., a $2 billion publicly traded company in Batesville, Indiana, has owned BCC. Hillenbrand also owns Hill-Rom Co., a large medical-products and furniture company, and Forethought Financial Services Inc., a provider of insurance and trust-based financial products for the preplanning of funeral services. Caskets are the centerpiece of BCC's business, but the company also manufactures cremation products such as urns and provides its funeral homes with a variety of publications to help families deal with death, grief, and mourning.

The business of taking care of the dead is an ancient one -- as old as humankind. And, in many ways, the elemental tasks of dealing with death have changed little through the ages. Or so it seems from the outside. But according to Bob Putzier, 60, general manager of the Tinley Park distribution center, the funeral business in general, and BCC in particular, have undergone dramatic changes during his 17-year tenure with the company. "A lot of people seem to think that the funeral industry is staid," he says, "but that's simply not the case. I've been in this business a long time, and things are constantly changing: The questions change. The demands change. Customers' needs change."