Josh Corson began designing distillation equipment in 2012 for a friend who wanted to open a craft distillery. But when the friend decided that he didn’t want to go into that business, Corson was left with a bunch of distilling equipment. Working with his brother, Tory, Corson built a website and put the distillation equipment that he had built up for sale. Little did he know that he was in the midst of a craft distillery boom, that the sale of his initial equipment would be followed by many additional orders, and that he would soon have a growing manufacturing business with more orders than he could fill. Today, Corson Distilling Systems, Inc. is a leading family-run commercial distillery equipment manufacturer located in Boise, Idaho. Rather than assembling systems from outsourced parts, the company designed and built the machines necessary to forge its distillery equipment from raw stainless steel and copper, and hand-builds each system with care. While the growing company develops a standard line of equipment, it also specializes in custom, engineered-to-order systems. Although Corson Distilling initially used AutoCAD® 2D design software, it soon found those tools to be inadequate for supporting growth, according to founder and President Josh Corson. “When we started building more custom equipment, it became clear that we would not be able to meet our delivery dates without automating design, production, and assembly,” Corson stresses. “A couple of our engineers suggested moving to SOLIDWORKS Premium 3D design software to boost throughput, which we did in early 2016. While designing in SOLIDWORKS was an improvement, we were still not fast enough to meet growing demand. We were looking into ERP solutions to further automate our processes when we discovered the COUNTERPART® system from Smooth Logics.” When Corson saw a COUNTERPART ERP system demo from SOLIDWORKS Certified Solution Partner Smooth Logics, what impressed him was the way that the system worked directly with SOLIDWORKS Premium software and its SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard product data management capabilities. “The other ERP systems that we evaluated required a lot of manual data entry,” Corson recalls. “The combination of SOLIDWORKS Premium and COUNTERPART software automated many of the functions directly from SOLIDWORKS,” Corson continues. “The COUNTERPART system, which works with all versions of SOLIDWORKS, grabs model and drawing files directly from our SOLIDWORKS PDM vault to support procurement and manufacturing and also supports automated configuration of our equipment designs inside SOLIDWORKS. The two solutions immediately relieved our draftsmen, who spent a lot of time creating DXF™ files, of about 25 percent of their workload and streamlined our processes.”
SIZING STILLS WITH EQUATIONS
With SOLIDWORKS Premium and COUNTERPART software installed, Corson has not only streamlined its order-to-design-to- production processes, it has also automated the configuration of equipment designs using SOLIDWORKS design configuration and equation tools. “Based on a single design, we can now leverage SOLIDWORKS and COUNTERPART to automatically create models and drawings for stills of infinite sizes by just using equations,” Corson notes. “We no longer have to put in the time and effort to separately design and prepare each custom piece for production,” Corson adds. “We enter the dimensions in an equation, and the system automatically generates the newly configured design and mates all the parts together. This has enabled us to reduce the time to create a custom configuration from five weeks to two days. Now, engineering is outpacing production, which is the opposite of what happened previously.”
