I'm blessed to be the third owner of what
is now an 85-year-old company.
And shame on me if I don't do my part to get it to be 100.
Dixie Ironworks is a company that's been here since 1933.
Current point in our history, we've
got one main product line, valves and fittings and things
like this, really high-pressure equipment that's
used in the oil field.
We do all of the machining, assembly,
pressure testing from right here in Alice, Texas.
For the company to continue to thrive,
it has to move beyond that first innovation.
So the old way of doing CAD, we had
lots of engineering time spent on IT,
lots of IT infrastructure, expensive software running
on expensive hardware.
Having these large files that sometimes you
want more than one person working on,
the difficulty of making sure that those
are sinking well together.
The pain was well-known.
We'd been through it for well over 10 years.
The more you look at it, the more
you realize, do I keep going through this pain,
or do I at least try something new.
One of our other engineers had heard of Onshape, passed
some information on to me.
I looked at it.
It looked interesting.
I said, man, this is fantastic that engineering software is
now being moved forward.
Everyone was thinking the same thing.
If this can work, we need to do it.
One of the big benefits is that we've put the power of people
being able to solve their own problems.
Somebody on the production floor,
if they have an idea for a fixture,
they can hop into Onshape and start to flesh it out,
prototype it.
This part was completely designed in Onshape,
the drawings done in Onshape.
Manufactured on the shop floor using Onshape models.
QCed using Onshape.
Start to finish.
It is incredible the degree to which
you're able to compress the time scale of bringing innovations
to the market.
I made everybody in the company understand that we're not
going to keep renewing SolidWorks
so that you're going to be using Onshape.
And everybody's really embraced it.
We're really heavy CAD users.
And on shape isn't a light program.
It's a full CAD program that's on the cloud.
I'm never going to lose any data.
It just allows me to add more value to the company
and not have as crazy of a day.
I couldn't imagine going back to SolidWorks
today, too many memories of the pain and things
that just don't exist anymore.
If we find a tool that can help us meet our goals
and become a more agile company, grow our profits,
we have to take advantage of that.
Tools like Onshape are part of that progressive, continuous
innovation that has to happen at a company that wants to make it
to 100 years and beyond.