It’s all about CONTROL and getting it right… first time… every time.

Corona Cabinets have just arrived in the 21st century by taking a giant leap of faith and purchasing new equipment and manufacturing automation software, all at once.

Tim McDonald is obviously one of those people who believe you can’t cross a chasm with lots of small steps. After doing it the hard way for years, Tim is determined to make new software technology work for him.

A qualified cabinet maker, Tim spent many years working for other people and doing mostly commercial work like pubs and shopping centres. Then in 2002 came the opportunity he had always dreamed of and Corona Cabinets was born in the Brisbane suburb of Tingalpa, starting off in a 400sq metre shed with a panel saw, a second hand beam saw, a Blum mini press and an edger.

The next two and a half years were very successful.

“We got lots of business”, says Tim, “and we worked ourselves stupid trying to keep up. Our team was fantastic and everyone put in 110%.

Our saws were running 12 hours a day, we worked every weekend but we just couldn’t keep up and had to turn lots of work away, which really hurt. In an attempt to improve our productivity, we developed a cutting list generator in excel, which we keyed into Ardis to get a printed optimization.

This helped a little and speeded up the cutting list but it was inconsistent and, due to the human factor, we still made errors. Custom work still needed to be set out on the floor and if a part was missing someone would spend up to 20 minutes rectifying the problem.

On top of this we had no drilling information and experienced frustrating inaccuracies with adjustable shelf holes and of course we were writing on each part in texta for identification purposes.”

June 2004 was when Tim decided to take the leap.

He purchased a new Beam Saw and Point to Point machining centre. “My original plan was to re-work my spreadsheets and upgrade the optimizer,” said Tim, “the problem was that I would still have very limited drilling capabilities. Parametric programs on the point to point could not handle the high proportion of custom work that we do. I needed automation software that had real flexibility.”

“During my search for machinery I visited another shop with a machinery rep. While I was looking at the machines the owner kept commenting on the effectiveness of the software. I didn’t think much of it at the time but later on I called him up and asked for more information.

That’s when I met Mark Gladwin of LearCom.

Mark came to see me and introduced me to QuickCAM and CADCode software.

He demonstrated to me how all the things I needed were available from these two products. After just buying the machinery, it was a tough call to suddenly add the cost of new software. I had to be really sure that this was the right decision.

Eventually I decided to proceed and placed an order with LearCom.”

“There is a lot of work setting up a new software system, especially one that promises REAL automation. However, in the end, the workload was probably less than re-working my old spreadsheets and the benefits of the new software are enormous”

Over the next few months Tim more than doubled the output with the same number of people and has reduced overtime to less than half.

“Control is the word”, said Tim, “we have now taken back control of the manufacturing. The parts are cut on the saw and machined on the point to point and we do not need to touch the PTP controller, that’s real automation.”

“You do not need extensive training to process jobs, anyone with a cabinet making background can do it easily. The speed of processing a job is amazing and every part is correct, every time. Using QuickCAM, I developed a series of new products including fully parametric curved cabinets and pigeon holed racks. These are things you just cannot build with some other systems, with this system we can make anything.”

“One thing that stands out is how automation has added a touch of professionalism to how we look. Our customers see us getting it right every time, and they like it.”

“Now I am planning future improvements. Firstly I will link AutoCad to CADCode so our drawings can be sent to machine with optimization, machining data, tool paths, and G Code all done in minutes, automatically.

After that, well who knows?”