Whiskey House of Kentucky is the most sophisticated, technically advanced producer of custom bourbon and American whiskey in the United States. As a manufacturing company, Whiskey House faced the challenge of developing robust custom software solutions to support their production processes while maintaining focus on their core business.
The company encountered two main obstacles with their software development:
- The need for a custom solution that could integrate seamlessly with their unique manufacturing processes.
- Limited in-house software development resources.
"We are not a software development company first and foremost," explains Patrick Mannion, Digital Solutions Architect at Whiskey House. "We are in the business of making the best custom whiskey for our customers in the industry. We needed something that would provide a much lower barrier to entry for us to build robust software for different services within our manufacturing space."
Production-ready standardized code: accelerating delivery and ensuring quality
One of the most significant advantages Amplication brought to Whiskey House was the generation of production-ready code. This not only sped up development but also ensured high-quality, standardized code across their multiple projects.
"Having the production-ready code has been invaluable," Patrick explains. "It just makes onboarding developers and conforming to standards so much easier."
The high-quality generated code also serves as a benchmark for custom development. Patrick adds, "Any bad code that developers might write sticks out like a sore thumb because Amplication's code is so production-ready and based on best practices. It's almost like a built-in style guide for our developers."
Streamlining development, focusing on business logic and team collaboration
Amplication's easy-to-use interface proved to be highly beneficial for Whiskey House. The production-ready code generation, that includes all the core and business domain backend functionalities, allowed Patrick's team to focus on core business functionality without wasting time on boilerplate.
The Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) view, in particular, facilitated productive conversations between technical and non-technical team members. Patrick notes, "Sometimes I would just share my screen and show the ERD view. It was incredibly useful for having productive conversations with developers on my team because we had something visual to showcase."
These out-of-the-box UI features built directly into Amplication significantly streamlined Whiskey House's development process from day one.
Open-source and full support: the best of both worlds
While open-source solutions offer flexibility, they often lack professional support. Amplication provided Whiskey House with the perfect balance of a fully customizable open-source solution, with all the generated code based on industry best practices, along with expert assistance.
"There are other code generation tools available out there, and they are open-source, just like Amplication," Patrick acknowledges. "But one thing that we found particularly useful about Amplication was that it provides this level of support. We really enjoyed that Amplication offers both the benefits of an open-source solution and professional support."
This expert assistance comes not only through direct support channels but also through well-documented, structured code and comprehensive platform documentation. This multi-faceted support system was crucial in helping Patrick's team quickly adapt to and maximize the benefits of Amplication.
Rapid deployment and scalability
Amplication's ability to generate robust backends that can be easily deployed on public infrastructure was crucial for Whiskey House's industrial applications.
"In our industry, being able to use Amplication to produce backends that are robust and that you can easily deploy on publicly available infrastructure was crucial," Patrick says. "Industrial companies typically don't have an extremely large developer base. Amplication allowed us to move much faster with our limited resources."
Patrick also highlighted the value of Amplication's .NET support for the industry: "The fact that Amplication supports .NET could be very interesting for our industry. There's a lot of Microsoft infrastructure in place in many industrial settings, so that's a big plus for companies looking to modernize their systems."
Results: 5X faster development and 5X reduced costs
By choosing Amplication, Whiskey House has achieved remarkable results:
- Reduced both development time and labor costs by an estimated 5x
- Improved code quality and consistency across projects
- Accelerated onboarding of new developers
- Enhanced communication between technical and non-technical team members
"Amplication significantly shortened our implementation process," Patrick summarizes. "With Amplication, we estimate that we've seen a 5x reduction in both development time and labor costs. As we move projects into maintenance, we use Amplication to add functionality and update existing applications."
Patrick has also shared his thoughts on Amplication's AI assistant, Jovu, to further accelerate their development process in the future. "The AI-powered capabilities of Jovu could potentially take our efficiency to an even higher level," he notes.
Amplication has significantly enhanced Whiskey House's software development capabilities, especially considering their compact team size. It has enabled them to create custom, scalable software solutions that align perfectly with their unique manufacturing processes.
