Cardale, founded by Roy Sibley in 1945 originally began manufacturing garage doors in 1964, and in 1968 Cardale Doors Limited was established. Cardale Doors Limited today is still a privately owned British company and has been dedicated to manufacturing quality garage doors for the last 40 years. With head offices at Brackley and manufacturing facilities at Brackley, Luton, Scunthorpe and Verwood, and a distribution depot in Glasgow, the Company is able to offer the widest choice of styles, designs and finishes in the UK.

Effective IT underpins British manufacturing
In a manufacturing industry, where price pressure and overseas competition are a constant threat, British garage door manufacturer Cardale has built its successful business on the effective use of technology.

“Technology underpins everything we do,” explained Cardale’s Business Systems Director Stephen Holden. “With sites around the country our primary method of communication between staff is email, the main method of information storage is on servers and our production for customers is driven through the IT system. As a result, ensuring our IT infrastructure is up and running around the clock is incredibly important for us.”

Old PCs were becoming a risk
Increasingly, the three-person IT team was finding it difficult to effectively manage Cardale’s desktops. The company had moved to a Citrix server-based computing model in 1999 but had continued to use PCs on the desktops. The PCs were now ageing rapidly and becoming a risk.

“We were having many of the usual problems that people experience with PCs,” said Stephen. “Virus security was an issue as it is very difficult to lock the desktops down, Windows problems, printer problems…they were causing more problems than they were worth.”

Partnership approach found the right solution
Working with their IT partner Technologie Made Simple, Cardale decided to look at the thin client options. “We brief Technologie Made Simple and they find us the right technology at the best price. It works very well,” explained Stephen.

Cardale trialled products from both IGEL Technology and another leading vendor. Both products were effective but Cardale decided to go with the better value IGEL product.

The company has now rolled out the IGEL-2110 LX Smart to 60% of the workforce and expects this to rise to 80% by the year end as it continues to recycle the old PCs.

“The results have been phenomenal,” said Stephen. “It has allowed us to standardise our desktop and roll-out effective IT policies across the company. This was particularly helpful when we had a Microsoft audit last year, as it was very easy to see the software we had deployed in the business because it is all held on the servers.”

“The IGEL units are easy to install, once we had set the network parameters you simply take them out of the box, plug them in and they do the rest. Security has also vastly improved as we are yet to have a single virus-related problem.”

Biggest benefits felt by end users
However, Stephen said possibly the biggest benefits had been felt by the end users. When things went wrong with a PC, we had to rebuild one here and ship it out to the member of staff. In some cases they could be without their PC for several days. Now we simply post them a new IGEL thin client overnight and the next morning they can plug it in and away they go.”

The impact of the IGEL thin clients in the office has also been significant. “Staff were amazed at the amount of desk space they could reclaim because the IGEL units were so much smaller than the old PCs,” he added.

New thin client innovations coming
But no manufacturer can afford to stand still and now Cardale is trialling wireless IGEL thin clients on the factory floor. “It is something we could have never considered with PCs because the environment is just too harsh but IGEL thin clients stand up to the test and assist staff with production schedule information,” explained Stephen.

Moving forward the company is also considering combining its IP telephony system with the office-based IGEL thin clients allowing the company to do away with its IP telephony handsets by plugging a headset directly into the thin client and dialling.

Finally, in the future, Cardale sees the possibility of deploying handheld thin clients for its quality control team to record information in real-time as they move around the factory floor.

With its thin client technology plans, the British garage door manufacturer looks set to stay in front of the market for many years to come.

The solution

• Applications accessed: Microsoft Office and ERP application, Microsoft Dynamics Nav and several software as a service applications • IGEL model: IGEL-2110 LX Smart • Terminal services OS: Citrix Presentation Server • Network used: Server farm with load balancing connected to a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network.