January 31, 2017

Conestoga Wood Specialty Corporation (PA) Turns to 10ZiG for Virtual Desktop Solutions

In business since 1964 and a long-time 10ZiG customer, Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation has built their reputation as America’s leading supplier of custom cabinet doors and wood cabinet components. Their focus is dependability and their commitment is supporting cabinet manufacturers with the highest quality products, the most ethical business practices, and the best record for complete and on-time delivery within their industry.

As a wood product manufacturer, Conestoga Wood’s shop environment is a very dusty one. Wanting to track various processes and stages that their product cycles through, they needed to add PCs, which generally do not hold up well in that type of environment. Up until about 2006, they were using IBM dumb terminals on their dusty shop floor that were connected to their IBM AS/400. Seeing that Twinax connections were not going to be part of IBM’s future, and wanting to do more at their work stations in the dusty shop, Conestoga Wood decided to demo and go with the option of 10ZiG (then BOSaNOVA) Thin Clients. The main goal of Conestoga Wood was to have numerous workstations on their shop floor that would report the various steps of their wood manufacturing process as needed. Their manufacturing paperwork is barcoded and as an order moves through the plant, it is scanned into the system as manufacturing process steps are completed in real time. This is done with said scanners, which are connected via USB port to Thin Clients. The Thin Clients are also used for other tracking purposes on the floor – shipping/packaging, information entry, quality control reporting with products, and inventory searches and follow up. Staff is able to use their intranet to check email via Outlook web access, look up documents in the document control center, and open Word and Excel docs through Open Office, and more.

The end solution that Conestoga Wood chose was 10ZiG Thin Clients; 2006 through now. At first, it was 10ZiG BOSaNOVA; then, over the years, several 10ZiG Thin Client device purchases and a few different unit solutions as well. Fast-forward to now, and they currently use 10ZiG Linux-based Thin Client devices; the 5802q series. As a result, they have ordered many of the wireless unit version, clearly saving money by not having to run wire to each device. Therefore, they do have a robust wireless infrastructure at most of their sites. They also use the free 10ZiG Manager, Centralized Management Software utility, to copy and configure all new devices before deploying them, saving them tremendous time – and also for uploading new firmware. To date, Conestoga Wood has hundreds of 10ZiG/BOSaNOVA devices in production at all of their sites, collectively. 10ZiG Thin Clients work very well with their IBM AS/400 platform; they are durable and highly functional in the shop’s manufacturing environment, and the 10ZiG Manager makes it easy for them to roll out new Thin Client devices.

“We have never heard anything but good things regarding our 10ZiG devices. The benefits that we see are that those employees working on the shop floor are able to quickly report what is happening at any given moment with our many product orders that are in production. We continue to have a close relationship with 10ZiG and I don’t see that changing because our company continues to rely heavily on the IBM AS/400 (IBM i) and we need those 10ZiG Thin Clients out on our shop floor. Customer service and technical support also have been great. I do recommend 10ZiG to other companies.