Doncasters Group is a world leader in integrated precision engineering, and was originally
founded in 1778. The company now operates from sites in the UK, Continental Europe, USA,
China and Mexico. Their client base is genuinely global and comprises most of the industry
leaders in its relevant areas of activity. The group currently employs around 5,000 members
of staff worldwide. The company possesses many unique industry leading technological and
manufacturing skills that are very highly regarded by their customer base. They are in virtually
every respect global leaders in aerospace, industrial gas turbines, automotive turbochargers,
fasteners and superalloys. All are household names within their respective industries and highly
demanding as regards problem solving, time to market delivery, costs and through life support.
Computers are used across the organization, from the shop floor where their precision
components are manufactured, through to back office facilities and into their design teams.
Six Sigma

By virtue of the components that they manufacture, Doncasters operate on a strictly six sigma
basis in every part of their supply chain. From a technology perspective, this means that they
cannot compromise on accuracy or reliability. Like most manufacturers, their shop floor is a
harsh and demanding working environment for computers. Historically, they have used PCs to
provide access to shop floor tracking applications. Multiple different users log on during and
across shifts to track the progress of the components. The combination of high numbers of
different users using the same PCs, combined with a dusty working environment puts real strain
on the fans, chips and disks of traditional PCs.

When setting up a new line in 2009, the IT team at Doncasters Chard looked at deploying a
traditional PC solution onto the shop floor to allow the shift workers to access Internet Explorer
for document management applications, as well as their usual shop floor tracking programs.
A workstation was required for each bench, which would give access via a USB swipe card
reader for each user’s log on.

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