Blu-ray, CD, DVD, USB and much more…

http://cd-team.blogspot.com

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The Team

CD Team would like to thank all of you who took part in our survey.

The winner of the £20 Amazon Voucher has been contacted.

100% of you were either very satisfied or satisfied that:

• your enquiry was dealt with in a timely, professional and friendly manner
• your account manager was knowledgeable and helpful
• your order was well managed throughout and delivered on time
• our range of products and services met your requirements

99% of you were either very satisfied or satisfied that:

• the speed and condition in which your product was delivered met your expectations
• our technical support team was knowlegeable and responsive (when contacted)
• that every team member showed an interest in you and treated you as a valued customer

100% of you would recommend us and 96.4% would use us again

However, only 60% of you use our website
We hope this is because you think we’re a lovely bunch of knowlegeable people and prefer picking up the phone and contacting us directly for information. However, we really do make every effort to ensure our website shows the most up to date news items, product information and downloads and we want it to be a useful resource for you. Therefore, our main priority for the following year is to make our website even more informative and beneficial to you, our customers. We will be working on the site design, navigation and usability in order to attract more of you to the site and keep you returning.

Any suggestions on how we could improve the website or any other aspects of our business in order to better our service to you are greatly appreciated.

Optional Survey Comments included:

“In all dealings with CD Team, I am always left with the impression of a professional, well organised company, with a courteous and knowledgeable team.”

“You are always efficient and communicate well, which makes my job that bit easier since I know I can rely on you.”

You don’t have to wait until our next survey to make a difference… you can add a comment about your account manager or the products and services you receive from CD Team any time, just click here »

Thank you for your continued business and support

CD Team has been awarded ISO 14001 certification. This certification has only been achieved by less than 1% of UK businesses and this prestigious award is supported by the Government and recognised worldwide. Nigel Griffiths, who undertook the assessment for QMS Quality Management Systems, paid particular tribute to “the investment in people and training that enables CD Team to provide an efficient and environmentally friendly service to their customers”.

Yesterday, every member of CD Team lent a hand to pack an urgent project which needed to be despatched the same day. This is a service which is critical to many of our customers and vital to us. I took pride in seeing the couriers and post leave our building on time knowing it was a job well done and within the deadline, and I spared a thought for the amazing fulfilment I was priveledged to see in India a couple of years ago. If you have never heard of the incredible tiffinwallah courier service, it is Indian efficiency at its best…

These are the men who deliver 175,000 lunches (or “tiffin”) every day to offices and schools throughout Mumbai, the business capital of India. Lunch is transported in a tin container consisting of a number of bowls, each containing a separate dish, held together in a supporting frame. The meals are prepared each morning in the commuter’s home by their family once (s)he has left for his commute into Mumbai. It is then collected by the tiffinwallah later that morning and delivered to their place of work or study in time for lunch. Afterwards, the process is reversed and the tin container returned to the commuter’s home address.

The process is amazing despite the complexity. The 5,000 tiffinwallahs working today make a mistake on average of only once every two months, according to the President of the Mumbai Tiffinmen’s Association. That’s only one error in every 8 million deliveries, or 16 million if you include the return trip. “If we made 10 mistakes a month, no one would use our service” he says.

How do they do it?

The meals are picked up from commuters’ homes in suburbs around central Mumbai long after the commuters have left for work, delivered to them on time, then picked up and delivered home before the commuters return.

Each tiffin carrier has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered.

After the tiffin carriers are picked up, they are taken to the nearest railway station, where they are sorted according to the destination station. Between 10:15 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. they are loaded in crates onto the baggage cars of trains.

At the destination station they are unloaded by other tiffinwallahs and re-sorted, this time according to street address and floor. The 100- kilogram crates of carriers, carried on tiffinwallahs’ heads, hand- wagons and cycles are delivered at 12:30 p.m., picked up at 1:30 p.m., and returned whence they came.

The charge for this extraordinary service is just 150 rupees per month, enough for the tiffinwallahs, who are mostly self-employed, to make a good living. After paying Rs60 per crate and Rs120 per man per month to the Western Railway for transport, the average tiffinwallah clears about Rs3,250 a month.

Of that sum, Rs10 goes to the Tiffinmen’s Association. After minimal expenses, the rest of the Rs50,000 a month that the Association collects go to a charitable trust that feeds the poor.

Although we don’t have the same daily volumes, ours is a far more varied service. In any one day we might be producing 8,000 DVD’s, packing them into PVC wallets and dispatching those with letters into jiffy bags with labels to 8,000 destinations Nationally. The same day we could be packing promotional materials such as key rings, blow up chairs, t-shirts or books with, CD’s and Blu-ray discs, across multiple language skus and dispatched Worldwide. The complexity should not be underestimated and nor should the skills required to ensure we do an accurate job.

Every box and all packing material is re-cycled and re-used immediately on the same job where possible. Or, stored and re-used over the course of the next few days, or weeks. Our waste management processes are all measured and recorded for our ISO14000.

We can’t claim to deliver by bicycle to save on fuel, but our couriers and the postal service all work to ensure efficiency, and are measured against care for the environment too.

I’m certain there are still many lessons that can be learned from the Tiffinmen’s Association, perhaps I am just trying to convince myself that in name of commitment to continuous improvement I should visit Mumbai again.

Submitted by Jo Fone, Managing Director

tiffinwallah_bike

mumbai__tiffin_wallah

With the current economy the way it is, there is increasing pressure on businesses to cut costs at every opportunity and find better deals and bargains on required products. However, businesses should be aware that if they buy too cheaply, they run the risk of products failing and their reputation being at stake and will therefore be forced to spend more money in the long run. In my experience this has become more apparent with USB sticks than any other media storage device.

In recent months, I have seen an increasing number of USB production jobs where the customer has supplied us with their own USB media to copy on to. Although happy to duplicate onto pre-sourced USBs, there have been several jobs now where the supplied USBs were, shall we say, not of the greatest quality.

To give you a better idea of the effect this can have, one customer required us to upload company data onto 500 of their supplied USBs so that they could hand them out at an exhibition to promote brand awareness. During the duplication process, we found that 28% of the sticks had failed to upload (140 units total). Despite trying the sticks again they still would not duplicate as the chip inside them was of such poor quality.

As a result, the customer did not have enough USBs to hand out at the event and of those sticks that were handed out, they could no longer be confident that they would all work when these potential clients tried to use them.

So, as a lesson, businesses looking for bargains may indeed find products which are much cheaper than others on the market and they may think they are getting a great deal, however they could also be taking a huge gamble. For instance, if you make a 30% saving on the USBs and 28% of them fail and cannot be used, you haven’t saved any money. The cost cutting risk is apparent; you risk losing any possible saving you could have made and risk your reputation by handing out a branded product that just doesn’t work.

With reputation and word of mouth so vital in today’s world, paying out a little extra for good quality products from a reliable supplier will give you that vital peace of mind.

CD Team Account Manager

It was a successful night for the games industry. Nintendo walked away with a smile as Super Mario Galaxy was announced as Best Game.

Another big winner was Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare who collected awards for Gameplay, and Story & Character. Little Big Planet scooped the award for Artistic Achievement and Fable II came first in the Action and adventure category.

Other winners included Boom Blox, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, Race Driver: Grid, Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution, Spore and Boro-Toro.

The games industry is set to be catapulted into the spotlight once again when the British Academy Video Game Awards holds a captivated audience on Tuesday 10th March 2009 from the London Hilton, Park Lane.

The Awards are a fantastic opportunity to show appreciation to an industry where so much hard work goes into creating original gameplay, advanced graphics and a smooth user experience which, more often than not gets taken for granted.

As such, all areas of expertise are acknowledged in the following award categories:
Technical Achievement, Best Game, Hand Held, Sports, Strategy, Original Score, Artistic Achievement, Multiplayer, Casual, Story and Character, Use of Audio, Action and Adventure, Gameplay, BAFTA One’s To Watch Award in association with Dare to Be Digital and the Game award of 2008.

Set to be an exciting awards ceremony with fierce competition, you can expect to see Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare up for no less than 8 awards, Grand Theft Auto IV up for 6 awards, and Little Big Planet up for 5 awards. Other popular games up for awards include Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, Mario Kart Wii, FIFA 09, Ninjatown, and Wii Fit, to name just a few.

We enjoy working successfully with the games industry, providing services such as duplication, packaging and fulfilment so we will be following the awards with bated breath!

For more information and a full list of the nominees, visit the official website here…

In recent months we have heard stories about large corporations losing CDs and USBs containing confidential details of millions of customers, including bank details, health records and other sensitive information. The general public are understandably worried about the safety of their confidential information, and the companies that store this data have a duty to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

The stories that dominate the news relate primarily to larger businesses, however this does not mean the same security lapses aren’t happening in smaller enterprises. In fact, the possibilities of data loss are just as likely, if not more so, because of budget and personnel constraints. But this shouldn’t be an excuse.

In the current economic climate, businesses should treat their customers like gold dust. Repeat business is vital to the prosperity of most SMEs and confidential information should be protected in an appropriate manner.

Human error is always an added risk and unfortunately mistakes are made despite best efforts to avoid them. However, if SMEs become more vigilant and follow simple rules to protect their data, even in the event of piracy or theft, they can reduce the chances of data loss dramatically. Both they and their customers will be safe in the knowledge that their data is protected from unauthorised access.

A new product on the data protection market reaches out to smaller businesses helping them password protect, encrypt and record their data. It is ideal for those needing to backup or distribute sensitive data quickly and very simply without compromising the level of security.

AutoSave Encrypt contains a pioneering embedded technology (CDSoft-R Cryptex) which means you won’t need to install any software in order to burn and encrypt your files to disc. The files are password protected when the data is initially transferred onto the disc. If your Cryptex disc is lost or stolen, it will become totally useless without the original disc or the password to access it.

For more information on this product and other security products visit this website: www.storeandprotect.co.uk

By increasing the awareness of the importance of data security, we hope SMEs and corporations take responsibility for protecting private information.

From a business and personal perspective, it is the right thing to do.

The downturn in the economy has many of us reading advice from business press on steps we can take in order to help us through these times. The advice given follows a similar theme regardless of which publication or website you are reading. This article gives our take on the situation and the measures we are taking to safeguard our success:

Jo Fone

Managing Director

“One surprising aspect of the games market over the past year is that the more severe the economic downturn has become, the better the gaming market has performed.”

Recent news articles in both the Financial Times and MCVUK report that due to the credit crunch, cautious consumers are staying in and spending more money on being entertained at home. A survey by Google of most searched-for products shows gaming terms dominating. “Games represent a relatively cheap, but also exciting and innovative pastime. As more people save money by staying in, a video game, although it may cost three or four times as much as a DVD or CD, offers much more longevity and hence better value for money.”

This is excellent news for Blu-ray and proof that this format is here to stay. With more than 75million Playstation 3s, Xbox 360s and Nintendo Wii’s in the market, games software publishers are feeling the benefit of an installed base of console owners.

For more Blu-ray information visit our Blu-ray microsite

(To read the full news articles please visit MCVUK article and FT article)

CD Team’s USB & Flash memory duplicators now have the ability to duplicate USB hard disks. These are 10 slot systems able to record up to 10 external USB hard disks at once with an average speed of 300MB/Min per port. These systems can be standalone or networked and linked together if necessary allowing up to 40 duplication ports.

http://www.cdteam.co.uk/our-products/flashduplicators.html

For more information on these systems please email info@cdteam.co.uk or call 0044 (0)1491 636373

Thank you

Alex Ashur