Tecbridge Circuits

Christmas Newsletter 2011

		We would like to thank you most sincerely for your custom, encouragement and support during 2011. This has been our most successful year yet and has seen us expand both in the UK and throughout Europe. During the year we have attracted many new customers in Germany, Italy, Canada, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Cyprus, Corsica and the USA. We have continued to grow in Education, Aerospace, Security, Audio and Broadcast markets and we are proud to have worked successfully with small businesses in many other vertical markets. We are now privelidged to count some of the largest companies and organisations in UK and Europe amongst our customers. Our roots lie firmly with the countless small businesses we have helped with competitive pricing, high standards of product quality and customer service.

Christmas and New Year Opening

Our published delivery times will be extended over the Christmas and New Year period to take account of UK holidays, Courier disruption and Factory breaks.

Scoat and Fairfield factories will both operate normally through Christmas without a break. Both factories will close briefly at new year between 1st and 3rd January. Courier services from our two factories in China will be disrupted owing to Christmas and New Year holidays in Western Europe. We will try to receive and ship PCB's to customers in the windows between 27th and 30th December, however performance of courier companies is uncertain at these times.

It is a great idea to order PCB's just before Christmas so they are being manufactured whilst you enjoy the Christmas festivities. It is also a good idea to avoid the rush just before the start of the Chinese New Year holiday.

Here at Tecbridge we will operate as normal up to and including Friday 23rd December (Christmas Eve) and will then operate a partial service up to Tuesday January 3rd.

Chinese New Year Holidays 2012

Much of the World's PCB manufacture is carried out in China and delivery timescales are likely to become extended for both European and Offshore factories alike.

According to the Chinese zodiac, this is the year of the Dragon and our colleagues at both our offshore factories will be taking a well earned break. The public holiday is between January 22 and January 28th and both factories will close between 21st and 30th January inclusive. Orders which have not been shipped from the factory before 21st January are likely to be delayed by about 12 days. Please allow extra time in the period running up to the Chinese New Year and also to allow extra time when the factories re-open. Both periods are likely to be exceptionally busy and it is not unknown for delays in cold-starting the factories after the shut down.

Key Dates

Factory	Last safe order date for 1-2 layer boards for delivery before Chinese New year
Scoat	4 January (12 working days service)
Fairfield	11 January (8 working days service)

At Tecbridge Circuits we are taking advantage of the closedown to undertake essential IT and software infrastructure upgrades and improving our processes and procedures. We will however continue to provide technical support and advice over this period, and we will continue to monitor emails, customers file uploads and of course be available by telephone. We will continue to process customers orders and generate quotations.

Our Business Values

We aim to supply our customers with the highest possible standards of product quality and service at the lowest possible cost.

Our PCB products come from factories with which we have established deep and close working relationships so we know we can always guarantee quality. We constantly work to improve our understanding of our manufacturing partner's processes and capabilities and learn how to communicate accurately and effectively with them. We process our customers designs here in UK to highlight and anticipate possible issues long before they cause problems at the factory or deliver unwanted surprises to our customers. We help our manufacturing partners by ensuring customers designs are presented in a consistent and complete way. In this way we are able to delivery the best quality and prices offshore manufacturing can offer whilst reducing the risk and hassles of working with offshore factories to negligible proportions.

Occasionally we may need to source manufacturing capacity from new factories to meet special technical requirements our core manufacturing partners cannot meet. In these circumstances, we always discuss the issues so our customers can properly evaluate the risks and benefits of working with us and a new but untried manufacturing resource to achieve a design objective.

We are practical electronic design engineers and understand not only bare PCB manufacturing but also PCB design issues such as designing for EMC, critical mixed signal design, power systems design etc. By looking at our customers designs critically we are often able to offer suggestions and advice which save unnecessary design spins which waste time and money.

Why not link to us?

We spend a lot of money on advertising each year and frankly we would prefer not to. You may be able to help us keep our costs and prices low by helping us achieve a higher 'natural' ranking with key search engines.

If you have a blog or web site, contribute to forums, bulletin boards or even social networking sites visible to the major search engines, you can help by linking to us. All you need to do is mention the words PCB or Printed Circuit Board in your anchor text and include a hyperlink to our home page. If you value the experience you have had working with Tecbridge, a nice comment or two is always appreciated.

If you would like to link to us but you are unsure of the technicalities, please just give us a call.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter. We wish you a very happy Christmas and prosperous New Year.

 

Henry Gibson

Director
Tecbridge Ltd