Seminars and more from CMDA this year

The newly appointed executive members of Pune's Computers and Media Dealers
Association (CMDA) have drawn up a road map for activities that the association
will conduct through the year at their first meeting after the elections last
week.

Shashikant Satbhai, Secretary of CMDA said, “All our executive board members
met last week and decided about the future plans for the association. Apart from
the regular activities like publishing the annual CMDA diary, organizing the
Diwali mela, holding free health check-up and continuing with the sports
activities, we have decided on two new events this year.”

These new events will be organizing management seminars and a system
integrators (SI) forum. The executive council will stress on these two
initiatives to enhance the technical and business knowledge of its members.
Satbhai added, “Rather than giving our members events around entertainment, we
thought of adding value to the activities conducted by us. These two events were
taken by after a lot of consideration. ”

Corporate houses often invest a good percentage of their revenue on the
personal development of the employees. But small business people can't afford
this luxury. To do away with this limitation, the association decided to conduct
these seminars for its members. The first management seminar will be held on
September 20, 2008 and CMDA hopes to conduct four such programs in 2008-09.

Satbhai said, “It's an effort to update all our association members
technically. We call professionals across the industry and they will deliver the
lectures to the members. Depending on the success of seminar program, we are
planning to conduct workshops, which expose our association members to the
management techniques as well as they get practical knowledge regarding the
same.”

Besides this, CMDA will have an SI forum because 70 percent of the
association's members are SIs. “Sis have different problems that need to be
addressed, like getting support from companies, DOA problems, not getting proper
information about various marketing schemes, delay in getting commissions, etc.
So we thought of bring these problems under single roof and approach them
through a forum,” Satbhai said.

To finalize the common set of problems of SIs, CMDA will circulate a
questionnaire to all its members. This will help them to freeze on the immediate
and critical problems faced by SIs. Those common problems will be discussed with
vendor companies at the forum and the results of these meetings will be
circulated to all the members of the association.

CMDA is also planning to create blogs through which members can share the
information and can also put questions about issues they face as well. Another
core focus of the program is to increase member profitability by standardizing
service across the region.

The association had conducted a general survey where it came to know that
most of its members started their business at the early age with no business
knowledge from any institute. CMDA members feel that it's a right time to add
value to the young businesspeople and help them to manage their resources
professionally, which will result in profitability.