Cammegh's Roulette wheels really are considered by many to be the best out there, it's not an idle marketing boast by the company. Their customer base continues to grow right alongside their reputation, which is the real test of any product. Marketing will only get you so far, the real proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Bill Cammegh retired from 'active' duty with the company in February 2007, leaving a legacy and an attitude not only of lasting excellence, but of a commitment to taking that excellence forward into a bright future under his sons, Andrew and Richard. Bill is still involved with many of his customers, as continuity is key in any family business. His background is engineering, but these days he sees himself as the company's flag bearer.
"It's quite satisfying and our wheels are the best in the world. If any one wants to debate that with me I happily would. Our big advantage really is that most of our competitors evolved from being furniture manufacturers and the Roulette wheel is not a piece of furniture it's actually a piece of precision engineering, which I am trained in. It really is a precise tool and I'm still really surprised at how much you have to know about adhesives.
"Our ball track for example has to be stable, hard, non-abrasive and also you must be able to produce it economically. It is the only one that is made in-house to be a ball track on a Roulette wheel. When the wheel leaves here you will never have to lubricate that wheel and the spin characteristics actually improve with use, which we have proved."
When he speaks, the pride in the family product is apparent in every word – and it's the same pride and enthusiasm we as an industry see at so many trade exhibitions with Richard, Andrew and Creative Engineer James Moores, who stood in for Andrew at the recent G2E in Las Vegas.
The following interview is with Richard, Andrew and James at Cammegh HQ near Ashford, Kent in England.

Casino International: Why did the company start making Roulette wheels?
Andrew Cammegh: That's a story that goes back to my father, as a mechanical engineer he was fascinated by them. He was seduced by the glamour of the  James Bond era and had the background in precision engineering, so it was a marriage made in heaven really.
We have never looked back and the company has been running for 18 years. It's a passion and the family has a much greater-than-passing interest in what we do!

CI: Is there a particular reason Ashford is your location? The actual site is quite remote from the town.
AC: With my father being a precision engineer he knew a lot of people who could assist who were close to hand. The skills are in this part of the country, as it used to be quite an industrially active area. Also we have Canterbury University on our doorstep, for technical knowledge, and in fact that is where James [Moores] came from, straight out of university.
The other reason it's handy being in the South East is that we can reach a number of our customers via the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar – we do a lot of work in France with the Billboard being particularly popular, and also have recently had a lot of business from Holland.

CI: What's is Cammegh's growth like year on year?
AC: Healthy, year on year. From four years ago we are doing three times the volume of sales. The Roulette wheel is a sensitive product, it has to be made perfectly and we have made improvements on quality procedure from procurement to production techniques. We are more efficient and more effective at delivering. As  a relatively new company we think that a great strength of ours is the ability to balance sales and delivery.

CI: So what's the secret to your stability and growth?
AC: We reinvest into the business heavily. We have invested a great deal in the Billboard of course and the Eyeball and most recently the wheel analysis application which we call Pitboss. And of course a wheel like the Slingshot II is very time intensive to develop, where the ball is in view in the automated wheel every second; but now we have more than 50 orders on our books as we speak for that wheel, so the investment and care is paying off.
What goes on all the time is a constant R&D exercise in looking at and finding materials to make sure the product is made with the best available materials. Sometimes we create and invent the materials that we use to make the wheel.
It is essential to keep developing new products that are relevant for the market.  When we came into the business our competitors were selling a manual Roulette wheel at £4250 and we market our equivalent product today more than £1000 cheaper than that.

CI: What makes Cammegh different then?
AC: It's passion and absolute focus and total determination on making it the best product. And we know they are good, as others imitate our ideas and innovations. There is a relentless energy for us to be creative and innovate. It's clear that the product is the best. We make Roulette wheels and our energies are not diverted to other levels and quantifiable side is that we are able to deliver too.
We have a good atmosphere where people work hard but they feel they have a voice and can contribute to the creativity. We also have great discipline targets have to be met,  lead times to met and things have to be done.
We're unique in that we are dedicated to Roulette. If you take Roulette seriously we think you would be right to choose Cammegh. Another aspect is that the new customers work closely with both Richard and I and the older customers still work directly with my father. I think that gives the customer the feeling of control and accessibility to the product.

Richard Cammegh: We are almost obsessive-compulsive about the product and are constantly looking to refine and improve it. To quantify it means telling trade secrets – basically we have 18 years of information and info from other sources making us market leaders.

AC: We have 100% belief in the product. Our confidence is based on knowledge. We were very careful before we launched the Mercury II. Although we were aiming for January last year, we didn't release that product for sale until April as we tested and tested it before we released.
We innovate but we are also careful to listen to what our customers want first. Our customers value that they are not being force fed things they don't want. The trick is to look at the market trends and spend the money on research and development.

CI: The company's product line has expanded beyond the wheel… You now have the Pitboss suite, Eyeball and Billboard. The latter, you mentioned, has seen some success this last year. Tell us about Billboard, the Roulette signage solution you created…
AC: It's definitely an attractive item and it is engaging as the graphics are so pure and the statistics it is offering are so relevant in the context of the games that are being played and the games played around that. It gives the player a feeling of control. It makes them think that the casino is giving them something over and above what they had before, which is statistical information on games that have happened before while watching the game they are playing at the moment, and that gives them a perceived added advantage. That coupled with the attractive design of the Billboard engages the customer.
The other aspect of the Billboard is that it enables you to advertise other events, to promote the game itself and to promote tournaments, the restaurant or you could put infotainment on it, to advertise special deals, entertainment. It's another means to engage with a customer and keep them entertained and informed about what's going on at the casino.
What is special about the Billboard is that the customer is very close to the product. We have spent a lot of time with James's skills as a Creative Engineer to customize and make bespoke Billboards to suit the logo and the decor of the individual casino. Sometimes it is as easy as working from the logo of the casino and using complementary colours, but other times it's a complete redesign of the Billboard to meet their specific requirements. Designs are created to reflect materials and details in the casino itself; for example the cash value chips on the cloth at the 'no more bets' phase.
We've done a lot of things with different languages, from Cyrillic for Russia to Argentinean, which is slightly different to Spanish, Spanish, Italian, German. Being able to attune the system very close to what the casino wants other than just what's available adds a lot of value to it.

James Moores: Because we are so open with the customer, they have access to us at a very creative level. The Billboard was designed not only to show nice statistics to the customers, to give them the sense of understanding of the wheel and the environment they are playing in – they feel connected and it is a very eye-catching device. We can customize the look with the casino's own chips, their logo, sometimes even the language bar, for example with Cyrillic characters, so the general style is in keeping with their look.
Customers are very happy with the way our screens look, we spend a lot of time involved with the customer. Though Roulette is very much a traditional game, people are open to new ways to view it.

CI: What kind of customers do you pitch the Billboard at, it surely isn't as simple as anyone who has a Roulette wheel?
AC: The Billboard is so simple, it's useable for entirely different applications where people don't have any Roulette at all. As we're fairly obsessed about Roulette and Roulette wheels though, we like to stick to what we know.

CI: What applications would you use it for that don't include a Roulette wheel?
AC: A bar is a good example, you could show the 'hot' drinks, say if Budweister was selling particularly well you could flash up a sign saying the stock price for Budweiser has gone down from £2.50 to £2.25, but Blue WKD is £3.
You could use it for any number of applications but we are only really interested in what we do and we are particularly good at what we do.

CI: Was it much of a stretch for the company to make the Billboard? It's a very different piece of equipment from a Roulette wheel.
AC: We have five times more people on research and development for the Roulette wheels than we do on Billboards. The Roulette wheel is very complex, to deliver a random action, compared to the electronics side; it's another type of excellence we're achieving.
It was a challenge, and we love a challenge. We were the first people to put in-rim sensors in the Roulette wheels, which are of course electronic. Then having created a product that gave a data feed out we thought, now we need that feed to go into something else we can produce. It was all very deliberate, and it has grown carefully and has become a really reliable product at the same quality and standard our customers expect from all our products.

CI: What about the other new products like Pitboss, which I gather you've been working on and refining?
AC: Pitboss TI is used by a casino's the table inspector to administer and/or inspect tables. It has a better calculator and is portable for managing a Roulette table at any moment in time. You can get a snapshot of what's going on; wheel speed, direction, previous winning numbers and the game status as well. You can look at sequences, no more bets, place your bets…
Originally it was conceived as a touchscreen device which could work wirelessly in the Casino – and this has gone out to a few locations in Cyprus and Hamburg. But for more recent developments we have developed something a bit more robust; this has been customer-led as they wanted something that could be sitting on the table, because for them the casino is an industrial environment. The PDA did have some limitations as it was handheld, where the TI unit is more robust. The PDA lent itself to managerial uses as the manager could oversee a table from a distance and work on the handheld but for table inspectors, the touchscreen on the tablet is invaluable.

JM: So not only do we do the Roulette display, we now do analysis and management of Roulette wheels with the TI units, where the dealer uses Pitboss to view and analyze what is going on in a game to enter the flows, the drop and manage the amount of money and chips on the table. And you enter that onto a back office piece of software which is on a secure network, so not only are you doing the games side you are working on the admin too; we are working on the complete solution for Roulette. We can offer the ultimate system from wheel to back office PC to low grade network.

For more information on Cammegh products, please visit www.cammegh.com or call +44 (0)1233 820771. 

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