The Future for Advantage

by Roger Varblow 1. August 2008 13:22

When I joined ACS as Director of Product Development in the early 80’s, we were entering the in-house fulfillment systems marketplace with the unique opportunity to develop software simultaneously for a magazine publisher and a book publisher. From the very beginning, ACS has been able to offer a fully integrated subscription and book fulfillment software solution. We made our mark in the years that followed by rapidly establishing and expanding Publisher’s Advantage as a fully integrated system that enabled circulation print publishers to rapidly expand their business through marketing and selling of one-off products to their subscribers.

The Internet was coming into its own as a viable business medium when I became President of ACS in 1992. In response, we developed the Advantage WEB module to support these new forms of commerce. Army Times was our first client to implement the WEB module for transacting with the U.S. armed services world-wide. This enabled Army Times to process transactions for print publications online at their convenience, even on ships at sea! Many of our clients have since similarly implemented this module to expand their business opportunities.

The last decade has seen the further emergence of technology on the web enabling publishers to deliver content online in digital format. For many of our clients, this has ushered in a whole new set of challenges, forcing the revolutionary transformation of the traditional print subscription paradigm. ACS introduced the Access Management and Billing module (AMB) in 2004 to address these needs. We are helping several of our clients with major AMB initiatives and this month we convened an AMB roundtable to get your input regarding this key module. Our new clients now routinely purchase the AMB module in addition to the Circulation module. We expect that the first new Advantage client purchasing AMB and not Circulation is not far off…Advantage supporting a fully online publishing business, with no print circulation.

Our next frontier involves the development of real-time business intelligence and marketing tools. Many of you are using Advantage reports, SQL queries, data warehouse extracts, and PivotTable reports to extract and analyze data to make important business decisions. Now, we are investing significant ACS resources to develop a Business Intelligence module that will enable you to retrieve data more easily and analyze it more deeply than ever before. We expect that this new module will help you to rapidly identify and capitalize on new opportunities.

While many publishing organizations are experiencing declines in their circulation, many ACS clients are increasing their overall income by adjusting their business model using our new Advantage modules, such as AMB. A number of our clients are also taking advantage of enhanced marketing, customer service, and fulfillment tools delivered in new Advantage releases. At the same time, we're also continuing to make Advantage a more turnkey solution that requires fewer resources and less management. We're even offering Application Solution Provider (ASP) solutions for clients and prospects who want to focus their resources on marketing, customer service, and fulfillment, rather than on IT. In addition, we have continued to expand the services that we provide to assist clients in converting new publications into Advantage, upgrading software and servers, and helping clients to ensure they are taking full advantage of the many features of Advantage. Our highly trained and experienced business analysts and software engineers are available to assist you.

It's important to ACS, and personally to me, that Advantage fully meet your business requirements and respond to shifts in the industry. I extend my warmest invitation for you to attend our annual Training Week in October, where we'll also be hosting a Business Intelligence module roundtable.

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Voices

Tom Hermans: Advantage Installer Extraordinaire

by Cindy Morphew 1. August 2008 13:21

Tom Hermans is a member of the ACS Major Projects team; the group that manages implementations for new clients, as well as large projects that current clients may wish to do. With up to a dozen projects active at any one time, the team is always busy.

The Major Projects team -- led by Tim Zapawa -- works well together. Although they each have their own projects, they also help each other out with training on certain modules or with other tasks where their particular expertise applies. Tom says that Tim is a good boss, who is always there to help a project start off, but then steps back and lets the project manager manage it.

“I count on Tom to manage numerous projects – not just one. And he does an amazing job at it!” says Tim. “Tom is a master at pulling together the various elements of multiple implementation projects and keeping it all on schedule.”

Tom is a Project Management Professional, certified by the Project Management Institute. He is also a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, SQL Server 2005.

Fellow team member John Sheehy appreciates Tom’s knowledge. “Tom’s experience and success at managing projects from start to finish makes him an invaluable resource at ACS. Whether it’s a question about application functionality or assistance with effective managing techniques, Tom is always willing to help,” says John.

In his 8+ years at ACS, Tom has managed the implementations of half a dozen Advantage clients, as well as a number of projects. He enjoys getting to know all the people he meets while working at a client site, and likes to keep in touch with them. He enjoys it when, from time to time, he hears from people he worked with on past implementations, who call just to say hello.

Tom says that although the pressure can be intense just before a go-live, he loves the feeling that comes from a successful implementation. Bringing a new client’s production operations live on Advantage is a tangible accomplishment that is truly satisfying.

The easiest projects, says Tom, are the ones where there is a decision-maker who really knows the business. Getting quick turnaround on important project decisions makes everything flow smoothly and prevents delay.
Levi Hyssong, team member, praises Tom’s helpfulness. “Tom is always willing to help out and answer questions for any project we are working on. He has a lot of experience at ACS as a project manager and the success of his techniques makes him a great resource for learning,” says Levi.

Another team member, Mike Miklosovic, agrees. “Tom’s positive approach helps clients and co-workers move forward in the best possible way,” says Mike. “And Tom is always pleasant whether talking about work or personal interests.”

Tom grew up in Livonia, Michigan, although he later moved to Milford and graduated from Milford High School. He earned a BA in Business Administration from Cleary University, and has always been interested in marketing technology. He enjoys bridging the gap between the layperson and the technical folks. He got experience doing that at the jobs he held before coming to ACS in 2000.

Pre-ACS, he worked in support services of the marketing department of a financial services company. He then moved to a large insurance company and helped provide software support to 25,000 agents. Tom didn’t care for the atmosphere at the large, bureaucratic firm, although it had at least one positive moment, as that is where he met his wife, Sherry.

He moved to ACS in 2000 because it offered just what he was looking for. He wanted to work at a smaller company and he liked the fact that he can work independently, and make decisions for his projects on his own. And when he does need to seek approval, he doesn’t have layers and layers of bureaucracy to work through. The most important factor, however, was the opportunity ACS offers for a better balance of work and family life.

Tom and his wife, Sherry, live in Brighton, Michigan with their two daughters, ages 11 and 14. The elder plays piano and volleyball while the younger is on a travel soccer league. Tom likes the fact that his job allows enough flexibility for him to be able to attend many of their activities.

In his leisure time, Tom loves fishing, boating or really anything to do with water. He also likes to ride his mountain bike and to go hiking. Plus, he has jumped on the bandwagon of the newest craze to sweep the USA: collecting antique fishing lures! Co-worker Mike knows this. “I found an old lure while fishing on vacation and when I showed it to Tom, he knew the maker, how old it was, and that, unfortunately, it had NO collector value,” says Mike. In fact, rumor has it that the Antiques Roadshow is going to bring Tom in as their fishing lure expert. Until that happens, however, Tom is quite happy to continue in his role of project manager here at ACS.

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Employee Profile

AMB: A Million Benefits

by Cindy Morphew 1. August 2008 13:20

With the industry balance between print and digital moving inexorably toward digital and away from print, more Advantage clients are making good use of the Access Management and Billing (AMB) module. This module can handle individual and group access to online content which is sold under various models, including time-based subscriptions, downloads, pay-per-view and others. Two of the most recent to implement the module in new ways are the American Medical Association (AMA) and Oxford University Press, Journals Division.

In the 4th quarter of 2007, the AMA began a project to transition their site license sales for online content to the Advantage Access Management and Billing module (AMB). Prior to the start of this project, AMA fulfilled these online journals through traditional Advantage functionality in the Circulation module (CIR). However, they saw the need for a model more representative of these online products. The AMB module was chosen as a natural fit for their growing online customer base and setup and training quickly followed. The conversion was successfully completed in June and the AMA is happy to share their experiences with other Advantage users. Contact your ACS account manager for details and contact information.

Oxford University Press library sales staff now manage their online consortia contracts with the AMB module. The sales agreements take shape on an Oxford engineered Excel spreadsheet and when the contract is agreed, they are entered into Advantage’s AMB module for automated billing, reporting and the management of access to the online content. Oxford University Press completed their AMB implementation project in mid July 2008, in time for the beginning of the 2009 consortia sales season. Andy Wright, OUP’s system analyst said: “Using the Advantage AMB module has helped us manage our consortia sales and renewals much more accurately and easily."

The project included planning, set-up, testing and training. Having the Library Sales staff involved with all aspects of the project meant that they had plenty of hands-on experience with the system and were completely comfortable with it by the time the project went live. Claire Kearney, Oxford’s project manager said: “The staff can now directly create and manage the contracts on the Advantage system. Changes of name, address and contract details are maintained directly by the staff who negotiated them in the first place and that helps ensure the timely and accurate handling of our important consortia business.”

Will your company be the next AMB success story? Contact your ACS Account Manager for more information.

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Module

AMB Forum Fosters Free Thinking

by Phil Montgomery 1. August 2008 13:20

Ideas were flying fast at the Access Management and Billing (AMB) module user forum on July 15th and 16th in Ann Arbor. The forum format allows us to get input from a number of you in identifying the best direction forward for a particular area of Advantage, in this case the AMB module.

Participants from Agora Publishing, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, Crain Communications, Massachusetts Medical Society, Motor Information Systems, and The Taunton Press made up a lively group with diverse viewpoints and ideas.

Why AMB? Many Advantage clients and prospective ones -- are seeing a growing volume of content access business. Pay-per-view and other one-time transactions can be accommodated through the PRO module. However, on-line access on a subscribed basis -- once considered merely a side benefit of a print subscription -- is now big business. Clients needed a more direct solution for handling that business especially if you want to provide access horizontally across your publications, by subject, for example.

AMB was developed more than five years ago to accommodate these business needs. It has seen a lot of changes since then; in fact, a great many new features have flowed into the module in the last year alone. The forum group was able to view and work with these new features in a preliminary version of the 2008R3 release.

A big part of a content access operation is the content delivery system. Participants had some good interaction on this topic. AMB can provide authentication (who) and authorization (what) information through web capsules or through a batch feed. Matt Varblow used the Capsule Workbench to show how the web capsules involved with this operate.

We reviewed how AMB is structured and how access agreements are entered and maintained. The group identified several potential improvements, but the main suggestion was to provide a streamlined way to establish an access agreement. For access sales to consumers, most clients agreed, many of the agreement data elements would be used only on an exception basis.

We will be incorporating these suggestions in future releases. Many thanks to all who participated! Your input is invaluable, and it is always great to work with you.

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Events | Module

Can CRM Help Make Your Life Easier?

by Cindy Morphew 1. August 2008 13:19

CRM is a common term with many different meanings. Advantage's Contact Management (CRM) module is a comprehensive project- and task-management solution that supports such activities as selling your organization’s products and services, collecting information about a prospect company, resolving customer problems, etc. While Contact Management uses some Advantage features in common with customer service---such as logging customer notes---the CRM module helps you achieve larger goals.

For instance, let’s say you have the goal of making a sale to a company involving a significant amount of money. CRM provides a way to conduct and monitor your sales efforts, which may include the following: projects, contacts (the people linked to the project), tasks (the project's to-do items), contact communication, and history. All of these elements of a project are accessible from a single tabbed dialog box.
You can categorize CRM tasks, assign them priority rankings, send notification of completion (to a supervisor, for example), and even set a reminder for your desktop as the task deadline approaches.

The advantage (pun intended) of the CRM module is that it offers you a tool that is integrated with the Advantage application, providing you with these benefits: avoiding the need to route between applications, working within a consolidated task and notes database, and having the ability to assign tasks for follow-up to other Advantage users. These are things an alternative third-party package cannot do.

In addition, the CRM125 upload process allows you to create tasks and optionally link them to stored images. You could use this process to mass-create a set of customer service tasks; following up on illegible or unusable mail-in cards, for example, with an image of the card linked to each task. You could then load these tasks into a general user pool, to be addressed by available reps.

The main CRM workspace shows information specific to each user, including her or his open tasks, the tasks due today, the tasks due this week, and overdue tasks. The CRM module lets you easily assign tasks to a pool of users, or transfer tasks (and their history) from one user to another.

Whatever your task management needs, the CRM solution is the ideal tool for Advantage users of all levels, and the perfect fit for your integrated Advantage environment.

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Module

Customizing Your Work Area

by Katherine Porter 1. August 2008 13:18

Advantage uses a variety of methods to provide you with a customized work area. One method of customization is the VIEW – Preferences listing on the Advantage tool bar.

In addition to modifying your color choices (on the Colors tab), the display tab allows you to control how information is presented to you in Advantage.

The check boxes for Display Data Trees and Display Splash Screens are easily understood; a check in front of one of these means to show the data tree or that initial splash screen.

The Display Report Completion messages can be unchecked, which will stop Advantage from notifying you that your report is ready to view.

The Show Help "Always On Top" is a little understood line. This controls the behavior of the Advantage on-line help.

When this box is checked, the Advantage help will pop up (when invoked), and you will be unable to toggle back to Advantage. With this box UN-checked, the Help will pop up, and you can toggle between the Help and Advantage. Users with dual screens can actually park the Help on the second screen, and easily cross check between Advantage and the Help. This toggling methodology can be very useful if you are exploring new functionality.

Show Field Descriptions enables those large, square field description boxes that show up when you hover over the field. If these are getting in the way, you can easily turn them off by un-checking this box.

Under the Editing Tab - there are two boxes worthy of interest: Gray Disabled Field Captions and Gray Disabled Field Values.

Although these follow the Microsoft "norm," I find that it is more useful to UNcheck these two boxes. They affect the prompt and the values when you Inquire on a record (launching a dialog box). If you need to do a screen capture of the image, or you are displaying the dialog box on an overhead, Unchecking these boxes will allow you to see the prompts and the field values much more easily.

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Tech Tip

Multi-Queue Processing for CIR410

by Molly Mathe 1. August 2008 13:15

Multi-queue processing allows you to split CIR410 – Cycle-end Processing across multiple queues, with each queue dedicated to a different range of customer numbers. For very large databases, this can help speed the total wall-time processing required for cycle-end. Multi-queue processing only works if you are also running DBR.

You can increase the throughput for this process by dividing the input file into separate queues (a maximum of nine queues is allowed), and running the CIR4MQ – Multi-queue Cycle-end process instead. CIR4MQ is identical to CIR410, except that it is designed to split processing for the publication across multiple queues.

Setting up the Queues
This is controlled at the publication level. To enable multi-queue streaming for a pub, go to the Cycle End Queues tab when inquiring on a pub at CIRPUB.

Use the Add button to specify a queue and starting customer number. You can use the Customize button to add other available columns to the view.

The columns available in the view are:

Queue: queue number for the customer range in question; selected by the user from the available defined queues)
Start customer: starting customer number for the queue; user-assigned. If the lowest defined customer number (across all queues) is not zero, the system resets it to zero to ensure that no customers are missed.
Issue date: date of the issue for which the cycle-end is being performed. Populated by the system as the queue completes. Used (with last cycle-end number) to recognize that a queue has completed, and the order of queue completion.
Last cycle end number: system-assigned number for each queue as it finishes processing. Advantage uses this, plus the issue date, to determine the order of queue completion. The last queue to complete also performs process-wide wrap-up tasks.
Request number: system-assigned number that uniquely identifies an Advantage process request. Used for internal purposes and troubleshooting.
Update date: last date a queue definition was added or changed at CIRPUB.
Update user: user ID of the person to last perform a queue definition add or update.

Running CIR4MQ
Queues are defined by publication (not issue date), so that the multi-queue information present at CIRPUB is the information that CIR4MQ uses when it initiates the cycle-end(s).

If a queue fails, all of its updates are rolled back to the beginning, as if that queue had never started. If the queue determines that it is the last to finish (based on the other CEQ records) then it completes the global wrap-up. If an error occurred after that point, the CEQ update is also rolled back, along with any global updates. In an error situation either before or after the wrap-up section, all that is necessary is to correct the problem and restart that queue.

When CIR4MQ is initiated, it checks the queue information for the publication involved. The process then initiates a separate cycle-end process for each queue (and corresponding starting customer number). These processes can run concurrently.

As the queues finish, the Issue Date field is updated to reflect successful completion of that queue. Also, the Cycle End Last Number is incremented on a queue-by-queue basis. These two fields---Issue Date and Cycle End Last Number---allow the process to track the order in which the queues are completing, and also which of the queues is the very last to complete. The last queue-based process to finish conducts final reporting for the issue.

Multi-queuing may be used with any of the CIR4MQ processing modes: report, trial, update, mail, etc.

CIRSMQ (Multi-queue Setup Processing)
An alternative to using the Cycle End Queue tab at CIRPUB is to run the CIRSMQ process. The process includes a run-time setting for the number of cycle-end queues. The process then evenly divides the customer base across the queues---in effect providing an automated shortcut to the ADD function on the Cycle End Queue tab.

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Tech Tip

The Future for Advantage

Tom Hermans: Advantage Installer Extraordinaire

AMB: A Million Benefits

AMB Forum Fosters Free Thinking

Can CRM Help Make Your Life Easier?

Customizing Your Work Area

Multi-Queue Processing for CIR410

eVantage Archive

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The Future for Advantage

Tom Hermans: Advantage Installer Extraordinaire

AMB: A Million Benefits

AMB Forum Fosters Free Thinking

Can CRM Help Make Your Life Easier?

Customizing Your Work Area

Multi-Queue Processing for CIR410

eVantage Archive

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