With the 2010r1 release of Advantage, it is now easier to manage multiple Advantage configurations from a single location, including a new mechanism for users to launch the Advantage application.  This enhancement follows an industry-standard approach, and is called the Advantage Launch Pad.

In prior releases, the configuration settings for individual areas were located in client and server-side configuration text files (Advantag.ini).  These plain-text files, located on each and every workstation as well as the application server, were prone to users or processes inadvertently deleting or compromising them. These configuration files could also have problems if they become out of synch with global INI file or other application settings.

The new Launch Pad feature is implemented through a central database called the AdvConfig database.  It’s a single, centrally located database (a master database) that provides a single, unified location for viewing and configuring all installed Advantage areas across multiple locations, such as multiple instances on a server.  This database replaces the client- and server-side INI files and benefits from the configuration being located within a formalized database.  This database allows for easy tailoring, updates, and configuration of all Advantage application areas and eliminates the need for client-site reinstalls due to those configuration changes. It also provides system administrators with a reliable method for centralizing administration, backup, and user settings.

This introduction of the AdvConfig database and Launch Pad user interface is a first step into a larger initiative preparing the application for future enhancements.  It represents an advancement in technology and is part of the continual evolution of the software.  For example, this approach will allow for a multi-server implementation of the software.  In prior releases of Advantage, each client was tied at installation time to a particular Advantage server by way of shortcuts that pointed to program files on the given server.  With the LaunchPad, the client-side shortcuts point to the locally installed LaunchPad program.  In a future release that supports running Advantage on multiple servers (clustered), the LaunchPad will quickly interrogate the AdvConfig database for the available server with the lightest load and initiate a session with that server.

As with all production configurations, we needed to address availability and security–both important concerns. There are two major components of this implementation that ACS will address – the AdvConfig database itself and the web service that allows for the communication between Launch Pad and the Advantage applications.  Availability of the AdvConfig database can be achieved through SQL clustering or through SQL replication of the database on another SQL server.  If replicated on another SQL server, the web service connection string would be altered to designate that redundancy. 

The web service is the second component.  Redundancy here can be accomplished through the use of an NLB cluster where the second occurrence of the web service is installed on another server and both are used to access the AdvConfig database via a cluster configuration.  The load on the server to support the AdvConfig web service is modest, so the nodes in the NLB cluster could safely be deployed as virtual machines.  To maximize availability, the virtual machines should not reside on the same physical hardware.

In summary, here is what the Launch Pad can do for you:

·         It consolidates all Advantage shortcuts into one application

·         It eliminates the need to reinstall user shortcuts

·         It replaces the Advantag.ini files

·         It provides an applications that shows you all the available areas between test and production

Note:  For a detailed description of the Advantage Configuration System, click here: http://support.advantagecs.com/tools/download.aspx?id=3932.  You will need your Advantage log-in and password to access this document.  If you don’t know it, contact your system administrator or the Advantage Support Center.

The second release of 2010 will be available early in June.  Here are just a few of the new features you will receive.

·         Credit card responses from the vendor are now processed via a flexible, select-driven response code table (similar to direct debit responses).  Besides providing greater standardization for handling vendor responses, the number of possible automated actions you can take based on a particular response has been increased.  For example, you can cancel or bill-suspend the subscription, cancel or bill-suspend the BCL participation, add the customer to a Telesales list, etc.

·         With this release, you can set a discount at the promotion header level, to apply to (or bypass applying to) any CIR, PRO, or AMB item on the order.  The promotion-level discount is overridden by any specific discount set up at the item level.  This feature provides a shortcut method of setting a general discount for the promotion, without needing to set it up for each item.  The promotion discount is expressed as a percent (not an amount).

·         A CDSDWS warehouse extract type has been added for AMB transactions.  The table is populated by AMB210 posting, and provides information on new adds and renewals of agreements, adjustments (including adjustments to access points), cancels, and reversals.

·         ARP310 can now automatically bill-suspend or nonpay-cancel an AMB agreement.  This feature uses the same lowest-level select controls that are used for CIR and CEM suspends and cancels.  AMB suspend/cancels are supported for all billing processes, including "regular" billing and installment billing.

·         At MSTDAT, you can now move an order from one of your control groups to another, or from one closed control group to another, as long as you have security to do so.  This allows much more flexibility in management of control groups; for example, you can move one "problem" order so that the rest of the control group can release.

Advantage 2010R1 has tons of useful new features and functionality, including:

·         With this release, you can incorporate the following into your premium fulfillment flow: 1) you can send a premium set to the referring customer on the order (as opposed to either the bill-to or ship-to); and 2) you can impose a "lifetime maximum" on either premium sets or regular premiums…effectively limiting how many times a given customer may receive the premium set/regular premium on the current order, and across all orders going forward.

·         A customer service pop-up has been added to the Subscription Lookup dialog, which allows you to estimate the price of a subscription given the following input parameters: location, copies, delivery code, and optional promotion code and promotion choice.  The system returns the rate per copy, postage, tax, and total amount.  This can be a useful tool to answer "what would it cost?" questions from your customers.  A Web capsule is also available to allow you to present the same functionality on your website.

·         A search field has been added to Advantage filter dialogs.  Many of these dialogs consist of lengthy lists of fields, and the search tool can help you locate the fields you want quickly.  The search is applied to the field caption, actual field name, and field reference name.

·         A "customer permissions" feature is now available, which offers a greatly expanded alternative to the customer promote/do not promote flags.  The feature allows you to structure questionnaires for presentation either to reps at Advantage screens or customers online, which in turn will capture and store the customer responses in a dedicated table.  You can store separate permissions settings for the customer at any of several levels, such as publication, office, and company.  As with the ‘promote/do not promote flags,’ the permission settings are available for selects and reporting to help you determine how the customer should (or should not) be promoted.  

·         The report viewer has been rewritten with this release.  Reports are now displayed in a print-preview-like dialog, with expanded tools such as zoom in/out, and on-the-fly resizing so that you can test the report appearance on different printer page sizes.

For more information on 10R1, contact your ACS Account Manager.

Advantage 2010R1 is full of new functionality and cost-saving features.  Here are some highlights:

• Auto-renewal Chains --With this release, you can set up auto-renewal "chains," which will allow you to step a customer through a series of structured offers with each CIR350 auto-renewal of the subscription.  For example, the initial offer might be for a basic rate, while term 2 steps the customer up in price, and term 3 offers a "loyalty" premium.  The feature makes use of subscription choices for defining the offers, and the pricing for each step in the chain is up to you.
• Automatic Migration Path --You can now use the Advantage inventory package feature to set up an "automatic migration" structure, whereby a customer is automatically moved from publication A to publication B when the first subscription expires.  You can set up as many publications in the package as you wish, using whatever pricing you want.  When the order is released, the system creates the subsequent subscriptions in suspend status.  When one subscription expires, CIR410 resets the subscription on the next one, and makes it the active subscription.
• First Name in Search --Previously, Customer First Name was available as a filter field at SVCDAT and in Customer Lookup.  You can now set a system option to have first name appear as a search field proper on the main SVCDAT/Customer Lookup view.
• Subscription “Restocking” Fee --With this release, you can link a fee to a customer cancel of a subscription, and credit the customer the cancellation amount less the fee (in this regard, the feature is similar to the restocking fee available for PRO returns).  You can charge the customer either a flat amount, or a percentage of the cancellation credit.  The cancellation fee can be linked to a promotion credit policy set up at CPNTBL/CPT, or it can be entered directly with the cancel at MSTDAT/SVC.
• Reserve Premium Before Earned --You can now configure the system to have it commit stock for unearned premiums, as a way of ensuring that enough of the premium item is available at the time the customer places the order.  Along with the automatic commit, you can have the system display a message if the premium is overcommitted (or out of stock), and optionally offer the customer a secondary, backup premium item. 

The next release of Advantage--available in the second half of October—is jam-packed with new features and functionality.  Here are just some of the new things contained in the release.

• Customer Hierarchy:  The Customer Relationships feature has been expanded to offer a more robust use of relationships---the Customer Hierarchy, which makes use of the concept of relationship trees.  Previously, customer relationships were usually reciprocal (employer/employee), or nested in a two-deep hierarchy (such as with the Master Customer Relationships feature).  Now, relationship trees allow you to set up structures with multiple, theoretically unlimited, nesting levels (for example, employees within branch office within company within parent company).  In addition, you can view the aggregate purchase history, activity summary, subscription summary, and notes for a single relationship tree in one display.

• Customer Relationships in a Household:  The Customer Relationships feature has also been expanded to allow the setup of Household Relationships.  This is similar to the Location customer feature, but is geared more toward private households.  When two or more customers are joined in a household, the system can auto-create a separate customer record to represent the household, and order entry edits can be applied to require the system to use this household record.  You could use the latter feature to ensure, for example, that a single address receives only one subscription, regardless of the number of separate customers living there.

• AMB included in SVCDAT List and Directory Views:  The List and Directory views at SVCDAT now support the display of all the AMB access points on which the selected customer is a participant.  This is similar to the current list of the customer's publications at SVCDAT.  As with the latter, the system capitalizes the access point name if it is on an active agreement, and uses lower case if the agreement is inactive.

• Specific Payment Types in Promotions:  Previously in Advantage, you could set up promotions to accept only specified payment codes for credit cards.  For example, you could create a promotion that would accept Visa, but not AMEX.  With this release, the following full validation setup is offered for promotions: you can specify the payment types accepted for each promotion (for example, you could define a promotion that accepts direct debit, but not credit cards); and within each valid payment type, you can specify the payment codes accepted (for example, could define a promotion that accepts checks and cash, but not wire transfer payments).

• Auto Control Groups: You can now configure the system to automatically create, open, balance, and close control groups for customer reps, without the reps needing to route to MSTDAT views that manage these control group features.  Thus, you can move the required flow of control group handling into a background, invisible series of tasks as far as the rep is concerned.

For more information, contact your Account Manager.

We are pleased to announce the latest Advantage module: Business Intelligence.  You’ve told us that people in your organization need to be able to get at the vast amount of data in Advantage; that they want meaningful reports, easily accessed and not requiring detailed technical knowledge or deep familiarity with Advantage.  We listened and the BI module is our response.
BI offers you 3 main benefits:

1. Meaningful Reports
   Rather than selecting reports and then running them, you simply go to a website to access reports which will include graphs, pivot tables you can modify and standard “canned” reports.  You can configure your home page to display specific reports of your choice at the time interval of your choice.  Reports include the analysis types you need—snapshot, historical and comparison; the subjects relevant to your business—marketing, financial and operational; and are geared for each user type you have—key performance indicators for strategic decision makers, summarized data for tactical decision makers, and access to detail for front-line decision makers.
2. Organized & Accessible Data
   Your data is already organized for you for easy analysis, stored in a separate data mart.  The data is structured around the measures and dimensions you need and summarized data is efficiently presented.  There’s no need for users to know field names or codes. You can access reports on demand via a SharePoint website, or they can be delivered via email.  Reports are also interactive so that users can explore combinations of dimensions, drill down to deep detail or jump to related reports.
3. Industry-Standard  Solid Foundation
   The module uses advanced tools with broad acceptance.  These include Microsoft SQL Server, Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services, plus Excel.  These tools have been used to provide a suite of core reports with customization options involving web layout, custom data elements and new report development.

The BI module is in beta testing at both Kalmbach and Oakstone.

A customer subscribes to a journal or to content access.  Excellent!  This is the start of a relationship that has some built-in communication points.  These may include the initial invoicing, and at some point, renewal promotions will begin.  A subscription-based relationship has on-going touch-points where the client is involved with your content and continues to purchase access to it in different ways.

Unfortunately, these automatic communication points haven’t previously existed with product purchases.  Someone buys a book, you collect payment and send it and that relationship is over.  Well, not anymore!  You can now do the same sort of thing with product purchases as you can with subscriptions through the Order Again feature, which is based in the Product Sales Analysis module (SAL).

Here’s how it works: Ray buys something about tennis.  Great!  You have lots of items about tennis.  Or maybe you have an on-line offering related to the product they purchased.   

The Order Again feature allows you to create a subscription-like record that you can execute a series of promotions against – similar to a renewal series.  The subscription-like record is called an Instance of a Product Summary ID.  You set up your series through an outlined set of select rules that identify the effort you want to produce – just like renewals.  If the customer responds and purchases, the Instance is updated to reflect that and you can continue the relationship with another series of efforts, as soon as you want.

Excited?  OK, here is how you can go about designing your use of this feature.

   1. What Product Summaries do you want to create?  You can set up a Product Summary for a specific product or group of products.

   2. Which transactions do you want to involve with this?  You can control which customer types participate through a setting on the customer type record (CDSCTM/TYP).  The Product Summary record has a selection set that allows you to define more explicitly which transactions you want to move into an Order Again promotional series.

   3. Finally, what would the series look like?  How many efforts?  When?  Mailed/emailed?  Promotional pitch?  Like billing or renewal efforts, you need to have an output formatting routine to produce the efforts.

Include the SAL350 process in your regular processing schedule to keep the Instances up to date.  Include SAL380 in your end-of-month processing schedule to update monthly information on the Instances.  That’s about it. See the Sales Analysis manual to read more.

P.S.  A side benefit of Product Summaries is that you can show a rating for three of those Product Summaries for the customer when looking at their Customer Portrait.

Here are just some of the new features available in Advantage 2009R2.

• Access Management & Billing (AMB) - The AMB module now incorporates renewal statistics tracking, similar to functionality in the CIR module.  The AMB340 process (regular renewals) and AMB350 process (auto-renews) will now auto-assign renewal promotion codes.  Also, renewal responses to AMB promotions are reflected on the CPNPMO-M promotions statistics table, at the agreement level.  A new promotion table, AMBPMO-M, reflects response statistics at the level of the access point.
  
  
• The Customer Overview display now incorporates the same routing functionality that is available in the Customer Portrait.  From the Overview, you can access a number of different Advantage informational views for the customer---including, for example, A/R and subscriptions---as well as route immediately to MSTDAT/FST for the purpose of entering orders.
  
  
• Advertising Management (ADM) - Order entry and maintenance for the Advertising Management module has been consolidated into a single tabbed workspace, ADMDAT.  From ADMDAT, you can enter and maintain advertiser contracts, as well as perform standard functions related to insertion orders.  The ADMDAT workspace uses Advantage scripting functionality, meaning that you can tailor your contract and order entry fields according to the needs of the contract or order, or by user.
  
  
• Inventory Management (INV) - Advantage has added "price point" functionality to the Inventory management module.  With this feature, you associate an item to a separate price point inventory item for the sole purpose of assigning and maintaining prices.  For example, if you have a line of 100 items with identical pricing, and wish to increase the price incrementally each year, you can assign all the items to the same "price point" item.  This means that ongoing price maintenance need only be performed on the price point item; the other items would inherit the pricing structure assigned to the latter.
  
  
• Conference and Event Management (CEM) - You can now offer Conference registrations as items under a promotion (along with PRO items, CIR subscriptions, MBR subscriptions, and AMB access points).  As with the latter, you can set up multiple Conference offers under the same promotion, using different pricing, or a different mix of sessions.  Finally, as with PRO, CIR, MBR, and AMB, you can set up reusable Conference "choices" at the CPNTBL workspace, so that you can assign the same offer to different promotions.

For more information, contact your ACS account manager.

In these hard economic times, it's easy to think of reasons not to begin a new project. However, there are some very compelling reasons why right now is an excellent time to conduct an upgrade project. Upgrading to the latest revision of Advantage could not only increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs, but also improve customer service. In addition, implementing new features may well help you to generate additional sales. And when the economy improves, being ready to handle new business could be key to your success.
We at ACS can help you to determine if an upgrade makes good business sense for your company.

An Advantage upgrade project focuses on the delivery of a new software revision to your site. This delivery brings you:

• New features – all fully explained in the Release Notes

• New industry standards – such as credit card masking and encryption

• Adaptations to new technologies – operating systems, database, and web technology changes

• Better efficiencies – as evident in the new user interface to make the software more intuitive and user friendly and MSTDAT/FST to streamline order entry

• Operational optimizations – such as the new CDSREQ process request enhancements to more efficiently request and run reports, processes, and job streams

Reading the Release Notes is your key to understanding all the new features and enhancements. We make available a Release Notes 'Highlights' document that identifies the high-profile changes in the annual release and summarizes the feature for quick and easy reading. This document may be found on the client area of the ACS website, on the list of downloads.

Another key resource is your Account Manager—someone who is familiar with your business and can point you to those features that will make the biggest impact at your organization.

Change is inevitable. The business environment in the future will not be the same as it is today. By being on a regular upgrade schedule, you are assured that your organization has the most recent software, with the most effective tools possible to improve the efficiency of your operations. It positions you to be ready for change. You can anticipate new business segments and capitalize on that change in your business with a software package capable of identifying those opportunities, marketing to those customers, and handling those transactions. While change is inevitable, ACS' commitment to delivering updated software will remain steady.