Death, taxes and change.  The human certainties.  Change is constant.  Who could possibly argue with this, especially now?  So much is changing:  technology, business models, advertising, communication, housing prices, dietary restrictions, airline fees, the accelerator in my Toyota…I’ll stop here.  It is indisputable that change in our industry is occurring.  But where the change will take us is probably at the forefront of every CEO’s mind. 

Is it just me, or is there a new buzzword out just about every week now?  It wasn’t that long ago that I hadn’t heard of “monetizing” or “cloud computing” or “chatter.”  I find myself using Wikipedia more than ever before as our engineers casually mention a new acronym each time we meet.  More and more information is being thrown at us every day.  If you’re like me, you have electronic newsletters that show up in your inbox faster than you can read them.  I find myself skimming more and reading less.  Then there is the sheer quantity of emails that we receive, especially from all those marvelous memberships that we get to Best Buy, Borders and other retailers. 

I am deeply appreciative to the writers of spam filtering software.  Without it, we’d accomplish very little as we’d be fishing through hundreds or thousands of emails trying to find the relevant ones.

Where am I going with all this?  To this:  we are experiencing more and more information overload.  As more information is available and easily searchable, we need to be able to sift through it more and more effectively.  As consumers of information will want to purchase smaller and more targeted “chunks” of information to suit their very specific needs, the amount of stuff available to be purchased will skyrocket.  Why do I say this?  Because for some years now, many clients of ours have talked of wanting to be able to sell their customers a chapter of a book, or a chart on the 3^rd page of an article, or a table of contents, or an abstract.  When this happens, a publisher’s “inventory” of products grows exponentially. 

Combine this with the ability to package such granular products together with other things like conference attendance, membership dues, and subscriptions, and it starts to get very interesting for the consumer yet very complex for the publisher.  You’ll have to be able to handle micro payments.  You’ll have to be able to deliver the electronic content as the reader wants it – on their PC, their iPad or in a print-on-demand book. 

ACS is ready, willing and able to partner with you to do all of this.  We can help you transform your business.  We have the tools developed to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.  I would love to hear from you regarding what changes you have in store—or just in mind-- so we can enable that transformation.  Call or contact me and we’ll talk about it.

Dan Heffernan

dheff@advantagecs.com

(734)327-3600 ext. 441

Ten years ago, as we crossed the millennium threshold, big changes were in the wind for print publishing.   Ecommerce and digital content were visions of growing clarity. Prognosticators abounded, but there was no clear industry direction. Many of our clients were waiting to see what other publishers would do to try and make money with digital content on the web, and what technologies would prevail. Amid much uncertainty, ACS developed several strategies that provided our clients with a competitive advantage:

• Keep Advantage functionality abreast of the known new developments, such as PCI, direct debit, 24x7 processing, and business intelligence.
• Aggressively pursue growing industry shifts where publishers could continue to thrive, such as  ecommerce, digital content access management, and conferences/events management.
• Explore and develop emerging features  in the European marketplace, such as alternate delivery (an innovative system that is now making inroads into several US markets)
• Develop project management excellence to offer to our clients, utilizing tools and techniques of   the internationally-recognized Project Management Institute (PMI).
• Establish an Advantage upgrade program that enables our clients to efficiently upgrade their Advantage software on a regular basis.

Many of these strategies are still works in progress. For example, we're just releasing the first version of our Business Intelligence module and we've started work on some major initiatives in alternate delivery.

What kind of job would you say we’ve done in implementing these strategies? Your feedback would be very helpful.

From a business perspective, ACS has seen solid success for the first 10 years of the new millennium. As is the case for many of our clients, the last two years have been difficult for us, though I’m happy to report that ACS enters the second decade with many projects either underway or planned with our current clients, and a strong sales pipeline.   We’ve also seen major expansion internationally: 10 new Advantage clients in the UK, France, Denmark and Australia.

Looking back, it now appears that the last 10 years were a time for sorting out where publishers could go with the advent of the internet and major new technologies affecting publishing. Here at the end of the decade, of course, we’ve seen major upsets to our world economy which have decimated certain segments of the publishing marketplace.

I expect that the next decade will be a period of transition providing many opportunities to fully implement and refine the new, innovative ways of publishing we’ve seen in the last decade. To be specific, I believe we’ll see major adaptation of automation in the following areas:

Content packaging - I anticipate the emergence of new and standardized taxonomies appropriate for different publishing segments, enabling information to be custom packaged for maximum benefit to target audiences. I expect we’ll see a new level of automation that allows some publishers to move away almost totally—at least in some market segments—from traditional methods which have evolved over centuries for organizing articles into magazine issues, and chapters into books.

Delivery methods - As sophisticated taxonomy methods will enable a major leap forward in organizing and packaging information for publication, so various distribution channels will be enhanced to deliver that information in the most expedient fashion for the customer.  Digital push via email; social media and podcasts; browser-based, smartphone-based and eReader-based presentation of content; printed content delivered more efficiently (e.g., the evolution alternate delivery); conferences and events both in-person and virtual. And the list goes on.

Pricing and payment - We’ve already seen the emergence of new pricing and payment models (micropayments on iTunes is the first that comes to mind). I expect these models will be refined and adapted in coming years to support the advances in content packaging and delivery channels. New levels of sophistication in automation will likely be the only means of handling the complexity this introduces.

Business Intelligence - Analysis through next-generation Business Intelligence tools will be essential to manage the new world of publishing in the 2010’s. Given the maturation of publishing concerning content packaging, delivery channels, and pricing/payment models, I expect publishers will only be able to track more closely with their audiences through efficient BI analysis. Fully realizing the value of each member of their audience will require good metrics for buying habits, content access patterns, etc. Finding optimal methods of communication through sophisticated analysis, I expect, will be the key to maximizing revenue opportunities.

We at ACS look forward to the next decade with great optimism. We stand committed to harness technology to help you not just survive in the down economy, but even thrive during the tough times. If my speculation (above) bears out, there will be a lot of adaptation necessary for publishing prosperity in the coming years. ACS is here to be your ‘adaptation partner’ for the 2010’s. Our software, consulting and support services, and staff expertise will help you through these years of transition. Dan Heffernan, as our Chief Product Manager, heads a team responsible for mapping the future for our software so we can stay ahead of the game, well positioned to help you adapt to the new publishing world. Dan will present exciting new futures for the software at the Advantage Users Group USA meeting in New Orleans in mid-January. I hope to see you there. 

We are in the middle of the conference and trade show rush of late spring/early summer as I write this.  June, like December, is one of the busiest months of the year with school concerts, plays, final exams, graduations, parties, weddings, anniversaries, Father’s Day and, if you’re blessed like my family, numerous birthdays.  To add to the busyness, The Society for Scholarly Publishing, SIPA and Audience Development all have their annual conferences and exhibitions during the same period.  By the time July comes, we’re ready for a holiday.

My complaining is really a fraud, however, because the trade shows are enjoyable work.   In many of these organizations, the same attendees are there year after year and we have formed friendships and alliances with our colleagues in the information distribution (aka publishing) industry.  It’s always good to see old friends and acquaintances and catch up on industry news.  At two of this year’s trade shows, attendance was high, especially given the soft economy and cuts in travel budgets at so many companies.

Certainly one of the reasons for this is that publishers are looking for ways to increase their audience while cutting costs.  Many have had to downsize and depend on outsourcing to keep their businesses going.  We at ACS are always on the lookout for ways we can help you cut costs through efficiencies, automation, more e-commerce and interfaces with other systems.  As your solutions provider, we suggest that you consider taking advantage of some of the ancillary services we can provide.  You may not be aware, for example, that you can ask ACS to:

• Perform operations services, such as kicking off processes and monitoring them at night
• Host your system physically in our facility
• Provide customer service and data entry
• Help you with your website design and implementation with our API
• Review your operation and provide cost-saving recommendations
  

Some of these services, such as operator services, can be provided with little notice and for a temporary period, such as when your operator is on vacation.

We’re here to be your partner and to help you be successful.  Please contact your account manager to begin the conversation.

On another note, Advantage Computing Systems is celebrating 30 years this month.  Surviving 30 years in high technology probably is worth some sort of “staying power” award.  Certainly we can claim to be a successful company, having gone 17 straight years without a losing quarter.  But we also measure our success by having satisfied customers.  You are the reason for our success, and we sincerely appreciate your business and partnership.

by Greg Stout, Vice President of Client Services

"An educated consumer is our best customer." That was the long-time advertising slogan of a local retailer in the area where I live. It also correlates to one of ACS's key philosophies - that our most knowledgeable Advantage clients are the most satisfied ones.

Advantage is a comprehensive, feature-rich marketing and fulfillment package designed to help you operate most effectively. In addition, Advantage is updated three times per year to add more and better features that you can use when you upgrade to the latest revision. So, how can you keep up with all the new features and know that you are taking full advantage of all the functionality? Advantage training is one of the best ways.

The ACS Training Program has three components:

1.  Webinars
2. The annual Advantage Training Week
3. Customized training

Webinars

The ACS webinar program began in earnest in 2008. During that year, we presented 30 webinars, most of which were an hour long, with a total of 371 attendees. This type of training is very effective because it is focused on a particular topic, is time and cost effective, and very popular among our clients. Webinars are a particularly beneficial training option, especially in these challenging economic times when many companies are restricting travel and education budgets.

The 2008 webinars received very high marks from attendees. As a result, we are expanding our webinar offerings for 2009. Again, we plan on offering at least 30 webinars, but some of them will be presented as a series. These series will be offered in 2 or 3 sessions, some of which may be longer than one hour. This will allow us to delve into topics that require a more in-depth study. In addition, we will be able to include exercises that will help you put your learning into practice. Based on feedback we have received, we expect that these webinar series will meet a very real need.

Advantage Training Week

Historically, Advantage Training Week has been a week-long event, hosted by ACS in our Ann Arbor office, providing a dozen training classes and various types of group events. Training Week gives you the opportunity to pick and choose training classes that most interest you, and to network with other clients with similar interests and challenges. In addition, you have the chance to meet many of the ACS staff you may only know by telephone or email contact. We at ACS love to host our clients whenever we get the chance; Advantage users are simply the best!

For the past couple of years, we have limited the size of Training Week to four or five classes over three days. This shortened approach seems to work better in conjunction with the annual Advantage User Group conference, which ACS fully supports. The AUG conference also provides training opportunities, including presentations by ACS clients and roundtable discussions co-hosted by ACS staff. In addition, at the AUG conference, ACS has the opportunity to demonstrate new features contained in the latest release and to present our plans for future software enhancements. Options for 2009 Training Week are currently being considered.

Customized Training

Customized training is always a popular offering. ACS can provide tailor-made training to your staff, focused on the subjects you need, when you need it, at your site or ours. Your account manager can work out the specifics directly with you.

The bottom line is that "an educated client is ACS's best customer". Advantage training is important to us, and we welcome your input on potential training topics and suggestions for improvement. You can send them directly to me at gstou@advantagecs.com.

It is a cliché that software developers who become managers never fully let go of their need to program. Like a cough in a concert hall, there is no way to suppress the tickle that says it's time to design something, code it, test it, demo it, tinker and re-design.

This is why I appreciate my current opportunity to delve into the design and development of ACS's nascent Business Intelligence module. At the recent AUG meeting, we discussed the current status. The project holds enough technical challenges to keep me occupied for many months.

The literature on data warehousing and business intelligence is extensive, reflecting the software industry's decades long struggle to coax 'actionable intelligence' from databases that stubbornly conceal what they know behind a façade of obscure names and complex structures. My bookshelf is groaning under a stack of thousand page books explaining Key Performance Indicators, Slowly Changing Dimensions and debating the pros and cons of star schemas vs. snowflake schemas. Historically, many projects have failed.

The good news is that tremendous progress has been made recently. There is a growing consensus on the best methodologies to use to build a robust, scalable data warehouse that can deliver answers to a wide range of marketing and management questions – including the questions you have yet to formulate. Better still, the software tools are keeping pace with methodological advances. I've been pleased by the solid foundation Microsoft has built into their SqlServer 2008 suite of business intelligence tools.

This is where you come in. Help us define exactly which reports and pivot tables your decision-makers need in order to make your business hum. What data elements are critical for analyzing promotions and products? If you have built your own reporting site, we would appreciate learning from your experience. If you are currently wrestling with data accessibility issues, let us know how we can help. We look forward to hearing from you!

Let me start by wishing you a Happy New Year!

2008 was a tough year for many industries. Here in Michigan, countless businesses and households have been hit hard by woes of the big-three automakers, in addition to the general challenges of a struggling economy. While ACS is not unaffected by the economic conditions, the list of prospective clients interested in Advantage remains steady and we are doing okay. Among the Advantage community, I hear with some frequency of publishers and associations cutting back on staff, reducing issue frequencies, and merging titles. Unfortunately, many of our clients serve market segments that are significantly affected by the current recession.

Nevertheless, we continue to see promising signs among our user community. It is our goal to help all discover new ways to utilize Advantage functionality and ACS services to deal effectively with the new challenges that we’ll face in 2009. With increasing frequency, we are seeing success among our clients in combating slow circulation and book sales by broadening traditional print offerings to embrace online content delivery. Another successful endeavor is honing business intelligence through more sophisticated data collection and analysis, for use in making more informed and up-to-the-minute marketing and operations decisions. We've also seen some publishers increase their revenues through our Teleservices module or by offering conferences through our Conference and Event module.

At ACS, we're excited by our expansion in Europe and the UK. Important new British publishers have joined the Advantage user community in the last several years, and in France we are continuing to see great promise for new publishers joining the user group. We recently completed a pilot project in Denmark, and are hopeful that we’ll be starting an implementation there soon. In December, we started an Advantage implementation at Vidal, our third Parisian client (see article on Vidal in this issue). Phil Montgomery and his project team are now busy with another pilot project for a major newspaper publisher in France. Next week, when I am back in Paris for meetings with our clients, I will be meeting with a French business consultancy to continue our work setting up an ACS office in Paris.

Our work with publishers, associations and service bureaus around the world has enabled us to add functionality to Advantage that offers our user community everywhere an even more powerful tool set for growing their business. I remember in 1998 how excited we were to introduce the ability to have multiple addresses for every customer in Advantage. Today, Advantage has grown significantly to provide multi-language, multi-office, and multi-local functionality. ‘Multi-local’ is terminology Philippe van-Mastrigt, our ACS representative in Paris, has coined to describe Advantage’s capacity to allow a publisher with multiple international offices to interact with local users in their own language, using local regulations for distribution, taxation, payment cards, etc.

We’re also excited about progress with the new Advantage Business Intelligence module that will help you analyze trends, target opportunities, and increase your revenues… important functionality for tough economic times. It is fortunate that our full-blown implementation of Business Intelligence technology for Advantage comes at a time when Microsoft has introduced a great suite of tools for this purpose, at a reasonable price. There was a product forum on the new BI module held at ACS/Ann Arbor in the Fall, and we received valuable feedback from many of you that has further shaped BI module development. We’re looking forward to presenting a BI forum re-cap at the Advantage User Group conference in Orlando January 21 – 23.

As many of our clients face a growing demand in 2009 to produce more with less, I thought it would be helpful to mention three areas of significant enhancement to Advantage that target helping you meet more stringent compliance requirements, reduce costs, and grow your revenues. These are all projects designed to help you optimize business operations, while gaining strategic advantage in your respective market segment.

Compliance

•  Consolidation of credit card and direct debit information to a single secure table
•  Increased capabilities in credit card storage, masking, and encryption
•  User session activity recording and reporting
•  Revamped user security that mirrors MS Windows with domain-level authentication
•  Daily reconciliation of subscription liability, earnings, and accounts receivable

Cost Reduction

• Significant improvements in job scheduling and automation to free up staff resources that would normally be required to manage nightly processing
• Core Advantage offline processes optimized to run 24x7
• Highly customizable workspaces for easily tailoring Advantage views to your organization structure, facilitating faster data entry and customer service transactions
• Powerful data entry scripting tools to improve data entry speed and facilitate various types of data entry functions

Revenue Growth

• An SQL query builder tool for easily and rapidly creating list selections against your data
• Data warehousing tools for analyzing circulation, product order, accounts receivable, and financial data
• Significant improvements in the Advantage e-commerce modules

In addition to developing these new software features, ACS has introduced important new services over the past year, all designed to help publishers, membership associations, and service bureaus do more with less during difficult economic times. At the Advantage User Group Conference later this month, we’ll be describing some of these special projects and new services our clients have taken advantage of. Here are some examples:

•  More comprehensive support for new company acquisitions, in-conversions, and division consolidations
• ACS system administrators managing your Advantage offline processing
• ACS engineers developing custom revenue modules
• ACS web site developers creating custom e-commerce websites.

We expect that 2009 will continue to be challenging for the publishing industry. How are your Advantage operations doing? During times of ‘tightening the belt’, are you finding ways to meet new challenges of reduced budgets while not jeopardizing current core business or compromising efforts to exploit opportunities for expansion? Let us know if there is something more ACS can be doing to help you meet your goals this year.

Once upon a time, a multi-title publisher would have multiple boxes of subscriber files to handle fulfillment. At some point, these card files went onto computer systems, but remained segmented by title. Then a revolution came along: a single customer database. First, this meant that a subscriber to two publications would have just one customer record in the database. Then later, it meant that a subscriber to two titles, who purchased books and other products, who also attended a conference and did some advertising and bought online content, still had just one customer record in the database. Marketers were thrilled! In one place, they could see everything such a customer had done– all the buying behavior, payment patterns, responses to promotions and even demographic information. They had all of this information in one database, and since it was the transactional database, this information was accurate, up-to-date, and accessible. (Well, accessible might have come later.)

Somewhere in here came e-commerce, and customer self-service, and the API and lots of wonderful technology that made it easy for readers to subscribe, purchase and read content. Software came along that could tell the publisher how much their customers were actually using the content. Marketers began to move away from print marketing into electronic marketing. The message about their products went out quicker and at less cost than with traditional direct mail.

Of course, there were some challenges in all this, like duplicate customers, marketers who had separate marketing databases, and circulation directors who couldn’t get quick answers to questions about their circulation, renewal rates and the like. It used to be that sales people would make a deal and then inform the company of what it had to do to live up to the promised terms of the deal. The rest of the company would roll their eyes and try to figure out how to meet the unchecked promises.

But times have changed. Now technology is in a position to drive the business. In fact, we find that many clients have the latest technology but aren’t fully exploiting it. I realize that I’m uniquely unqualified to say this, but publishers are so busy trying to develop their audience they haven’t always stopped to look at what tools they might already have in place to jump-start their efforts. The integrated database is one of them. With Advantage, you have at your beck and call an enabler of audience development like no other. This integrated database provides you with enough information to keep your marketers busy around the clock. Demographics, buying patterns, RFM scoring, cross-selling and the ability to query the transactional database for online, real-time information are just some of the catalysts to your audience development. Loyalty-building functionality in Advantage will help keep your audience loyal to your brand. Such things include not only frequent buyer programs, sweepstakes promotions, coupons and other such hooks but excellent customer care tools. It is my strong belief that one of the best ways of keeping your audience loyal is to treat them like royalty. Getting their information into your system quickly and accurately is a great way to start, and scanning and imaging are just two examples of many ways to get this accomplished.

If you have one group handling print and another handling e-media, you are missing something. Media is media, from our perspective, and marketing any form of it should be a concentrated, integrated, sophisticated, comprehensive, successful and fun effort. Advantage is there to really push your audience development. Give us a call. We’re here to support your growth.

We recently facilitated our annual Training Week (TW) event at ACS. As with all of our TW sessions, many ACS people spent a lot of time preparing course materials, setting up rooms and equipment, and coordinating staff to make this a successful event. You might be interested to know that more than 150 hours went into preparing for the System Administration and SQL for Systems Analysts courses; more than 120 pages of course material were newly developed for just the system administration course alone. Numerous engineers and systems analysts also collaborated to develop the BI (Business Intelligence) presentation where we presented an array of reports and data warehousing examples. Given the large turnout and the class evaluation responses, many seem to agree that this was one of our best training events ever.

There was a good mix of experience represented among the group of TW participants. Some attendees had many years of experience using Advantage, while others had hardly touched it and TW was their first visit to ACS. Of course, the veteran attendees weren't easy on the neophytes during the whirly ball tournaments. No official reports of injuries, but I understand that Ken Nemerovski is now seeing a chiropractor.

The evaluations contained many positive reviews on the TW courses. A strong component we use to determine what TW courses are offered each year is to analyze what our clients are doing -- or not doing. In the case of the BI Forum, we've gauged a strong interest among our users in analyzing and delivering key metrics and important business data to the organization's decision-makers. While Excel and Crystal Reports can often provide the BI necessary for an organization to make important decisions about the business, we've been seeing our customers' requirements continue to evolve where more comprehensive and BI solutions are necessary to rapidly identify potential opportunities and determine how to best capitalize on them. This is where we think our Advantage BI module will help you succeed; the TW event was the opportune time to review our BI framework and seek your input on the types of BI tools that will soon be available to you. While we had an excellent turnout among our clients, we hope to see a lot more during the Augment meetings in January where we'll be providing another BI review along with more detailed information on the module and planned release window.

The system administration and SQL courses were developed in response to recent system audits at some of our client organizations. In each of these audits, we uncovered major items. Although the operations management personnel often felt certain that their operations were running smoothly, our detailed systems audit uncovered numerous areas of concern, some quite serious. We often see that our clients are not performing all the required administration tasks in an optimal way, due to things like changes in personnel, or not fully understanding enhancements to the application.

In addition to providing a comprehensive approach to administering Advantage, the system administration class addressed many of the issues uncovered during these audits at various client sites. The class covered all the major aspects of Advantage including security, maintenance, reporting, user and process management, and systems administration. If you didn't attend the class, I encourage you to talk with your ACS representative about scheduling either a comprehensive systems audit or a session of the Advantage administration class, or both. The audit can be done in 2 to 5 days, depending on the level of sophistication of your usage of Advantage.

Advantage is a sophisticated tool, with so many features, options and choices that there are an infinite number of ways to configure it. To optimize your knowledge of Advantage and to maximize its value to your company, we highly recommend ongoing and advanced training, as well as periodic systems audits. This investment is well worth the cost, as it will ensure you have knowledgeable people operating a smooth running system that is being used to the fullest.

If you are like me, you find yourself increasingly pleasantly surprised when you receive good customer service. Excellent customer service certainly still exists. But these days, it appears to be the exception rather than the rule. In most situations, I now find myself expecting “average” customer service. And in most cases, “average” is simply one step above barely acceptable.

A large part of our customer service here at ACS is helping you to provide the best service to your customers. So, who are the customers you serve? And what is their experience?

Ultimately, your customers are those who subscribe to your periodicals, journals, and newsletters; buy your products; join your clubs; attend your conferences; and access your website. They are the end consumers of your products. In addition, because most of you are part of large organizations, you also have internal customers–your editors, the marketing department, your affiliate organizations and sister companies, your boss (or worse yet, your boss’s boss), your project stakeholders, and just about anyone you work with.

Advantage can help your customers! Advantage software is customer-centric. At the touch of a button, you can easily access all the information you need to know about a particular customer, allowing you to effectively serve every customer, especially those on the telephone. The Advantage database provides a powerful engine for sales analysis and targeted marketing. Continual enhancements of customer service screens provide an effective means of data entry accuracy and efficiency. Your customers reap the benefits of a system designed with them in mind.

Advantage can help you! Our client services division is set up to help you help your customers. Our staff of engineers, analysts, business consultants, and project managers not only knows the latest technology they also know publishing. ACS staff members average over 12 years experience in the publishing industry. Our goal is to make your job easier.

Some of our customer services include:

• An expert support center to address your production issues in a timely manner. You can contact our support center by phone, e-mail, or via the web.
• 24-hour emergency support services.
• Business consulting and training services to enhance your knowledge and use of Advantage.
• Modification services to customize Advantage to your specific business needs.
• New feature forums to allow you to give input during the development process.
• Upgrade services so you can benefit from new features of Advantage and stay current in the marketplace.
• Project management services to assist you with special projects.

Your customers expect good service. Your organization expects you to provide it. ACS stands beside you as a partner. The employees at ACS strive to provide the best customer service possible, and although we are not (yet) perfect, we continually look for ways to improve our products and services, and set goals to make them a reality. We are fortunate in that we receive many compliments from our clients. We thank you and look forward to serving you and your customers for many years to come.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with your thoughts regarding our customer service and how we can serve you better.