Dear Advantage Users,

Thank you for your participation in the Advantage Webinars in 2010.  Between a dozen Advantage presenters, we hosted 27 different webinars last year to nearly 300 attendees.  It was a great year!

To ensure that you continue to benefit from this efficient and cost-effective training program, please take time to answer the following survey questions while we prepare our 2011 schedule.

Thank you,

Angie

amark@advantagecs.com

 Click here for survey:  Advantage Webinars 2011

Last evening, I had the opportunity to observe my 13-year-old daughter handle a technical challenge that my wife was experiencing.  As my daughter took the laptop and started in to solve the problem, my wife looked at me with that now-familiar frown which says something like "Why can she do this when she's never taken a computer course in her life, and I, who have used computers for years, can't figure out how to begin?"  I smiled and told her not to take it personally.  Based on conversations I've had with friends, I believe most parents have experienced this phenomenon.

Perhaps it's perspective.  Perhaps it's age.  After all, we observe children picking up a language without even thinking about it.  They just start talking, make lots of mistakes, get corrected, and slowly, over time, they've mastered it.  Kids can also pick up multiple languages at the same time.  Why shouldn't they be able to handle technology?  I recently upgraded my smart-phone and my daughter took it, played with it for a few minutes, handed it back to me and said "cool!"

Maybe it's mostly about intuition.  The user experience on a smart-phone is meant to be intuitive.  As is the user experience on a tablet.  These products don't even come with a user manual in the box.  My new gadget had a quick start guide of about 4 pages and the user manual is online somewhere.  I haven't needed it yet, and not because of any brilliance on my part, but because it is designed to be intuitive.

As the calendar changed from 2010 to 2011, I got thinking about the last year and where we were and where we are now.  Not to be nostalgic, but to try to get my head around how quickly things are changing.  Let's remember that a year ago the Apple iPad hadn't hit the shelves yet.  There was talk of what was coming, but did any of us know then the sort of impact this device would have on our industry?  Not a day goes by without my seeing yet another article on the subject.

It is clear that publishers are both embracing and grappling with tablets.  Some are embracing Apple, others are avoiding it and going straight to the Android-based tablets.  The competition will likely wear down Apple's strict 30% cut and closely-held information about subscribers and buyers of magazine editions.  Personally, I'm looking forward to watching this all change and be able to talk about what happened this time next year.  I must admit being very pleased that the magazine publishing industry is not succumbing to Apple in quite the same way as the music industry did years ago. 

But this is not to say that mass retailers, like Apple, Google and Amazon are not to be reckoned with.  They are.  One of our clients says that 80% of their books are now being sold through Amazon.  The concern is the amount of information coming back to publishers from mass retailers about these end consumers.  It's little or nothing.  It's certainly not a technical problem (so I won't have to get my 13-year-old involved).  It's an ownership issue.  Do publishers own the data about who their audience is or not?  Until publishers insist that they do, they will be bullied into sales channels where all they have to hang their hat on is units sold. 

We are in conversations with other technology companies that are trying to tackle these problems and are working with information providers who insist that they need to know who the members of their audience are in order to be effective marketers.  As solutions emerge, Advantage will be part of them.  We believe our clients deserve to have a complete picture of each customer's behavior and intelligence about their interaction with the products being marketed.  We believe this information is key for your growth.

As always, I would be happy to discuss this or other topics with you.  You can contact me at dheff@advantagecs.com .

Have a successful year! 

Here are some of the exciting new features in 2011R1, now available.  Contact your account manager for more information. 

• The promotion code maintenance user interface (formerly CPNPMO and its views) has been rewritten using the Advantage list frame and scripting features.  The new view, CPNDAT/PMO, allows the setup and maintenance of promotion codes and their related records (e.g., promotion items, regular premiums) from a central data entry point…instead of requiring you to route to multiple views.  The Advantage scripting feature allows you to construct different entry/maintenance scripts using a subset of fields: for example, perhaps you will have one script for entering e-marketing offers, and another for traditional mail offers.

•  A new table contains several key AMB data elements as "virtual fields," allowing you to use them in your selects and user-defined reporting.  Such AMB fields as agreement expire, agreement status, billing status, etc. are not stored as static fields in Advantage, but rather are dynamically calculated as needed.  Previously, these fields were displayed on the agreement at customer service views, but not available for use in selects and reporting.  The new AMB "virtual field" table allows you to do this.
• The AMB module has been changed so that agreements no longer earn income during suspension periods.  The system offers options regarding how the earnings are handled once the agreement is restarted; however, the agreements will now always cease to earn during suspensions.
• A new "area transfer" feature allows you to move information…for example, setup data…from one of your Advantage areas to another, or multiple other areas.  You may wish to designate one area as the "master area" for setup-type information and periodically propagate these tables to other areas in order to keep all areas in synch.

Advantage batch processes that use select criteria produce statistics that reflect the number of database records that were a) evaluated and b) selected (or deselected) at each level of the select logic. 

The location of the directory that contains the statistics is environmentally defined by SELECTSTATLOC=<directory>.  Statistics reports are written to that directory if the environment variable is defined and the directory exists.  The default location is a subdirectory of the ProcLogs directory called Select_Stats.   This may be changed by the user.

The process log file contains a message similar to "Selection analysis statistics in <pathname>", so that you may move from a particular log file to its statistics.  Similarly, the actual statistics file identifies the select name that generated it to help tie stats and processes together.

The level of breakdown is according to the structure of the boolean expression, independent of how it is typed in on the select screen.  For example, if a single select screen line at the screen reads:

                AND   CTM.CTM-TYP = 'INDIV' AND CTM.PROMO = 'Y'

the output would break this out as two separate lines in the statistics analysis.

AND   CTM.CTM-TYP = 'INDIV'

AND CTM.PROMO = 'Y'

The indentation used in the analysis reflects the level of detail, with appropriate roll-ups.   For example, the reader can see that a set detail selected 'n' of 'nn' records, but he/she can then examine the indented lines to determine which parts of the complex condition for the set excluded how many customers.

Note that enabling this feature can result in a difference in I/O overhead.  In most cases, this difference is negligible; for major processes, the difference should be small, but you may wish to monitor the impact on processing time.

See below for an example of this output:

Analysis of select set 'PRO305' in process 'PRO305'

Sunil Chawla has joined the ACS team and will be providing services to CDS Global-UK.  Sunil was the Advantage system administrator, DBA and IT manager at Maney Publications, but had to resign from this position in order to move to London. The timing worked perfectly for him to join the ACS team currently traveling regularly to Market Harborough to support CDS.

A UK native, Sunil holds a degree in computer science from Manchester University and is also a certified Microsoft Database Administrator.  He lives in Bromley, near London, and in his leisure time, enjoys playing badminton and tennis and traveling to tropical destinations—anywhere with clear blue water where he can scuba dive and snorkel, although the Maldives is his favorite place.

We are pleased to welcome Sunil to the ACS family.

As the arena of customer communication becomes more and more personalized, you need the flexibility to create and send relevant communications as quickly and automatically as possible.  Advantage offers you this capability.

Many of you have been using the customer letter functionality for years (note: for purposes of this article, the word "letter" refers to either email or a hard-copy snail-mail letter).  This is where you create a set of letter templates and via a Customer Note, Action Code, and MS-Word, Advantage sends the appropriate customized personal letter to a customer when  certain conditions are true , filling in such information as customer name and address, order number, subscription details, product order details, and order data.  This format is simple to set up and easy to use, but is fairly limited in scope.

Recent functionality, called "conditional letters," provides you with much more flexibility and greatly expanded uses.  These letters are not output to a file, rather, they bypass MS-Word or another application and are generated from RTF format and are then sent via HTML email or printer, and a PDF copy of the communication is created and saved.    You determine the conditions that drive the communication.  For example, a condition might be the placement of an order, which then triggers a customer and personalized order acknowledgement letter, and this acknowledgement may vary depending on the customer type and order lines, for example.  Conditional letters can be set up to manage this automatically.

Other possible uses for conditional letter communication are to send order quotations, promotions based upon order history, billing notices and statements, subscription renewal notices, WEB order confirmations, product order status notifications, notifications of credit card payment status, direct-debit payment notifications, and customer service inquiries.  You decide when, why and how you want to communicate with your customers and then ACS can help you set up Advantage to do just that. 

Conditional letters are tied directly  to  the Customer Notes feature in Advantage and when a letter is sent to a customer, a PDF of the letter is automatically created and added to the Customer Notes where it is always available for future customer service reference (in the SVCDAT/CTM Documents file for that customer).  Emails can be sent directly from Advantage or formatted and sent to go through an external email server.

Client response to this feature has been enthusiastic!  The first webinar on the topic was so popular that it was repeated to an even larger audience.  After working with nearly two dozen clients on this feature, Mike McCarren has become the ACS analyst expert on conditional letters.  He notes that it is highly customizable. "So far, we have been able to do everything a client has requested of this feature," says Mike.  "It's that flexible."

The majority of clients are using conditional letters functionality with simple conditional logic, although some have implemented very complex conditional logic.  For example, more complex letterlogic may be used if your customers have frequent contact with your company.  Thus, you might vary the second paragraph of the letter depending upon the number of contacts, or you might send letter X rather than letter Y, based on whether the customer is ordering for the first time or is a repeat customer, or if the customer ordered a publication, a product, or entered into an AMB agreement.

For more information, contact your ACS account manager.

In his five years at ACS, John Moore has made his mark on the software and in client support.  He was part of a team that rewrote MSTDAT/FAST and also worked on converting INVDAT into the new user interface style, which included implementing scripts there.  Although John has always been a member of the software development team led by Howie Brooks, he was tapped three years ago to enter the upgrade and support world in engineering. 

John is a key member of the team that works with Agora, Inc. He describes his role as alternating between fire fighter putting out fires, superhero solving issues, and whipping boy (although that happens very rarely). Agora's Daryl Berver has this to say about working with John: "John is great. He has been able to not only efficiently handle the engineering work on our ever-growing and increasingly complex account, but can also explain complicated GL\ARP transactions in layman's terms.  We are very lucky to have him on our account."

John grew up in Taylor, Michigan and attended the University Of Michigan, Dearborn, where he earned a degree in computer science.  After graduation, he worked for a time in technical support for Comcast, a local cable company, and that experience helped develop his customer service skills.  Then he spent time at Roush Manufacturing—in the automotive performance division, before joining ACS in 2005. 

Molly Mathe is the liaison between the clients and John in engineering.  She says:  "I love working with John!!! I know that even on the hardest tasks, his answers back to me will be easy to understand and relay back to the client.  And even on the hardest days, I can guarantee that he can get me to laugh."

John's sense of humor is visible in much of what he does.  For example, on the past few Halloween costume days at ACS, he has been a ninja called "Master Fast" (aka MSTDAT/FST), a knight called "CIR 210" and a prisoner with the number ARP378 (a direct debit process in Advantage). 

Other team members are also enthusiastic about John's abilities.  Analyst Doug Moore (no relation) comments:  "John is the ideal engineer and not just because he has an awesome last name! He is very diligent in his work, creative with solutions, and an excellent communicator."  

Although he enjoys the fast pace of his daily routine, John also likes the occasions when he gets to develop a large modification from start to finish. His overall knowledge of Advantage is impressive, and through recent projects with clients, he has developed proficiency in credit card processing and the Access management and Billing module functionality.

Supervisor Howie Brooks says:  "John's knowledge, persistence and attention to detail make him an invaluable member of the team.  He is constantly looking for ways in which our procedures and communication can be improved to help the client, and is always willing to go the extra mile for the client."

John lives in Belleville—in a condominium that has an "awesome view" of Belleville Lake.  In his leisure hours, John enjoys playing real-time competitive computer strategy games, such as Civilization, and spending time at his Isshin Ryu karate dojo, where he has earned his green belt.  John is also a youth leader at his church and works with middle school kids there.

With all his talents, we are happy that John practices his fire fighting and engineering skills here at ACS. 

ACS is happy to announce that A-lehdet has chosen Advantage and is beginning implementation.  The Helsinki-based company

was started in 1933 with a single magazine. Today, the grandchildren of the founders  manage the company which has grown into a publishing house with a portfolio of 18 magazines, covering topics from politics to gardening, with customer demographics ranging from teenagers to senior citizens. The Managing Director of A-lehdet is Olli-Pekka Lyytikainen.

 The ACS project team includesEric Burbeck (project manager), Tom Hermans (project director), and Karl Davis (lead engineer). The A-lehdet team consists of Oili Kalm-Parantainen (main business definer) and Timo Kurkikangas (IT architect) and its work will be coordinated by project manager Pekka Kivenjuuri from Deloitte.

We are delighted to welcome A-lehdet to the Advantage community.

www.a-lehdet.fi/