This Tech Tip outlines four guidelines for using the duplicate consolidation functionality in Advantage.  The four involve these activities:

1)      Matching levels customer types

2)      Creating consolidation sets dialog during customer service

3)      DUPSET review when more than two customers match

4)      The consolidate one set button – (starting at revision 9R2)

1)     Matching levels set by customer types

Using this feature ultimately reduces the number of duplicate customers and improves your customer database.

You can use the CTM DUPMTLVL (customer duplicate match level) system option to set different match levels by customer type.

This allows you to tighten or lessen the matching criteria for certain types of customers.

Set the option in the SYSOPT view.

The matching levels identify potential duplicates when adding or changing customers.

Levels available:

1-Loosest Match Criteria

2-Medium Low Match Criteria

3-Medium High Match Criteria

4-Highest Match Criteria

7-Medium Match Criteria

N-Duplicate Matching Turned off

It works like this:

Your initial customer search returns potential matches based on the criteria you enter (e.g., postal code, last name, company name).

However, you choose to bypass these potential matches and proceed to add the customer as new.

When you click "Finish," the Potential duplicate Customers / Create Customer Relationship dialog appears (see 2nd tip).

2)     Creating consolidation sets dialog during customer service

When adding/changing customers at SVCDAT, the system prompts you with several options for how to handle potential duplicates.

You can choose to:

-Continue – Ignore the potential duplicates and continue with your change/add of current customer

-Continue and Link – Continue with the current customer but relate it to one of the potential duplicate customers identified

-Consolidate – Create a consolidated duplicate set for later consolidation in the DUPSET view or next run of the DUP430

3)     DUPSET view

Be sure to review for accuracy the sets that have more than two customers who are identified as potential duplicates.

Change the filter in the upper portion of the view to show only sets with more than two potential duplicates.

Click the "Set Size" column two times to sort in descending order (largest number of records first).

4)     Consolidate one set button – (starting at revision 9R2)

The one set consolidation performs the consolidation very quickly and you don't need to wait for a DUP430 run.

This consolidates one customer set at a time but still does it across all tables.

You can do it with users on the system.

Do it one of two ways:

A)     Use the upper portion of the view.

Select a set in the upper portion of the DUPSET view.

Click the Consolidate button to consolidate this one set (see Consolidate… button in above view).

A consolidation results report is available to view online.

B)     Use the lower portion of the view.

Highlight customers in the list frame that you want to consolidate with the primary customer.

Right-click and choose the Consolidate action. 

We are happy to welcome Mark Sauter as a full-time employee, in the Implementation and Engineering Services group led by Karl Davis.  Mark worked at ACS previously as a summer intern before he graduated from Grand Valley State University this past May.

Mark earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Grand Valley, although his first major was actually creative writing.  He enjoys the problem-solving aspects of computer programming and the satisfaction of building something from the ground up and then seeing it in action.

Born and raised in Ann Arbor, Mark recently got married to another Ann Arbor-ite, and the couple makes their home in their native town. Mark and Lauren have known each other since they were four years old, as their families were friends and attended the same church.  The two only began dating in college, however, and got married last January.

When he's not working, Mark enjoys playing hockey and other sports, as well as playing the guitar and the violin.  Occasional computer games make their way into the schedule as well.

We—and that includes older brother Paul Sauter, also an ACS engineer--are pleased to welcome Mark to the ACS family.

Senior software engineer Barbara Smith is officially retiring from ACS at the end of August.  For a time after that, however, she will continue working to finish up several current projects. 

We don't want to say goodbye to Barbara.  But who could begrudge her a retirement she has so thoroughly earned?  In her eleven years at ACS, her contribution has been tremendous.  Barbara served as the lead engineer on many implementations and other assorted projects, many of them for international clients.  She has spent significant amounts of time in London, Paris, Copenhagen and Oxford and enjoyed each city.  Each has its own special charm, she says, explaining that Paris is gorgeous and impressive, while London is more home-y and she likes knowing the language.  Oxford's storied university buildings make it interesting to walk around and Copenhagen is historic and quaint, with many old, old buildings.  She likes to visit landmarks but also to explore each area and discover new places of interest.

Barbara's manager, Karl Davis, has this to say about her:  "Barbara has been an excellent lead engineer and fantastic team member over these past 11 years.  She's worked on many new installation projects in both the US and Europe.  On every project she's been assigned, Barbara's worked hard to serve our clients and provide sound technical solutions.  Her easy-going personality made her a delight to work with, resulting in establishing good relationships with everyone with whom she worked.  While she will be missed, we all wish her well as she begins this new phase of her life."

And Dick Hile, VP of Product Engineering, says:  "Barbara is the type of engineer that makes my job much easier.  When she's involved with an implementation, I know that the client will be well served and that she will do whatever is needed to make it a success.  She will definitely be missed." 

When thinking about her retirement, Barbara vacillates between excitement at the new opportunities that await her, and regret that she will miss the people she works with and the work itself.  "I've enjoyed working with clients and helping them to make their businesses run better through implementing Advantage," she says, "and I'll miss so many of the people I've worked with."

But she has many plans for filling her post-retirement time.  After catching up on sleep, she looks forward to working in her garden, visiting friends and family around the country, finding some meaningful volunteer work, reading, and learning to play the guitar or other musical instrument.  And there are always all those projects around the house—Barbara and her husband, Michael, plus their three cats live in Ann Arbor--that have been waiting for the time to get them done.

Warmest congratulations Barbara!

 Starting at 2011R1, a new right-click action is available at MSTDAT/FST, MSTDAT/MST, SVCDAT/MST, and the Master Orders tab at MSTDAT/CTG.  The action allows you to move one or more orders from any closed control group, or any control group you have open, to any other closed control group, or to any other control group that you have open.

One effect of this change is that if you are closed out of Advantage while at MSTDAT/FST, you no longer need to go to MSTDAT/CTG to close and reopen your control group.  Instead, go to MSTDAT/FST and press the Current Control Group button, where the list will contain the control group you were just in.  Select this control group and click the Open button, and you will be presented with the option of reopening the control group.

It's always a balancing act between moving forward with technology upgrades while not abandoning products which are still being used.  At ACS, we try to bridge as wide a span as we possibly can, in order to accommodate the needs of all clients.  Sometimes, however, changes need to be made.

Therefore, starting at Advantage 11r1, the minimum system requirements will be 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. 

This shift allows us to prepare for supporting a scale out (clustered application server) deployment model.  Requiring 64-bit OS and SQL also supports vastly greater system resources, particularly memory.  This is important for running Advantage, since we typically recommend that 10-20% of the total database size be available for caching.

Typically, ACS supports the prior two releases of each product (currently Windows Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 & SQL Server 2008 R2).  Since Microsoft is no longer providing mainstream support for Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005, it would be increasingly difficult for ACS to support new releases of the software on those versions.   Of course, we will continue to support earlier releases of Advantage using those versions.

Contact your account manager if you have any questions.

Here are some of the features you'll find in the second Advantage release of this year.  Contact your account manager for more information.

•  A new set of AMB tables gives users access to "virtual" information on transactions which Advantage does not otherwise store with the agreement.  Users can access such data as: agreement start date less free and adjustment days, expire date less grace days, and a conversion from trial flag.  At the access point level, data such as the following is available: access point event (add, change delete), price override flags, discount amount, sales amounts.  In addition, deleted access points are now retained for historical purposes.  Users can make use of these tables---which have been implemented as SQL views---in selects and user-defined reports.
• A "replacement" subscription modification has been added, which can be invoked at SVCDAT/CIR once you have located the customer's subscription.  You might be able to retain a customer who wants to cancel his/her subscription by offering a "replacement."  The modification uses available credit toward the customer's new order---which can be another CIR subscription, but can also a PRO item, an AMB agreement, or an inventory package.  All of this is processed in one seamless transaction from SVCDAT/CIR.
• A dedicated AMBREN/ARN view has been implemented for AMB autorenewal selects (previously, these were set up at CDSSEL).  AMBREN/ARN includes standard "lowest level" functionality, such as the ability to specify a premium set or an agreement choice.
• Autorenewal chain functionality has been added for AMB.  This is closely modeled on the CIR feature, where you can set up a series of autorenew offers through which customers can be stepped---including incremental price increases or decreases, as you prefer.
• Previously, AMB access points were added for all participants, or for just a single participant.  This has been expanded so that you can identify a subset of participants to which the access point should be applied.  In addition, you can set up access point pricing with a participant limit---for example, you can set up the access point with a limit of 6 participants, and add and remove participants within that preset limit.
• A new CIR package synchronization process has been added.  Through this process, you can "synch up" CIR expire dates for subscriptions in a package, if these dates have become disconnected over time.  The process does this by creating adjusting RAT transactions.
• You can now create a master contract in Royalty that earns at the individual contract level (previously, these always earned at the master contract level).  In addition, for master contracts, you can now perform adjustments at the level of the master contract (previously, these were always performed at the individual contract level).

Through much of the past year, ACS has partnered with Agora to complete an in-conversion from Equity Master, Agora's office in India.   Equity Master provides information about more than 500 leading companies in India, which account for over 90% of India's market value. Through Equity Master, customers can gain access to various stock market recommendations, archives, and special reports.

The project of converting Equity Master data into Advantage encompassed customer, promotion, and electronic subscription data; as well as implementing the AMB module for the first time at Agora. To account for the online data-entry into Advantage, the team made adjustments to the website to make use of the AMB capsule calls provided through the AdvantageWEB module.

Tara Rebak, VP of fulfillment systems at Agora, says "The conversion of Equity Master into Advantage was challenging not only because of having to decipher their data and having to learn AMB at the same time, but also because of the 10½ hour time difference.  We never would have been able to get through the project without Doug by our side!"  Tara also managed to help guide this project to completion while giving birth to her first baby, Connor, three months before go-live.

Doug Moore, project manager at ACS, expressed thanks to the many people involved in making the conversion happen.  These include:  at Agora, Daryl Berver, Tara Rebak, Andrew Bollard, the interface team led by Getty Sarno, and the Equity Master team led by Deepak Rajpal, and at ACS, Dan Sneed and John Moore for their critical engineering support, and the many others who helped take this project across the finish line including Scott Ghormley, Molly Mathe, and Stan Bisgaier.