ACS is delighted to welcome John Wiley & Sons, Inc., to the Advantage community.  Wiley was founded by Charles Wiley in 1807 and, in its early years, published works by such authors as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.  By the early 1900s, Wiley was established as a leading publisher of scientific and technical information.  In 2007, the company acquired UK-based Blackwell Publishing, greatly expanding its journal and society publishing business.

Wiley's global headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey. With more than 5,000 employees and operations across North America, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia,Wiley is a global enterprise.The company reported revenues of nearly $1.75 billion in fiscal year 2011.

Wiley began its search for a subscription management system in the first half of 2011 and sent out an RFI in June to a number of vendors.  The field was narrowed to three companies who participated in workshops and product demonstrations over the summer.  After a thorough evaluation process by the Wiley search team, Advantage was chosen, and implementation is now underway.

Advantage will be used to manage subscriptions for Wiley’s three core businesses:Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (STMS), Professional/Trade, and Global Education.  Advantage will support 10,000 subscribed products, including 1,500 journals across those businesses.

The ACS team includes project manager John Sheehy and lead engineer Karl Davis. Tim Zapawa is acting project director, and many others will be involved in the project as it moves through the implementation phases.

The Wiley project team to implement Advantage is being led by Nick Forman, business lead, and Neel Mony, technical lead, while being managed by David Ingham.  In addition to the ACS team members, the project will draw on expertise from across Wiley.

Do you have customers in your database at the same company but with all sorts of different spellings and abbreviations of their company name.   For example, you may have customers at General Electric and some are represented as General Electric Inc., while others have GE, The General Electric Company, or Gen Electric.  Misspelling a company name or storing it in different formats impacts search results and mailing efficiency and significantly hinders data analysis. How can you know how much you're selling to General Electric when it's represented ten different ways in the database across fifty customers?

Advantage has the answer:   the CDS165 - Company Name Standardization process. This process standardizes the company names to the most frequent occurrence in your database.   For example, if you have 12 entries for GE, 15 for General Electric, and 7 for General Electric Inc., all entries would be consolidated to General Electric.

How does this process operate?   It works by generating a comparison name, which reduces the entries to a single, abbreviated form of the company name. The reduced form is constructed by removing punctuations, converting to upper case, correcting common misspellings, standardizing abbreviations, and removing starting and trailing words, such as The, Inc., and Co. This reduced form is then compared to the other instances having the same abbreviated name. The CDS165 picks the most common name as the resulting company name for all entries.

If you want to add customized behavior to fit your industry or country, you can add additional starting or trailing words or phrases that should be considered at CDSVLU, using the OLD-WORD and END-WORD keywords.  For example, if you want GE to be considered as General Electric, but the process doesn’t recognize them as the same company, you can add a rule for the string GE.

The CDS165 process also includes a Detail Mode process option that shows each standardized customer and their variant on the surviving name. This process can be run in report-only mode to see what would happen without updating the database.

By carefully choosing rules for generating comparisons, you can increase the number of selected variants and avoid consolidating unintended company names. And, if you want to further ensure that a particular record is not selected for standardization, you can check the Company Standardization Exempt flag on the customer record.

Another great feature of the CDS165 process is that it can automatically add an alias at CDSCTM/AKA after its run. This option can even be set based on a minimum number of occurrences of a particular variant. For example, you may decide to only add AKA entries when there 2 or more variant occurrences.

Once a variant is added at CDSCTM/AKA, any future customers that are added using this company name variant will be automatically replaced with the standard form. This applies to customers added from data entry, web, or uploads. In our previous example, future company names entered as Gen Electric would automatically be standardized to General Electric.

Isn't this a lot easier than trying to define all the variants manually?

Interested in learning more about the CDS165 - Company Name Standardization process? The online help is a great place to start. You can also talk to your ACS account manager or support staff for further assistance using this feature.

In 2007, when I returned to ACS after pursuing graduate studies, the iPhone was a relatively new phenomenon and the iPad was little more than an idea on a drawing board.  Amazon also had yet to release the Kindle.  Now, all these products are central tools exploited by many publishers.  In less than four years, the worlds of publishing and marketing have undergone significant changes.  Publishers have increasingly been looking at how best to digitize their content, and then monetize that digital content.  They have re-oriented their marketing to reach consumers via new electronic means.  At the same time, in this world of digitization, some publishers have been successful at increasing print circulation, often through the use of innovative marketing to a core demographic through both print and digital avenues.

Advantage is also changing to keep pace and evolve to meet these new demands.  Advantage is a powerful tool that allows publishers to deliver content to consumers, analyze the sales of that content, connect with new prospects, and consequently market their products intelligently.  In order to take advantage of the thousands of development hours put into Advantage each year, however, it's essential to have a plan for regularly upgrading your Advantage software package.

ACS typically recommends that an upgrade be considered every year or two.  By upgrading on a regular basis, you can be assured that you will be receiving new features which will allow you to better market and deliver your content, as well as cutting overhead costs by doing these more efficiently.  Having a regular upgrade plan also makes each upgrade smoother and more cost effective.  Shorter intervals between upgrades ensure that your staff remains familiar with upgrade methodology and responsibilities, as well as providing a more manageable number of new features to implement.  As any circulation manager, marketing director, or head of IT can tell you, there are many projects and tasks competing for their time. Having a regularly scheduled upgrade ensures that everyone can plan accordingly and set aside time for the upgrade to occur at regular intervals.  This also ensures that upgrade responsibilities are manageable in addition to other obligations.

We complete 15-20 upgrade projects each year, and so have been able to develop a proven upgrade methodology to ensure efficient, well-managed upgrades. If you haven't already, why not talk to your ACS account manager today about setting up a regular schedule of upgrades? 

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.