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.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) website store launched successfully on Advantage in mid-April.  GASB establishes standards of financial accounting and reporting for state and local governmental entities.  The project lasted a little over a month and a half.

           

On FAF's side, the team included Jim Lapinski and FAF website consultants.  Work on the ACS side was done by Molly Mathe and Greg Sharp.  Congratulations on a successful go-live!

Congratulations to Weekly Reader on the success of their recent upgrade.  It was a big project, as they were migrating four versions ahead in Advantage and also moving several ancillary systems to new servers, all of which had to be coordinated and synchronized.

Marcia Smith, Vice President of IT and Fulfillment at WRC, was delighted with the success of their upgrade.  On Monday, after going live over the weekend, she sent an email to everyone involved saying:

"Thank you all for working together to get us where we are this morning – a truly great job!!  A special call out to Susanne Goebel and Steve Petersen for their great leadership and perseverance throughout this project.  And it was all done smoothly and with great communication and handoffs between the teams during the past few months, but particularly this past weekend. "

She also applauded "The ‘never say done' devotion of the ACS Advantage team to get the upgrade area ready and then enhance the scripts to run within a 48-hour window."

On the ACS side, Project Manager Doug Moore had nothing but praise for the team's work.  Martha Krieg did an excellent job as the application engineer, while Larry Kleber was tireless in running scripts.  Ray Zick, Howie Brooks and Toby Hartman stepped in to assist at crucial moments in order to make the target go-live dates.  Project Director Paul DesRosiers and Senior Account Manager Ken Darnell were also involved along the way in the seven-month project, which came in on time and within budget.

Kudos to everyone involved!

 

Liturgy Training Publications (LTP), a not-for-profit agency of the Archdiocese of Chicago, recently went live on Advantage.  Chuck Lorenz served as the LTP project manager, aided by Deanna Keefe, and JohnThomas provided executive sponsorship.  The go-live date was set for early January to avoid LTP's busy season at yearend.

Eric Burbeck acted as the ACS project manager, directed by Mike Miklosovic.  Barbara Smith served as lead engineer and several others, including Angie Markel, Bill Pinard and Levi Hyssong provided assistance.

LTP publishes materials for use in Catholic churches, schools, and by Catholic individuals and families.  In addition to several magazines and journals LTP primarily publishes and distributes books. They market via direct mail, their website, Catholic bookstores, and leading e-commerce book websites.  LTP is the largest U.S. distributor of Spanish language titles in their niche.

Based in Chicago, LTP has an historic location in the Windy City.  Their office is in the old stockyards area, in a converted warehouse building, and they are both entertained and annoyed by the dozens of loud trains that pass close by all day long.