ACS is pleased to welcome the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) to the roster of Advantage users.

The FAF is the independent, private-sector organization with responsibility for the oversight, administration, and finances of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), and their advisory councils. FAF prints and distributes subscription products including statements, interpretations, and technical bulletins for GASB and FASB. They are based in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Jim Lapinski, Publications Distribution Manager, was deeply involved in the evaluation process and is now the FAF project leader. He is in favor of Advantage for these reasons:

"The Advantage solution fit our needs better than any of the competing products that we evaluated. We were not only looking for a software solution, but also a partner. The ACS team took the time to learn our business needs and answer all of our questions."

Project Manager Mike Miklosovic is leading the implementation for ACS. The team is working toward a go-live by the end of first quarter 2009.

Only a few days remain to register for the 2008 Advantage Training Week, to be held October 7-8-9 at our office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  The attached brochure includes the schedule, course descriptions, answers to FAQs, hotel information, and the registration form.

Please note that registration is closed for the course that Karl Davis will present on Tuesday, October 7, Circulation Production and Analysis Reports. 

We are close to capacity for all other sessions.  Please register soon if you are interested in those topics.  Note that, although there is no fee for the Business Intelligence Forum, registration is required for this session, as it is for the other courses.

Remember, the registration deadline is 5 p.m. EST September 16, or when a class size limit is reached.  Registration is available by fax, mail, or online.  Please note that no reductions, refunds, or credits will be given after September 16.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding 2008 Training Week.  I look forward to seeing you in October.

Read on for course details and descriptions...

Nemo

Ken Nemerovski
NEMO@AdvantageCS.com
(734) 327-2345  Phone
(734) 327-3620  Fax

P.S.:  All registrations received to date have been acknowledged with individual e-mails.  Please contact me right away if you have registered but have not received a confirmation.  Thank you.

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.

The third Advantage release for this year will be available early next month, and brings many enhancements to the season’s hottest module: Access Management and Billing (AMB). For instance:

• You can now impose a limit on the number of participants on an AMB agreement. When this agreement-level limit is reached (during both screen entry and on the Web), further participants cannot be added unless current participants are removed or the limit is raised. This will help you control maintenance on agreements where such limitations are critical.
  
• If you have "administrative participants" on AMB agreements (that is, people whose job it is to maintain the agreement and its participants), you can now add them in a true administrative capacity. Previously, these participants were automatically counted in per-participant pricing. However, if these people will never access the agreement's content, you can now add them to the agreement without including them in pricing, or against the new "number of participants" limit.
  
• AMB agreements can now be added as items to a promotion (along with CIR and PRO items), and fully participate in promotional pricing and discounting. This includes the use of agreement "choices" set up at CPNTBL, similar to the current subscription, item, and member choices that are available on the system.
• Support for end-user license agreements (EULA's) have been added for AMB. You can create EULA text, display it on your website, and track on the AMB agreement whether or not the customer has accepted the terms of the EULA.
  
• An earnings table, AMBERN-S, has been added for tracking income associated with AMB agreements. This feature, modeled on the CIRERN-S table that is available for CIR, allows you to analyze AMB income by access point within accounting period. The table further tracks this income by customer and location (if there are multiple participants on an agreement, the table uses the first participant found).

For more information on Advantage 8R3, contact your ACS Account Manager.

And what department could that be except for the Sales, Marketing, Product Direction, and Documentation department? Nowhere else in ACS can you find such a diverse mix of skills, experience, and responsibilities.

Since taking over the department a year ago, Dan Heffernan has put his own stamp on the group without sacrificing the existing collaborative relationships.

The largest contingent in the department is the Sales team. Early on in his tenure, Dan invested time in training several others to be able to conduct software presentations (aka "demos"). Mona Hidayet and Corey Mantel share with Dan – as well as Phil Montgomery – the task of demonstrating Advantage to prospects via the web or onsite. The team also demonstrates specific modules that current clients are interested in purchasing. The demo team members all do quite a bit of traveling, although the ability to conduct web demos has helped cut down a bit on the number of trips required. Still, members of the team may often be seen traversing airport concourses and riding in taxi cabs.

Other members working with the sales team are Philippe van Mastrigt, director of European Operations, who works on obtaining leads and assisting in the sales process for prospects in Europe and the UK, and Cindy Morphew, who is the first point of contact for prospective clients; fielding phone calls, e-mail inquiries, and staffing the Advantage booth at trade shows. She also manages the process and coordinates ACS’s proposal for RFPs (Request for Proposal) and manages the contract negotiation process with new clients.

Phil Montgomery directs the Doco team and is also responsible for Product Planning. That means he is the one who oversees, at a high level, what is being added to each release of Advantage. He gets input from AUG (Advantage User Group), client forums, and from talking to prospective clients about their needs. Industry trends and technology changes are also taken into account when deciding where to focus R & D resources.
Doco is in the capable hands of Tim Martin, assisted by Ellen Davis. Tim writes a large percentage of the modification specifications, and then is responsible for producing the release notes for every release. Once a year, he and Ellen tackle the task of updating all the manuals to reflect the enhancements that have been made to the software.

Finally, this department, in the person of Cindy Morphew, is responsible for all the advertising and marketing done for Advantage. This includes writing and managing all advertisements in trade magazines and websites; brochures and other informational materials; press releases and the ACS website; coordinating trade show exhibits; purchasing imprinted items; and editing eVantage, the monthly electronic newsletter.

According to Dan, this department is the "nerve center" of the entire company, and who am I to argue with a vice president?

Advantage's Conference and Event Management (CEM) module is a fully integrated solution for handling the registration, invoicing, and informational tracking for conferences (or other events) that your company offers as part of its product line. With the CEM module, you can offer conference registrations as part of a normal Advantage order---combined, for example, with a CIR subscription or a PRO product. Conference and Event Management is integrated with Advantage Web capsules, so that customers can self-register at your website.

Within CEM, you can set up the same conference at different locations, organize the conference content by sessions and tracks, and keep track of seat availability as in-demand sessions fill during the registration process. The system will also track session conflicts for you---for example, sessions offered at overlapping times---and alert registrants to them during registration entry. A registration can be entered under a single bill-to (e.g., a company paying for its employees' attendance), or with each participant treated as a separate bill-to.

CEM supports many administrative and overhead tasks involved in hosting a conference, including: tracking booth and equipment needs for exhibitors and presenters; associating conference sessions with continuing education credits; creating nametags; and recording information on hotel facilities where the conference is held or where attendees might stay (Advantage does not get involved in creating actual hotel room reservations, however) or both.

You can create flexible pricing structures, including early, on-time, and late registration fees for the conference or its sessions. Similarly, you can specify a "cancellation fee" that is retained when the customer requests an on-time cancellation (late cancellations typically do not refund anything to the customer, although the CEM module allows you to decide that). You can also set up Advantage to release conference information to your website on a specific day, but then delay opening up conference registration until a later date.

If conference and event registrations are entered outside of Advantage---for example, through an external website or some other means, the CEM125 upload process is available to upload them. Conference attendees are excellent prospects for additional product cross-sells and upsells, and their records can be analyzed and selected through Advantage for future promotions.

If your company hosts conferences or similar events, or sells seats at such events, the CEM solution is the ideal tool for your integrated Advantage needs.

Calendar-based Pricing is the first of three webinars offered in September. Calendar pricing offers a way to price over a fixed time period (calendar-defined) regardless of the number of issues involved. We'll review this pricing method and how it differs from the other publication pricing options; how to set it up; and we'll run through a few examples of this pricing method in action.

Also in September will be: Handling Backorders in Advantage and SQL Backups with Advantage DB and a free demo of Donations in Advantage. Please visit the webinar registration page to reserve your spot.

• 9/16/2008
  Calendar-Based Pricing, Mike Miklosovic

• 9/24/2008
  Handling Backorder in Advantage, Molly Mathe

• 9/27/08
  Demo: Donations in Advantage, Mona Hidayet (Free)

• 9/30/2008
  SQL Backups with Advantage DB, Bill Pinard