You may wish to include promotional/informational material with certain of your inventory items.  For example, if someone buys a book on starting a business, you may wish to insert your catalog on small business products.  You may even wish or need to tie the shipment of the main inventory item to the availability and inclusion of the insertion--and have the main item go on backorder if the insertion is out of stock. The Order Inserts feature allows you to accomplish all of this.  Inclusion of the order inserts, which are created as separate Advantage inventory items, is based on rules that you maintain. 

System Option

This feature is activated by a system option, INSRTSEL.  This PRO-level option specifies the default (active) insert select set currently in use.  If this is blank, it is assumed that no order insert handling is in use. Only one Insert Select Set can be used at a time.

You can also specify the insert select to use for certain individual processes that can send out Order Inserts, at process request time.  The processes below include run-time options for Order Inserts selects.  If the run-time option is blank, the select identified in the INSRTSEL system option is used; if that is also blank, the Order Insert feature is not activated.

Processes that allow entry of an Order Insert select at run-time:

MST390
MST391
BCL360

Insert Assignment Rules

Each order-line is evaluated against your Insert Assignment Rules that are set up at the PROSEL workspace, as shown below:

This workspace allows you to set up an assignment structure that can have up to four levels with selection criteria at each level.  This workspace allows you to set up sophisticated assignment rules in the same way as other Advantage selects (e.g., the A/R billing selection and CIR renewal selection).

You can create assignment rules so that the inserts ship, for example, whenever the customer orders any product from a particular product class.  Or, alternatively, you can look at the customer's buying history and base assignment of the insertion on that.

At the lowest level, you indicate the Insert Set to use, as shown below.

In this example the CATALOG insert set is going to be used.  The order with order-lines falling into this lowest level would not be held if the insert item(s) is out of stock.  Nor would the insert item(s) be duplicated if they had already been assigned to an earlier order-line.

If an insert assignment set is set up to hold order lines and one or more insert items is unavailable, the order line is put on backorder and all other inserts for that order line are also put on backorder. The PRO360 – Backorder Fill process tracks and fills these backorders (main item + insert) when the insert becomes available. If rush-ship is requested for an item whose insert is out-of-stock (and the lowest level logic indicates that the order-line is to be held), a message is displayed stating that rush-ship for the item is not available.

If an order qualifies for two different insert assignment sets, each of which contain the same insert item, and one set allows duplicate items but the other one does not, the results will depend on the order in which the sets are processed.  If the set that allows duplicates is processed first, then the item is added once to the order.  If the set that does not allow duplicates is processed first, then the insert item is added twice.

Order Evaluation and Inventory Update

As orders are added at MSTDAT/OLN and MSTDAT/FST, the view routines query the order insert select logic to determine if order-lines for inserts need to be added to the order.  If so, these order-lines are automatically added by the system.

Inserts are always added with a quantity of 1, regardless of the quantity ordered for the main item.

The following order types do qualify for order inserts:

Invoiceable
Gratis
Preview

 The following order types do not qualify for order inserts:

Warehouse transfer
Miscellaneous
Proforma
Credit (return)
 Invoiceable order with postship = Y

These insert records may be viewed by Customer Service at the SVCDAT/OLN view…as they are included as separate lines directly on the order.

Insert items are marked with price source of 'INS', which can be seen at the MSTDAT/PRO and SVCDAT/OLN views during an Inquire function. 

ACS will be exhibiting at the annual UKSG (United Kingdom Serials Group) Conference and Exhibition to be held April 12 – 14 in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

If you are planning to attend the conference, please stop by the Advantage stand.

http://www.uksg.org/event/conference10

Spring can’t come soon enough in Michigan, but webinars are already in full-bloom.  In fact, we’ve already kicked off the season with a free webinar of the 2010R1 New Features, presented by Mona Hidayet.

Just around the corner, on March 10^th, Philippe Rowland will be presenting an overview of the WEB module interface. He’ll discuss how the module components, capsules, and methods work together in Advantage.

A popular topic from last year is back. A multi-series webinar on ARP Reconciliation will be presented by Bob Thornton on March 17^th and 19^th. In this webinar, Bob will cover how order and payment transactions travel through the system from data entry to the general ledger, along with running a trial balance for A/R and how to tie-out.  Don’t miss out on this two-session webinar!

April webinars are also available for registration:

April 6^th – Email Addresses in Advantage; e-mail address functionality in Advantage, and the setup and maintenance of e-mail addresses.

April 29^th – GL Mapping Setup; demonstrates mapping setup and the financial control structure.

Visit the webinar registration page today to register and guarantee your spot.  Contact me, Doug Moore, if you have further questions or suggestions for future webinars.

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!

A second meeting of European Advantage clients is planned for Tuesday, 18 May 2010 in London from 10:30 to 16:30.  In addition to providing another excellent opportunity to network with other Advantage clients, these topics will be covered:

- ACS news

- company strategic direction

- Advantage software futures

- latest product features

Who should attend?  Advantage super-users, system administrators, marketing users, people involved in the day-to-day operation of Advantage, and those in regular contact with ACS. 

The meeting will be sponsored by ACS (no cost to you) and lunch will be provided.  Please let Dan Heffernan know if you or someone in your organization would like to attend and has not received an email invitation.

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 John Thomas 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.

ACS is pleased to welcome Ashley Richter and Craig Labenz to the Advantage family.

 
Ashley joins the product development team led by Howie Brooks.  A native of Lake Orion, Michigan, Ashley attended the University of Michigan where she earned two degrees: a BSE in Computer Science and a BA in Asian Studies. 

After graduation, she settled in Ann Arbor and took a job with an automotive supplier where she performed code maintenance and new product development.  She was there about a year, until the company folded due to cutbacks in the auto industry, and then she came to ACS. 

In her leisure time, Ashley enjoys video games, plus pen-and-paper role playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons.  She lives in Ann Arbor, close to the ACS office.

Born and raised in Clinton Township, Michigan, Craig attended Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan where he earned a degree in Computer Science, with a minor in math.  After graduating in the spring of 2009, Craig then traveled to Argentina, where he spent four months assisting his brother with his writing and consulting business in that country.  Craig worked on web development and learned a lot from that experience.  His web development expertise was one reason he was hired at ACS, and he is a member of Matt Varblow’s eCommerce and Enterprise Integration group.

Craig lives in Ann Arbor and admits that he is “unhealthily obsessed with football.” He likes to play it—both on the field and on the video screen—as well as watch it.  College football is his favorite.  Craig also enjoys traveling and has been to 30 countries, visiting every continent except Australia.  He hopes to raise that number even higher.

Welcome Ashley and Craig!

Mention Philippe Rowland and the first things people bring up are his ready smile and booming laugh.  That infectious laugh can be heard all across the ACS office space and you can’t help but smile when you hear it.  But although Philippe does have a great sense of humor, he isn’t all just fun and games.  His serious side comes out when he is given a project to manage and there is nothing he likes better than defining a new project and coming up with a plan to make it work.  Philippe enjoys gathering the project team and setting the expectations before diving in to the work.  He learns something from each project he tackles, because he says that each one is a little different.

“Working with Philippe on a regular basis for the last several years has enabled us to work more efficiently and productively,” says Rita Cohen of Massachusetts Medical Society.  “Sometimes it is difficult not to consider Philippe an extension of our own internal ACS Core Team.  In addition to his being outstandingly professional, he also brings so much more to the table including being extremely knowledgeable of ACS, a great sense of humor,  and patience with his clients.  We value and greatly appreciate Philippe’s efforts on MMS’ behalf.”

Philippe currently works in the Client Services division, under team leader Paul DesRosiers.  The team handles projects such as upgrades, new module installations and the like.  “Philippe has always been a great teammate,” says Paul.  “I’m very impressed with his ability to work on many different projects while keeping them all in motion and their priorities straight.  Clients genuinely like working with him and often request his involvement on subsequent projects. He has a great attitude, a resounding laugh, and is always willing to help others.” 

Philippe began his career with ACS on April 1^st, 1999, which triggers a big grin and rollicking laughter as the significance of the April Fool’s Day sinks in.  He started as a systems analyst in the implementations group and worked on several new client installations before joining the team focusing primarily on upgrades.  He has also spent time in the support center and done some account management.

“I’ve worked with Philippe on two upgrade projects and he is always courteous and professional,” says Judy Bramlett of Boy Scouts of America.  “On several occasions we have put his patience to a test and he always prevails. “

Before coming to ACS, Philippe worked as a technical trainer for Microsoft technical certifications at New Horizons.  Prior to that, he worked at a former ACS client from the old T & B Computing days, JOBO Fototechnic, where he used Intact 50, the forerunner to Advantage.

Philippe grew up in South Bend, Indiana, as one of 8 children of a French mother and an English father.  As a result, he enjoys dual American and British citizenship.  Two of his siblings live in the United Kingdom, while the rest reside in the Midwest here in the USA.  Philippe attended Indiana University, earning a BS in physics and math.  He moved to Michigan after college because his family had moved here and after meeting his future wife in Ann Arbor, he decided to settle in the area.  He now lives in Chelsea, with his wife, Henriette and their four children: Marie, a poli-sci student at the University of Michigan, Anna, a nursing student at Hope College, Lukas, a high school senior and Olivia, a high school freshman.  

Most of Philippe’s leisure time is spent in family activities, but he enjoys downhill skiing when he gets the opportunity.  He would like to travel all over the world, but knows that it will have to wait until the last of his brood is through with college.  However, Henriette is Austrian and she and Philippe and the kids visit her family there almost every summer. Philippe speaks French and a little German, as well as the language of laughter, which needs no translation.

Advantage 2010R1 has tons of useful new features and functionality, including:

·         With this release, you can incorporate the following into your premium fulfillment flow: 1) you can send a premium set to the referring customer on the order (as opposed to either the bill-to or ship-to); and 2) you can impose a "lifetime maximum" on either premium sets or regular premiums…effectively limiting how many times a given customer may receive the premium set/regular premium on the current order, and across all orders going forward.

·         A customer service pop-up has been added to the Subscription Lookup dialog, which allows you to estimate the price of a subscription given the following input parameters: location, copies, delivery code, and optional promotion code and promotion choice.  The system returns the rate per copy, postage, tax, and total amount.  This can be a useful tool to answer "what would it cost?" questions from your customers.  A Web capsule is also available to allow you to present the same functionality on your website.

·         A search field has been added to Advantage filter dialogs.  Many of these dialogs consist of lengthy lists of fields, and the search tool can help you locate the fields you want quickly.  The search is applied to the field caption, actual field name, and field reference name.

·         A "customer permissions" feature is now available, which offers a greatly expanded alternative to the customer promote/do not promote flags.  The feature allows you to structure questionnaires for presentation either to reps at Advantage screens or customers online, which in turn will capture and store the customer responses in a dedicated table.  You can store separate permissions settings for the customer at any of several levels, such as publication, office, and company.  As with the ‘promote/do not promote flags,’ the permission settings are available for selects and reporting to help you determine how the customer should (or should not) be promoted.  

·         The report viewer has been rewritten with this release.  Reports are now displayed in a print-preview-like dialog, with expanded tools such as zoom in/out, and on-the-fly resizing so that you can test the report appearance on different printer page sizes.

For more information on 10R1, contact your ACS Account Manager.

Fifty people descended on the New  Maison Dupuy Hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans January 13 - 15 for the annual Advantage User Group meeting.  The 41 clients representing 23 different companies were joined by 9 representatives from ACS.  

Although the conference officially opened on Wednesday night, three discussion sessions were planned for Wednesday afternoon for early arrivals and almost everyone attended them.  Attendees had their choice of “XML ICEDIS Standards for Academic Publishers,” led by Andy Wright of Oxford University Press, assisted by Dan Heffernan of ACS, or “Implementing Marketing Strategies in Advantage,” led by Nikki Lorenz of Kalmbach, aided by Phil Montgomery of ACS.  Much meaningful discussion took place during these highly interactive sessions.  They were followed by an ACS-led AMB and BI module update/forum led by Dan Heffernan and Phil Montgomery.  They were able to report on the latest additions to these popular modules.

The meeting officially opened with a vendor-sponsored meet-and-greet reception Wednesday evening.  Representatives from two vendors, Jim Jankowski from Ladd & Associates and brothers George and Richard Coriaty of Sir Speedy, attended the conference.  (Ladd is a circulation modeling software provider and Sir Speedy is a print-on-demand operation.)  After the reception, many attendees headed down Bourbon Street to be amazed at the eclectic mix of elegant restaurants, famous music halls and the other, more low-brow establishments. 

On Thursday morning, after a welcome and introductions by Andy Wright, the outgoing AUG chairman, Kevin Carr, president of Motor Information Systems, delivered an informative and entertaining keynote address.   His talk was entitled, Change or Perish, and was a captivating case study of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s rise to prominence over the course of the 20^th century only to be followed by a rapid and nearly-complete collapse in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.  Carr’s main point was that, due to a number of factors, EB did not adequately prepare for the technological changes that were making their way into the industry in the early 1990’s.  By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late.  Their short-sighted refusal to acknowledge the realities of the changing marketplace led to their inevitable demise.  Kevin cautioned the attendees to make sure they don’t make that same mistake.

Rounding out the program on Thursday morning was a vendor presentation on circulation modeling by Ladd & Associates and Kristie Fischer of Kalmbach Publishing.  Kristie, a user of the Ladd modeling software, explained how Kalmbach uses this application effectively by using data from Advantage to project a number of scenarios ranging from how many magazines to produce for a particular issue to how much revenue could be expected from a change in approach to renewals efforts.  Jim Jankowski  of Ladd Associates then demonstrated how to set up and use the Ladd application.

The food at the New Maison Dupuy hotel was superb and Thursday’s lunch was no exception.  Yum, yum!

Dan Heffernan, ACS VP of Product Direction, had the dreaded after-lunch time slot and tried to keep everyone awake with a colorful presentation of the latest ACS news, including current initiatives and the importance of keeping in touch with customers in order for ACS to provide real software for real life – at least in the publishing/information content business.  He succeeded in holding the attention of the entire group and gave them much to think about.

Brandon Marsh of Penton Media then led a session in which he reviewed the results of a survey done prior to the conference in which people were asked to identify and rate the interfaces that they use.  The list included credit card, address cleansing, manifest shipping and other interfaces.  Attendees found this information helpful and ACS will be putting this on its website for ongoing reference.

Brandon’s short presentation was then followed by roundtable discussions on several of those interfaces.  Participants found this exchange with one another engaging.

The day concluded with an AUG business meeting in which Kevin Quinn of Wolters Kluwer Health was tapped as chair for the next term.  Although some in the audience suspected that he was bribed, others responded that “it’s about time.”  Also coming on board were Sue Sherrill of the AMA, and Ricky Land of National Auto Research.

Dinner Thursday evening was aboard a paddleboat on the Mississippi River.  It was a little on the chilly side, but the lights of New Orleans from the water were breathtaking.

Starting off the Friday activities was a presentation of Advantage New Features, given by Mona Hidayet.  The reps from Speedy Printing then gave a presentation on Print-on-Demand, and after that, the group broke up into small groups to attend the first of two hour-long roundtable discussions. Topics included  Packages/combo orders, Print-on-demand, Promoting for Renewals, and Duplicate Consolidation. These roundtable discussions have become an important event at the conference, since everyone gets a chance to talk and all find something helpful to take away with them.

After a short break, the roundtables were repeated and attendees were able to attend a second discussion of their choice.  The conference ended shortly after noon on Friday.

According to a survey performed after the conference, everyone who attended was either satisfied or highly satisfied.  There was a tangible comfortable spirit at the conference, which even the new attendees felt.  If you missed it this year, make plans now to attend in 2011.