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Hearst Magazines UK Goes Live on Advantage
by Cindy Mikol
Hearst Magazines UK is now live on Advantage at CDS Global, completing a five month migration project. Hearst Magazines UK is one of the largest clients for the UK division of CDS Global.
After having worked through a busy holiday season to ensure the migration was delivered on time, Hearst Magazines UK was successfully migrated onto the Advantage platform in early March.
The CDS Global core project team included: Dom Toasland, Sharon Foxon, Anne Sentance, Agi Scott, Steve Merton, Bhavya Nagaraja, and Shelton Masuku. The extraordinary efforts and contributions from the staff were fundamental in ensuring the migration was delivered successfully and met the go-live deadline.
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ACS Welcomes Nick Glauch
by Cindy Mikol
Nick Glauch is the newest member of the ACS Client Services division, working as a project manager reporting to Levi Hyssong. Nick worked previously at the Altarum Institute, a non-profit healthcare research and consulting company, where he spent three years as a project manager involved in electronic records adoption for Rural Health Clinics, Federally Qualified Health Centers, and private health systems. Before that, he worked at the University of Michigan in the development office doing system implementation.
Nick earned a Bachelor's of Arts degree from U of M in economics and philosophy, but he found early on that he had an aptitude for managing projects. In addition to his studies and job, Nick has led endowment-building campaigns on behalf of public school districts (including his hometown district of Traverse City, Michigan) and managed political campaigns for state office.
Nick rationalizes his interest in technology as an extension of his background in philosophy. Software, he says, is really the implementation of a system of logic. He taught himself Java and Python programming languages and knows his way around software code. This ability is helping him to quickly ramp up on Advantage.
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Problem Solving and Growth
by Dan Heffernan
From our inception, there has been an attitude at ACS which I'll call "can-solve." It means we go all-out to come up with innovative solutions to business challenges. Recently, I overheard an experienced business analyst explaining to a newer analyst out in the hallway late one Friday that "we can't just leave this problem over the weekend for Monday. We need to take care of it. Not solving it is not an option around here." I was struck by how eloquently the experienced ACSer encapsulated our culture. We bend over backwards to help our clients. We take problem-solving very seriously, both professionally and personally. In fact, it's that ACS "ownership" of the problem which our clients say makes them trust us and stay with us.
Forgive me for tooting our own horn a bit, but this "can-solve" culture is one of the differentiating characteristics of ACS. And I think it's one of the many attributes of our company which helps to explain our growth over the last 3 years. We've grown by about 24% in employees since 2010 - a substantial number, especially where our headquarters is located (Michigan, USA). Why is demand up? Because our clients want us to develop more and more innovative and business-problem-solving functionality into the Advantage engine, enabling them to grow and to meet the ever-changing demands of their marketers and visionaries.
And that's what we do. We spend about 90,000 hours a year on new development to Advantage, ever increasing its scope, reach, and application to changing business needs.
VIEW FULL STORY
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Workflow Events in Advantage
by Dan Heffernan, Cindy Mikol and Matt Varblow
The 2013R1 release introduced an exciting new feature which we call Workflow Events. This is the basis for functionality which will expand exponentially over time as more events and actions are supported and users discover its value.
Workflow Events provides a background service that continuously monitors events...such as payment entry or an agreement change...against configurable rules, and allows you to set up actions based on those events and rules.
Here are a few examples of how you might use the workflow event feature:
Any time a customer is assigned to a collection agency: cancel all of the customer's subscriptions, add a customer note, and use a pre-defined letter template to notify the customer via email.
Any time an access agreement changes: send a notification to the CMS system.
Future uses might include such things as an "Order Complete" event. You could define a rule such that email is automatically sent to the customer any time that event occurs. An "Order Shipped" event might trigger a similar action. Perhaps an "Order Complete" event would also trigger email to the warehouse if the "rush ship" flag is set.
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Creating Packages
by Mike Miklosovic
Advantage allows you to sell some of your inventory items in sets or packages. Package set up was restructured in revision 2013R1 and moved to a tab on the inventory view (INVDAT). This Tech Tip explains how to set up a simple package - a set of items sold as one item.
Create the package item
1) First step - create the package inventory item at the inventory view (INVDAT).
- This is an item with the Package box checked.
- Also create the non-inventoried warehouse entry for this item.
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Premium Set Pay-Up Options
by Molly Mathe
The earning of premium sets can be tied to payment criteria; for example, the premium set can be earned when the order is n% paid-up. The paid-up percentage is not always straight payments against the invoice. Advantage considers miscellaneous credits, gift certificates, etc. to be recognized forms of credit/payment.
Gratis Product Orders
Gratis product orders where the freight amount was also 0.00 are always considered 100% paid up.
CIR 0.00 Orders
Subscription (CIR) orders where the order total = 0.00 are always considered 100% paid up.
Unable to Find Debit at customer receivables view
If the invoice does not exist in Accounts Receivable, the order is not considered as paid-up.
Calculation of Paid-Up on Invoices
If the invoice does not fall into one of the three categories above, the paid-up percentage is calculated as follows:
TOTAL PAID
+ DISCOUNT AMOUNT
+ QUALIFYING MISCELLANEOUS CREDITS
+ OTHER SUBSCRIPTION CANCEL CREDITS
- ORIGINAL SUBSCRIPTION CANCEL CREDITS
- REFUND REQUEST THAT WAS CREDITED TOWARDS THE INVOICE
- CREDITS/REVERSALS APPLIED TO THE INVOICE
- QUALIFIED WRITE-OFF AMOUNT
VIEW FULL STORY
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American Psychiatric Association, Gannett Government Media and Liturgy Training Publications Complete Upgrades
by Cindy Mikol
Congratulations to the American Psychiatric Association, Gannett Government Media and Liturgy Training Publications on their recent upgrades to Advantage 2012r1.
Shruti Kulkarni spearheaded the project for APA, while the ACS team included Philippe Rowland as project manager, Linda Woodman as lead engineer, Larry Kleber as upgrade engineer, and Ray Zick as technical team leader.
At Army Times, Neal Hawkins led the charge with Philippe Rowland again serving as the ACS project manager. He was ably assisted by lead engineer Martha Krieg, upgrade engineer Larry Kleber, and tech team leader Ray Zick.
It was the first upgrade for Liturgy Training Publications and Amal Vellappillil managed the project for them. The ACS team was again Philippe Rowland, Martha Krieg, Larry Kleber and Ray Zick, with Linda Woodman, Paul DesRosiers and Eric Burbeck assisting at the end.
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Check Out Upcoming Webinarsby Angie Moore
 We have an exciting list of new topics for this year as well as some popular repeats. Most topics will showcase the new .Net release of Advantage while still giving you tips to use at your current revision. Topics of the 20+ webinars scheduled from now through the end of September include: - Getting Around in .NET (May 13)
- FREE--20123R1 New Features (May 16)
- Packages Redesigned (May 23)
- AMB Data Entry and Administration (June 6)
- MSTPAY/ARPPAY (June 13)
- Customer Service letters (July 11)
View the rest of the schedule and reserve your spot soon by clicking the link below. https://support.advantagecs.com/webinar/ As always, email me with any questions or ideas.
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Visit Advantage at These Industry Events
We'll be exhibiting at the following trade shows and conferences this year. Plan to stop by and say hello if you're in attendance.
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Advantage Computing
Systems
Cindy Mikol
Editor
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Visit Advantage at These Exhibitions & Conferences
SSP (Society of Scholarly Publications)
June 5 - 7
San Francisco
Publishing Business Expo September 23 - 25
New York
Frankfurt Book Fair
October 9 - 13
Frankfurt, Germany
Media Next (FOLIO:)
October 28 - 30
New York
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