Advantage
Advantage by Advantage Computing Systems of Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
Target Market: Sales $10M & up, USD
Clients: 45+ publishers
Geographic Area: United States
Email: cmorp@advantagecs.com (Cindy Morphew, Marketing Director)
Phone: 734-327-3600
Web: www.advantagecs.com
Functionality: Packages for circulation and product orders, along with optional modules for advertising management, book clubs, conference and event management, membership, reprints management, royalties, commissions, E-Commerce, EDI, telesales and more.
Summary
Advantage’s key strength is direct sales and direct marketing.
If your publishing operation is focused on direct sales to consumers or mining your marketing list for a targeted sales campaign involving books, subscriptions (for journals, newsletters or magazines) or conferences Advantage excels in doing things that few systems can do.
Advantage can process orders for a book, a subscription and a conference registration on the same order.
Their Access Management and Billing module allows you to you to create access agreements under which content parameters and participants are established. Authentication routines enable you to evaluate whether access is allowed and under what conditions. All aspects of expires, renewals, and invoicing are handled. You can also set up a participant to view only a portion of the data available—so-called “personalized content.”
Their Book Club module allows you to create product series for book club members. For each series you can select the members, choose which products they receive and generate orders for fulfillment. More importantly, the system can product offerings and the timing of order generation based on responses.
The Conference and Event Management module handles registration, invoicing, and informational tracking for conferences and/or events. You can link presenters with sessions associated with a conference; session attendees can also earn continuing education credits. This module supports pre-conference sessions and guest sessions, while flexible pricing allows you to charge different amounts for the first attendee, second attendee, etc. and also enables you to offer variable early, on-time, and late registration fees. Many professional book publishers have found that hosted events can make a sizeable contribution to their bottom line.
Advantage is not for every publisher; however, if your operations include book clubs, direct sales, event management or the marketing of personalized content I would evaluate Advantage.
Their impressive client list includes the Weekly Reader, Health Communications (publishers of the Chicken Soup for the Soul line of books), Oxford University Press and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Vendor Information:
“Long before it was a marketing buzzword, Advantage was customer-centric with subscriptions and products completely integrated. A central customer focus – driven by our strategic product direction – shapes everything the software is programmed to do. We review our user interface continuously to make it as easy to use as it can be, while still providing immediate access to all the data a user might need. The 2005 release – Advantage: The Next Generation – offered a major interface redesign, with a whole new streamlined, intuitive and easy-to-learn look and feel.
Advantage user requests are the main source of new features in each new release. These outstanding features include:
- Combination orders—i.e. a subscription, a book and a conference registration on the same order
- Integrated promotions across multiple products and subscriptions
- Unsurpassed data access through 300+ standard reports (many customizable), online screens, ad hoc reports, pivot tables and data cubes, plus MS Access and Crystal
- Completely integrated accounts receivable
- Automated customer service letters and emails
- A completely integrated online and real-time E-commerce interface
Operating Systems/Databases Options
Options for Advantage include Windows, Unix or Linux operating systems, with Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server as database choices. Client/Server communication is via TCP/IP sockets.”
