Client Specific Solutions

We have done numerous developments and customizations within and outside SAP to suit the client's specific requirements.

Following are some of the critical developments:

• The classified pricing was a major challenge, because of the complexity in the pricing and the special discount offers for repeating the advertisements. As he standard pricing of SAP could not address this, we did some major ABAP developments to achieve this.
• The Classified Ad Matter Editor of PPI had some major drawbacks in comparison to the requirements of Malayala Manorama. The Editor allows only one Character Type where as the Client want multiple Character Type and each needs to be priced separately. They wanted to add some special characters to the matter, which had to be priced separately. After several rounds of discussionsand R&D, finally the customer decided not to use the Editor provided by PPI and asked us to develop a tool using the Indesign CS3 to cater to their needs. We developed a robust system, which caters to all the Malayala Manorama requirements and more.
  
  Some of the highlights of this tool are:
  
  
  • Template based Matter Composer improves the speed of the front desk operation.
  • Multiple Template Viewer allows the user to show the same matter in different formats to the customer.
  • Facility to have different pricing for different special effects special effects like Special Character, Drop cap, Underline, Background & Font Colors.
  • Multi-Language & Multi-Character Type Matter, with different pricing.
  • Customized Word/Line counting, which helps to count lengthy words as more than one and count negligible words as zero.
  • History of all the changes.
• Most of the Personal Ads in Malayala Manorama like Wedding Anniversary, Death Anniversary, etc. repeats every year and the user duplicates the previous year's order. As there is no feature in MAM to display the Ad Material and create an Order based on that material, we developed a separate module outside SAP and integrated with MAM, so that the moment the user selects the photo, the system copies the previous year's order and saves it with necessary changes.
• The Upselling feature in MAM recommends more cost effective publicity for the Advertiser. This feature recommends the additional editions the Advertiser can take for getting more visibility with less cost. As the system was not showing the total value of each recommendation, we developed a separate pricing engine outside SAP and integrated with the MAM Order.
• Whenever a new Heading is introduced in Classifieds, the client used to give a few additional editions to the Customer as a Promotional Offer. As there was no facility to automate this feature in MAM, we developed a new function within SAP, with which the user can generate additional editions for a specific set of Ads just before the pagination.

• The Receipt entry option in SAP is just like a Journal. The client wanted to capture the Cheque details like the Issuing Bank & Branch, Payable Bank & Branch, Cheque No & Date, etc. They also wanted the system to derive the correcting operating bank based on certain rules. They also wanted the system to generate a Cheque Register for sending it to the concerned bank. In order to achieve all these facilities we created a new screen for Receipt entry with in SAP. This was used for Advertisement, Subscription and Circulation.
• There is a case where the Bank can deny payment against a cheque due to various reasons. The details given by the bank are the Cheque No, Issuing Bank and the Reason. There are hundreds of Cheques being entered everyday in Advertisement, Subscription and Circulation. Hence, locating a particular Cheque is not very easy. We created a screen, where the user can easily search and locate the cheque and reverse the entry on a click of the button. The system internally identifies the correct modules and effects the necessary changes as per the module requirements.

• In IS Media, for every issue a new order has to be created. In the case of the Daily Newspaper, this has to be done every day. For each Agent/Retailer a base copy is maintained. Every day the required number of copies are increased or decreased, if needed. This increase can be for that day alone or it can be permanent. For this, we developed a new screen to do the increase and decrease, and another option to create orders in one shot using these values.
• The subscription copies are normally sent by Post or Courier. In certain areas these are delivered through the Circulation Agents. This is not available in SAP. We developed an option to bring in such copies from Subscription to the Agent Order and made a facility to credit a Handling Charge to the Agent's Account.

Our Client has a Subscriber base of more than 500,000. In order to maintain this high Subscriber base, they come out with many offers like Multi-Publication schemes, Multi-Company schemes and Promotional Gifts. It is impossible to define such complicated schemes in IS Media. We created a separate screen to achieve this complex requirement. We also created the Subscription Order separately in order to match with these schemes. The system then creates the standard order from this order.