Hello everyone,

Alistair approached the Victorian Ingres User Group looking for
assistance. He is not a subscriber to the Ingres or OpenROAD news
lists. If you think your organisation can help, please reply to him
directly at: alistair-at-mca-dot-com-dot-au

Paul White
President VIUG
pwhite-at-peerlessit-dot-com-dot-au


Alistair writes....

CMC Australasia is a wholesale distributor of books, music product and
training course material. While traditionally we have distributed to
bookstores, we have been moving into more direct selling especially with
course materials and the product involved in running and supporting
those activities.

We began developing applications using Ingres an 1988 and have been
using those apps to run the business here in Australia and New Zealand
since the early 90's. We are now in the position of having legacy
applications which have been developed in ABF and are currently running
in character mode on Ingres 6.4 We are faced with the need of either
doing some major upgrades and re-writes or sourcing an already developed
suite of applications that can be supported out of house.

As we are dealing more directly with customers, the whole CRM side of
the application has become important.

We continue to support our bookshop customers as a distributor as well
as supply periodicals on subscription. Training course material is
supplied directly to organisations and we track the progress and key
personnel involved with each course.

As a book and music distribution company the software creates royalty
liabilities based on the conditions of sale.. As the amounts generated
by these royalty calculations form part of the COG it is essential to
calculate them at the time of sale. While we currently use a separate
(legacy) program to distribute these royalties to their respective
owners, there could be merit in having it all within the same program.

While there are some applications out there specific to the book
industry, they are platform dependant and not that easily adaptable to
our specific requirements.

Somewhere out there may be an application provider who has already
addressed the peculiarities of the book and music industry, has a good
grasp of the CRM requirements of direct selling and is using Ingres! It
could well be that such a provider may be able to take some of what we
have already developed and incorporate into their existing applications.

Alongside the standard GL, AR, and AP packages we are looking for good,
flexible OE and IV packages that include the ability to support
warehouse distribution, subscription tracking and fulfillment and the
ability to track the progress of organizations using our course
materials.

For futher details please contact Alistair Stevenson at
alistair-at-mca-dot-com-dot-au


________________________________

From: alistair
Sent: Friday, 28 October 2005 9:30 AM
To: Paul White
Subject: RE: CMCA

Hi Paul

Thanks for chasing me up for yesterday's meeting. While not an open
road user, I was able to follow enough of it to get a tiny insight into
some of the possibilities of open Road.

You suggested I write a couple of paragraphs on what we were looking for
so you could post it on the user group site.. I've attached an 'off the
top of my head' summary.

Look forward to hearing from you

Regards

Alistair