Spring 2012 - AuSuM Systems

Spring 2012
www.ausum.net
The Newsletter of the AUSUM Systems™ User Community
AUSUM User Group Meeting 2012 is
returning to South Beach
BY LYN S E Y R O S E
This year’s User Group Meeting was chosen by the
majority of the Users and will be returning to the Hilton
Bentley in South Beach, Florida, October 29 through
November 2. This year’s User Group Meeting will be a
little bit different than the meeting in the past. This year
we will be hosting the meeting for PAM™ Users October
29 and 30 and SaRA™ Users on November 1 and 2. The
decision was made after much feedback and the ability
to have more one on one with users.
Our New Training Facility
Opens in Downtown Miami
BY A N D R E W M U E L L E R
Currently, we are developing an agenda for the sessions,
as well as another fun reception! Be ready to learn, share
knowledge of the system and interact with the growing
community of professionals who, like you, continue to
provide valuable input which positively affects future
releases of PAM™, SaRA™, AudRey™ and ASHley™.
Please check our website soon to get more information
on the user group meeting. We look forward to seeing you there and another successful meeting! Should
you have any questions, please contact Lynsey Rose at
lrose@m2ns.com or 614-798-5177 ext. 1001.
AuSuM Systems has a brand new training facility located
in downtown Miami, Florida! We are dedicated to the
continued knowledge transfer of the AuSuM Systems
to our clients in order to maximize their use of our software. The training room has stadium seating and comfortably fits 15 people and includes a 12 foot projector
screen, 42 inch touch screen monitor, wireless internet
access, and a refreshments area in the back of the room.
Customers that choose to take advantage of our state
of the art training facility will receive training at a discounted rate (discount depends on number of days and
users). Three customers have already utilized our facility
CONTINUED ON THE FOLLOWING PAGE
The Newsletter of the AUSUM Systems™ User Community
Spring 2012
New Training Facility
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
within the first two months of it being opened! Along
with customer specific training, we are accepting suggestions for our free monthly training sessions as we are
currently in the process of putting a calendar together
for the upcoming months. These session will last one or
two days based on the topic(s) being covered and will
be provided to customers at no cost.
We will continue to
provide customers onsite and online training
as desired. To schedule a
one-on-one or group training session either at our
new facility, on-site at your
office, or online, please
contact Lynsey Rose at
lrose@m2ns.com or (614)
798-5177.
Our new training center
features stadium seating and comfortably
fits 15 people. It also
has a 12 foot projector screen (pictured to
the left), 42 inch touch
screen monitor, and
wireless internet access.
Meet the Newest Member of the AUSUM Product Family
BY A N D R E W M U E L L E R
AuSuM Systems would like to
welcome our newest software
CanDi™ to the AuSuM family;
CanDi™ stands for Collections and
Debt Inventory. CanDi™ allows for
multiple iterations of demand letters to be sent out electronically
and via postal mail. Along with
that, payment plans can be setup
and maintained in CanDi™ for a
specific policy or account. These
payment plans can be automated
and trigger notifications for your internal staff to
follow up or collect payments as needed. CanDi™
can be intergrated with PAM™ to automatically create
a collection item in CanDi™ on policies that have an
Additional Premium greater than zero. This eliminates
any manual process in which a
collection item would have to
be generated. All the significant
policy information from PAM™
will feed directly into the CanDi™
collection item. As with any software in the AuSuM family, CanDi™
comes with fully customizable
reports builder functionality. This
allows for quick graphical representation of where outstanding
debts can be found.
The CanDi™ workflow process can be customizable to
the business needs of any organization’s collections
and debt process. To schedule a CanDi™ demo, please
contact Andrew Mueller at amueller@m2ns.com or
(614) 602-4039.
The Newsletter of the AUSUM Systems™ User Community
Spring 2012
Welcome The Newest
Members of Our Team
BY JOEL MOR GAN AND MARY FARINA
Joel Morgan
Joel Morgan has been in the insurance industry for 12
years. He started his insurance career selling property
and casualty insurance for various insurance carriers.
Joel then moved away from selling and started to work
in loss control. Joel has been working in loss control for
the past seven years.
During that time Joel was introduced to AuSuM Systems
and more specifically the SaRA™ system. Joel led his
company in the implementation and set up of the SaRA™
system, and has been working with AuSuM/SaRA™ for
the past two and a half years. At M2NS/AuSuM Systems
we are very happy to bring Joel’s insurance industry
knowledge and SaRA expertise to our team.
Mary Farina
Mary Farina has over twenty five years in the insurance
industry with a concentration in Business Analysis,
Premium Audit, Customer and Information Systems support. She was granted the title “Subject Matter Expert”
in the development and support of three Premium
Audit software systems, with the last one being PAM™.
As the previous Project Manager, she was an integral
part in customizing PAM™ to enable the Audit department to efficiently assign and manage their work volume. She feels that having the flexibility to customize
your own PAM™ site to address your individual business
needs is of crucial importance to any organization.
Mary’s role at AuSuM will be to invoke her many years
of Commercial Lines insurance and Premium Audit
experience as a Business Analyst. Understanding and
translating user needs into requirements, gathering
documents, and contributing to the current team’s
high quality of support.
Ashley/Audrey Installer
BY GAYAT H R I V E N K ATA R AMA N I
Tired of elaborate installation procedures of software
installation? There is an easy
way out. The Ashley/Audrey
Installer is the way to go.
The earlier process involved
installing each of the software from the internet or
through a CD manually. The new interactive installer
installs the necessary software on your machine and
also handles the required configuration set up. Just
launch the .exe file and it will guide you through a series
of screens installing Internet Information Server, .NET
framework, MSXML6, Windows RTM, Powershell, SQL
Server 2008 and Cold Fusion 8. The installer is built to
handle both Windows XP and Windows 7. The code
automatically detects the operating system on the machine and installs the appropriate software version.
We have an enhancement coming soon on the Installer
where, in addition to installing the software, the program also synchronizes the data between the host
and client. The feature will enable the users to work
offline in PAM™/SaRA™ on their local machine and synchronize with the host system when connected online.
So the users don’t have to be connected to the internet
to work on their inventory which saves a lot of time
and resources.
The Newsletter of the AUSUM Systems™ User Community
Spring 2012
Reports Builder is Emerging into a Powerful Tool
BY R I C H A R D S WA L I N
Since its inception, the concept of the Reports Builder
has been to provide a report generation capability
tailored to the need of the user. Although it is not
a panacea, it is a significant improvement from the
approach of custom building reports.
Our goal has been to continually grow its capability
and to enhance its ease of use. To that end, numerous
changes have been incorporated, including:
• The ‘Field Name’ column now contains displayed
names rather than database variable names.
• Calculated variables are color coded to annotate
those columns that can’t be used for criteria testing.
• The ‘Select Tables’ options are re-ordered and now
color coded as well.
• Tables are categorized by Audit/Survey data, ancillary data, personnel and organizations, independent data, and report unique tables. Numerous
database tables have been added, bringing the
number of audit data tables to seventeen and number of survey data tables to twenty-three.
• Date format checking has been added to alleviate
the issue that a number of you have encountered
when a corrupted date format were saved within a
report.
In addition, the documentation has been revised to
better capture the content of each page, with popups and links to greater detailed discussions and
examples. Many links are on each page and can be
found via underlined text. All of the available tables
now have a short description characterizing the data
contained within. This summary is accessible via
‘Select Tables’. Clicking a particular table name will
display a list and description of every available variable within that table.
Additional data tables will be added as the need
arises. Presently under development is the capability
to display the difference between two dates, addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division of numerical
values in two columns. Already existing is the ability
to count, sum, and average values.
The Newsletter of the AUSUM Systems™ User Community
Spring 2012
Upcoming Trade Shows and Events
Here’s where we’ll be over the next few months. Come out and visit us when we’re in your area.
RIMS
Philadelphia, PA
April 15-18, 2012
Booth #317
NSIPA
Las Vegas, NV
April 18-22, 2012
Booth #TBA
RILA
Dallas, TX
April 23-24, 2012
Booth #514
NFPA
Las Vegas, NV
June 11-13, 2012
Booth #2125
Recommendation/Risk Improvement Status Length
BY J O E L M O R G A N
In the past the “Recommendation/Risk Improvement”
status box could only be displayed in one horizontal
oreintation. That can be difficult for some companies
that have several different recommendation status
catagories. As you can see in the picture below, the
data and text tends to run together.
In the next release companies will have the ability to
display the same box in a new vertical display box
(shown below).
This new format is much easier to read for companies
that have a lot of categories or those that wish to add
more categories to their current list.
It is very easy to make this change in the system. Simply login to the system as an Admin user and then go
to Admin ---> Recommendation/Risk Improvement
Implementation and click on the box “Flip Recommendation Table on Main Survey Page” (shown below). Finally click on Save.