AUSUM User Group Meeting 2012 is returning to South Beach

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1 Spring The Newsletter of the AUSUM Systems User Community AUSUM User Group Meeting 2012 is returning to South Beach 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. BY LYNSEY ROSE Our New Training Facility Opens in Downtown Miami 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 ext BY ANDREW MUELLER 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

2 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) 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 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 BY ANDREW MUELLER 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)

3 Welcome The Newest Members of Our Team Joel Morgan BY JOEL MORGAN AND MARY FARINA 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 GAYATHRI VENKATARAMANI 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.

4 Reports Builder is Emerging into a Powerful Tool 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. BY RICHARD SWALIN 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.

5 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 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. BY JOEL MORGAN 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. In the next release companies will have the ability to display the same box in a new vertical display box (shown below).