American Collegiate Marketing (ACM) experienced increased business outcomes and enhanced customer satisfaction with timely IBM i batch jobs completion.

• In 1974, Founder and CEO, Irv Lesher, wanted to give college students a break. He believed that giving them a discount on magazine subscriptions would benefit both the students and the magazine publishers. He was right! And so, the parent company, American Collegiate Marketing, was born.
• Today, they sell discounted magazine subscriptions online to students, teachers, and just about everyone in the USA, and their commitment to superior service is stronger than ever.
• Their call center is still located in our company headquarters, right down the hall from the President/CEO. They work directly with publishers to ensure fast and accurate delivery.
• They are proud to say we've helped over 5 million Americans save a billion dollars on magazines!

Challenges

• ACM user software programs are menu driven and collectively called FAMIS (Fulfillment and Marketing Intelligence System).
• Order entry and payment entry was done during the day and evening hours. All data entry records were batched as they got created.
• At Midnight everything switched over to batch operations. This includes nightly Order Edits, Credit Card Processing for any transactions not handled via the website, and others, various reports on the day’s activities.
• During batch processing when things encountered bugs and crashes, it will be almost always happened after Midnight and will have to have the problem fixed immediately because all additional processing would come to a halt until the crashed processes were fixed.
• ACM had a shortage of trained IBM i skilled resources who can fix the high severity issues/abends immediately. This affected their business growth and customer satisfaction.