Inside ASI-AP

I realised I forgot to post about my May Boardroom luncheon. I did however post about the June luncheon for CEO's here, including a copy of my speech.

The May lunch was actually our inaugural "MD Boardroom Luncheon" function. The purpose of these luncheons is to get our customers together, over lunch, in our boardroom, for some networking and information sharing.

This function however has 3 differentiators from our regular functions - firstly, the attendees are selected by their functional titles. For May, we invited CFO's and Financial Controllers; for June, we had CEO's and GM's. Secondly, it is a classly lunch - 2 courses, sit down, waiters, wine, and excellent food. And finally, I am the host and the speaker.

I used the same theme as we used for our Executive Briefing in 2006 by asking our guests "what keeps you awake at night?". Of course, related to iMIS and their business systems generally. After lunch, I spoke on iMIS 15 and what it means from the CFO/finance manager perspective. A transcript of my speech is copied in below.

------

Luncheon speech for Finance contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 15 May 2007

Good afternoon and welcome. It is my great pleasure to host our boardroom luncheon today, the first of what will become a monthly event on the ASI calendar.

We have 2 objectives today. Firstly, networking. Networking – ohhh, I hear some of you sigh - not another networking event, our calendar is already full of them! Well that may be true, but today is a little different. Firstly, all of you in the room work for non-profit organizations. Sure, there are a number of non-profit industry associations – like AuSAE, FIA, Associations Forum – that run industry events. As an aside, you may be surprised to learn that the iMIS community is larger than all of those organizations. So in effect we have our own little industry association right here, with iMIS in common. But we need to go a step further. The second thing all of you have in common is that you are either CFO’s or financial controllers. And for that reason, I know you have common challenges that you face in your jobs. Finally, most of your organizations are non-competitive, which means peer networking, sharing problems and solutions, is very real. Comparing fee structures, online renewal rates, % of members paying via credit card or BPay, reconciliation methodologies – is something that most of you can easily talk about at your table.

The second objective is to provide you with the latest information on iMIS 15. Which I will be doing after lunch.

So – let’s get started. You have 2 tasks to complete before we serve lunch. The first is to look at your profile form in front of you. We would like to share your contact details with the rest of the group here today, but to do that we need your permission. So please check your details are correct, cross off anything you do not want us to publish, and if you are OK to share just with this group here today, tick the box.

At the bottom of the profile form you will see space to write 3 things that keep you awake at night. Keep you awake at night? Huh? Why would you want to tell me that? Well, let me be a little more specific. If you are an iMIS customer, I want you to be specific about 3 things that keep you awake at night related to iMIS and your software systems, including your websites. If you do not use iMIS, then consider whatever system you use to manage your members and finances, and what keeps you awake at night with those systems. The what keeps you awake at night list will not be published, it is just for my reading. But we will quickly collate your answers while you are eating lunch, and I am guessing that many of you will have challenges in common, and between us, after we leave today, as a group we can start to try and work on getting you a decent nights sleep.

Your second task is introductions. Here’s how we are going to do this – you need to nominate someone at your table to be the ‘introducer’ – and it can’t be one of the ASI staff. Each of you need to introduce yourself to one another at your table, and then the introducer will stand up and briefly introduce your table to the room.

So take 10 minutes now to check your profile form, write down 3 things that keep you awake at night, and nominate your table introducer and introduce yourself to your table.

[10 minute break]

Welcome back. If you can have your profile forms ready for collection now, Marla will come around and collect those from you. And lets hear from table 1.
Then table 2.
Then table 3.
Thank you. Let’s eat lunch.

[Lunch and desert served]

[Main presentation]

Welcome back, I trust you enjoyed lunch and your conversation with your peers.

Firstly, I want to come back to the profile form and the things keeping you awake at night. Marla has compiled these while we were eating lunch, and we will now hand out the list of attendees and your contact details. If you take a minute to look at the list, and see a name of someone you would like to meet but they are not at your table, please mention it to one of the ASI team and we will make sure you get introduced before we leave today.

As for keeping you awake at night, the 2 most common answers were:

1. Website integration

2. Data integrity / quality

I am not going to take time out now to discuss solutions to these challenges, but would like to suggest instead that I do so over the coming weeks via email, and would encourage you to participate in that discussion, particularly if you have already had the challenge and solved it at your own organization.

Let’s move on now to our second objective of the luncheon – an update on iMIS 15.

Before I do, however, I just wanted to give a brief overview of ASI and iMIS generally. I know many of you came into the organization, and iMIS was already implemented. For many of your organizations, iMIS has been in use for 10 years or more.

For the finance department, iMIS can be a source of hard work and frustration, and at the same time can be a source of great satisfaction. Everything in iMIS hits the finance department. Why is that? iMIS is an integrated system. Let me give you one example – events. Before iMIS, your events team would have used their own little events system for running events/conferences/training. It would have been standalone, and their finance knowledge was limited to marking off someone as paid. Events staff really couldn’t do anything wrong to impact the finance department. So what changed? Well many things. First members wanted to know when they changed their address, the events people didn’t know. Second, most of you could no longer afford to have large data entry teams – processing the same forms multiple times into multiple systems. Thirdly, the web and demand from members to go online. Fourth, multiple payment channels – credit cards, BPay, PostBillPay, direct debit, direct credit. An integrated system like iMIS makes all these things are reality. A member can register for an event online, pay by credit card, and not a single person in your organization has had to touch that individual transaction all the way through to your monthly financial statements. The only time anyone in your organization will see it, just to have a look at it – is at reconciliation time – and guess who – the finance department. Your teams. So like I said earlier, everything comes back to the finance department. I want to remind you that this outcome is a great one for the organization. It is the reason organisations invest in iMIS and updating your processes to reduce your costs and allow for straight through processing, all the way to general ledger.

So, that’s one of the reasons your organizations invested in iMIS.

Another reason, and equally important, is because ASI believes in customer for life. We believe once you buy iMIS you will never have to buy another system. Now for us to make that promise, we have to do 2 things. We have to keep iMIS upgraded with both current technology and with current business practices. And secondly we have to give great support.

Which is a great introduction to iMIS 15. iMIS 15 is the next upgrade of iMIS from iMIS 10. Why the numbering? Actually this is ASI’s 15th year in business. iMIS 10 was released in our 10th year, and iMIS 15 in our 15th year.

Importantly, iMIS 15 is an upgrade. It will come shipped to you on a CD that you can use to upgrade from your iMIS 10.6 system. It is like an upgrade to Windows or to Office.

So what’s new in iMIS 15? Firstly, let me talk about the technology. I said to keep you as a customer for life, we need to keep you update with technology. iMIS 15 is doing that. A large part of iMIS 15 is written in Microsoft’s .NET technology and almost all of the non-financial processing aspects is now browser based. Which means the average user can use just a browser to look up contact info and run queries. We are supporting MS SQL Server 2005 – the latest version – and also support for Windows Vista. So yes – iMIS is right up to date with technology.

We also have to keep you updated with best practice process if you are to keep iMIS for life. iMIS 15 delivers many new functions here as well. Just speaking generally, many of our association customers now employ commissioned sales staff and manage a sales team – and they need sales force automation functions to support this. In iMIS, this module is called Process Manager and it has been significantly enhanced in iMIS 15 to help you manage all processes like member acquisition programs, member renewal and retention programs, corporate sponsor sales, and event and product sales. Targeted customer offerings is another fairly recent trend for our customers – sophisticated segmentation tools like RFM Analytics and tied to Marketing Campaign management are newly enhanced modules for iMIS 15. Enhanced integration with Informz for email marketing – giving you campaign based analysis for open rates, click thru rates, and conversion tracking back to your website. And finally significantly enhanced member facing website functionality – for online event processing and your online shopfront.

One area that I would like to point out to you as an area where you and your departments can really drive efficiencies – complete automation of high volume, low value transactions. Examples of high volume, low value transactions are event registrations, member renewal payments, education course enrolments and payments. Of course, achieving this is more than just implementing the iMIS module for online event registrations (say). You need to get the message to the whole organization, and the membership, that this must happen. You need to involve your executive team, membership team, marketing team, IT team, and in many ways the finance department can be a great enabler of this. I know Chris here from the Football Federation was a champion of this at his organization; we also have other organizations like APESMA now have 100% take up of online enrolments for their education programs – in fact at APESMA you have no other option than to pay online.

As for the finance department – what’s coming for you in iMIS 15? Firstly, if you are sick of seeing the prompt that says ‘Check/CC’ when you key payments – well you can now change that to say whatever you want – maybe something like ‘Payment Type’? Secondly, and getting plenty of applause, is improvements to batch control. These include stricter controls on who can post batches and when. For data entry operators, switching from one batch to another is quick and easy now. And finally date controls on batches to prevent pre-period dated batches being accidentally entered.

The payment gateway processing has been significantly enhanced – actually opened up – so it is now easy to implement your own payment gateway, other than Verisign. This can be for credit cards, or even other payment types, like PayPal.

And finally, for the customer facing functions on your website, improvements have been made to allow more flexible selection of shipping options (and shipping charges) from your online store. Plus also the ability to show prices – that is show prices, not get payment in - in other currencies for products you sell via the web.

So – there we have a brief summary of iMIS 15. iMIS 15 is currently available in a Release Candidate version. This is a limited release currently being implemented by about 50 customers worldwide on a pre-approved basis. iMIS 15 will be generally available in June for download via our website, and shipped on CD’s the month or so after that. If you want to look at the manuals, they are available online already at http://docs.imis.com.

iMIS 15 - is the next step in the journey of customer for life. We promise to keep you upgraded with technology and with current best practice. And we promise to give you great support. Anytime we do not do that you need to please let me know. My email, my direct phone number and mobile are on the handout sheet.

That brings us to the end of my presentation. A couple of key date reminders before we leave. If you want to see a demo of iMIS 15 you need to register to attend one of our free weekly webcasts – the next ‘Whats new with iMIS 15’ webcasts are scheduled for June 5 and 19 at 10.30am – goto our website to signup. I am also very pleased to announce that the NiUG iMIS user group is now formally established in Australia and their first iMIS Information day is later this month in Melbourne – 24 May – down at AIM – more info from Rod Dalglish at the Bus Association of Victoria. And if you enjoyed today, let your CEO know to look out for my invitation since the next boardroom luncheon – on June 5 – is for CEO’s.

In closing, I just want to come back to the objectives for today. Firstly networking. I trust that the lunch environment, the exclusive CFO/financial controller only invitations, the table layouts, the questions on what keeps you awake at night, helped you meet your peers today. I welcome your feedback.

Secondly, an update on iMIS 15, the next upgrade to iMIS to keep you as a customer for life.

Myself and the other ASI team members are available here until around 2.30 if any of you have questions or would like to speak with us individually.

Otherwise - that is the end of our proceedings today, and the luncheon is now closed. Thank you for joining me.

[End]