So we have received a number of support calls from clients on how they should handle it. To help explain it we have put together some information sheets and sent out newsletters to our clients with information on how to handle it.
This work, of course, is important but frustrating. Consider the problem from the newsagency industry say it is just 10 minutes a site to answer this question, that is 10 minutes wasted on one site now multiple it for more sites. One would imagine that some process should be put in place that could automate the whole process.
One such approach would be if newspaper suppliers adopted Xchangeit DDO standard for invoicing. They do not have to use the Xchangeit system just use email. Then our clients, when they imported in the invoices, would have among other benefits a system that could automatically update the price. As long as they import the invoices they would not have to worry about price rises.
The second approach that we are working on is an automatic scripting system. Using these we would be sent to our clients' scrips. If the clients' system allowed the scrips to function these could do updating of item prices but it could do much more such as stop a publication on a holiday, create bumper papers etc. The idea is that the program is as automated as possible. This is similar to what many software packages and some companies like 7-Eleven do now so their operator does as little such maintenance as possible.
What we want is to speed up the back office work while assuring pricing accuracy!
