PETER J BEARDSLEY,

From: Beardsley's Swan Hill Newsagency, Tattersall's, OfficeSmart & Cartridge World
Sent: Tuesday, 13 March 2007 2:48 PM
To: Bernard Zimmermann
Subject: MAGAZINE CONTROL

Swan Hill Region - "Heart of the Murray"

Hello Bernard,

Only a few days ago, I emailed pos about the best way to find out certain data on non selling magazines.

Then today in the mail – el presto ! I’m sure NOT as a result of my request, but who cares !

The “New Features for Controlling Magazines is a big HIT”

Wow ! Sensational ! Well Done !!

The feature of it is its simplicity, a couple of fields to enter – that’s it. The search is very quick and the end result / outcome is exactly what is required and perfectly presented.

One could ask for no more on this topic !

Thank you.

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From: Bernard Zimmermann
Sent: Tuesday, 13 March 2007 5:03 PM
To: Beardsley's Swan Hill Newsagency, Tattersall's, OfficeSmart & Cartridge World
Subject: RE: MAGAZINE CONTROL

Now you have done it, I will put this in our company blog. Thank you.

-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Beardsley's Swan Hill Newsagency, Tattersall's, OfficeSmart & Cartridge World
Sent: Tuesday, 13 March 2007 5:18 PM
To: Bernard Zimmermann
Subject: RE: MAGAZINE CONTROL

FEEL FREE TO.

YOU KNOW WHAT I’M LIKE – IF ITS GOOD I’LL SAY SO. IF IT’S BAD I’LL SAY SO AS WELL!

WELL DONE

You cannot miss this opportunity to grow your business & increase your profits

How?

Come to Dynamic Supplies warehouse in Sunshine to hear how the drop Ship Program works.

This allows you to sell toners, printer drums etc to your business customers without holding stock.

For a comparison of your current suggested drop shipment prices compared to Office works prices

/blogs/pictures//drop_ship_prices.pdf

In the last 12 months before I sold Croydon Newsagency, I sold $246,530.00 of toners/ profit $48,705.00 the GP was 20%

This is big business you are missing out on

You cannot afford to miss out on this

Meet Paul Manning National sales manager Dynamic Supplies &

Robert Irwin National sales manager for Newsink

Please read your invite here.
/blogs/pictures//Invite_dynamic_warehouse.pdf

If you are serious in the book industry you have heard all this before so you can probably stop reading this now.

For the rest, please pick up a paperback or hardcover book. Now look at the back cover. You will see a 10 digit ISBN printed near the bar code. This ISBN number has been around for over 35 years. As the last digit is check digit what we have is 9 numbers. This is no small number as a billion books can listed using this. That is more then enough to cover every book ever published and every book that will be for a long-time. The problem is that these numbers have divided into many different categories. Some categories are getting full.

A similar problem occurs if you go into a supermarket, sometimes what you see is some shelves are empty and some packed. What has happened is in one category there is not enough stock to fill the shelf but in the other category there is too much and it cannot fit. So some of the shelves are full and some are empty.

The book industries decided rather then spread the numbers from the empty categories to the full ones to use a barcode so turning a 10 digit code into a 13 digit code. They then looked at their current standard for electronic data exchange which is BISAC. They quickly saw that BISAC cannot handle a 13 digit number and it should offer more information. Also they noted that technology has moved in 35 years. The rest of the world is going XML, which is a format recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium which is the closest body that we have that governs the WWW internet.

The book industry has always been progressive so they decided to bit the bullet. They would fix many problems all together. They would go to 13 numbers and modernize the BISAC file. So they came up with the ONIX file. It is built with 21st century technology.

They then turned around and gave everyone years of warning. The industry date set was January 1, 2007, which at the time was years away.

Off we as many other software suppliers did, went to book industry meetings. We discussed it with them the proposed changes.

We brought up the details that we had large number of DOS users that could not handle the ONIX files. For those trying to get a feel of what is involved in handling ONIX in our DOS system. First we would have to write a link into the internet and XML. Something that is possible but not trivial, then major file changes and probably almost every screen and report that has stock in it. Changes of this extent would probably cause bugs to everyone that uses our system until we worked them out. So it would have to be a new system separate from the newsagency system.

Many of the book suppliers stated they understood and that they would continue the BISAC file till mid 2008. All it is to them is another choice in their software ONIX or BISAC.

For interesting PowerPoint presentations’ discussing what is happening check out the following

http://www.publishers.asn.au/emplibrary/ISBN_13_present_Aug06_Part_1_V0.ppt
http://www.publishers.asn.au/emplibrary/ISBN_13_present_Aug06_Part_2_V0.ppt
http://www.publishers.asn.au/emplibrary/ISBN_13_present_Aug06_Part_3_V0.ppt

So well briefed, we worked on resolving these issues in our software. Those clients of ours that are in the book industry helped us out considerably and we got it working.

So what is the problem! Well nothing and plenty depending what you want from book from your retail software.

If you have a recent copy of our software posbrowser, then it is not a problem.

If all you want to do is sell books. Then there is no problem either. Just enter the stock as you do now and sell it. The retail systems can handle barcodes. Just quote the barcodes to the supplier, if you want a special order.

Now in March 2007, if you want to use BISAC, I am getting several different stories from book suppliers some are saying
1) We have a cutoff date of this date and from this date, we only have ONIX
2) Our software is updated and we cannot send out BISAC now.
3) We don’t know how to handle BISAC. (With the frequent changes in staff in the people invoicing in the book industry this is actually true. New staff do not know the choices for BISAC and it is too hard as they need to remember who gets BISAC.)
4) Industry standard is ONIX and BISAC cannot handle the new book codes. (This is not strictly true.)

Some book suppliers have stated that they are looking at the ECG committee DDO files which are DOS compatible. The problem here is that this standard was originally designed by POS Solutions for cigarettes. It was generalized for any stock item in a POS newsagency management system. Later the ECG committee adapted it for their magazines and cards. It is not designed for books. More importantly it is not an easy standard to use.

So what has happened is a book supplier has a consultant look into it. The consultant gives a quote. The book company thinks about it. You ring up a month later, still thinking. Another month later well in one case, I rang up and expected to hear that they are still thinking about it but now the company manager stated “Now after so many years people are complaining. This proves the need for booksellers to keep upgrading their software and systems…... It is not our problem…..We are not picking up the tab”. I suppose it depends how important newsagents are to that supplier. The reality is not one book supplier has gone to DDO files.

So now what happens?

Well for almost 90% of our users, probably nothing needs to happen. Most of those serious in book are on posbrowser. Years ago they heard of the problem and started to talk to us about it.

Overall I suspect that only a few of our users on DOS are affected. Most of our DOS users as when I went over the list with some book suppliers, I found very few are getting the BISAC now.

Some may serious think of updating their system. If so give us a call ASAP.

http://tinyurl.com/yo4mba

If you look at the current circulation figures for newspapers in Australia, you'll find that they are stable: some did go up and some down slightly. At present newspapers look safe.

Then I was shocked when I read part of an interview with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. He is the publisher of the New York Times which is one of the largest newspapers in the world. Responding to a question about whether the Times will be printed on paper in five years he stated "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either." He then went on to say “……that the New York Times is on a journey and its end will be the day the company decides to stop printing the paper [to make it] 100 percent digital.”

Suddenly I was thinking are we in this new equation? So what happens to all our businesses?

Obviously I was not the only one to think this. At a shareholder meeting he was asked what exactly he meant. He replied:

"We are continuing to invest in our newspapers, for we believe that they will be around for a very long time. This point of view is not about nostalgia or a love of newsprint. Instead, it is rooted in fundamental business realities…..”

All this sounds good but wait for the end of his statement which is:

"So let me clear the air on this issue. It is my heartfelt view that newspapers will be around--in print--for a long time. But I also believe that we must be prepared for that judgment to be wrong. My five-year timeframe is about being ready to support our news, advertising and other critical operations on digital revenue alone...whenever that time comes." [Emphasis added]

In other words, his paper is considering the possibility. I wonder whether we should too?

Here is a very interesting short clip that discusses a future without newspapers. It is over the top a bit but well worth looking at, I can assure you.

Epic 2015 (new updated version)

Click here to launch the movie

Note: This particular post, I was really debating whether or not to publish it. I showed it to Zac Varga from Pos Solutions. He was struck by it too. He then went to Jenny from Geyers Newsagency who was stunned too. She convinced us to publish it as she said that "it was really important to place that type of information so people realize how important it is to keep coming up with new initiatives to make our businesses relevant, just in case this became a reality here in Australia in the future!".

[link removed]

If you want to see what the next generation of signage for the MPA categories looks like press the link below.

[link removed]

I reckon it looks sensational!!

http://www.connectionswithacp.com.au/AboutACP/News/newsItem.asp?id=1253…

It actually very nice when someone writes such a nice letter to our director especially when it is Yarrawonga Newsagency which won first place in the ACP Magazines Newsagent of the Year Awards.

Zac,

Newsagents and POS Solutions Working Together

The idea of the 100% Returns Report came about because we wanted to improve our ROI on our magazine sales. We have been working in tandem with ACP Magazines on a project with regards to 'range optimisation', which simply relates to stocking the optimal product mix to achieve maximum return.

We sent some historical magazine sales data to ACP who fed it into their specific software which calculates which titles are a. profitable, b. breakeven, or c. unprofitable. These were determined to be core product, negotiable product lines, and those titles 'recommended for deletion' respectively. ACP then reported back to us with the results. We determined from the data that we could delete 208 titles from our range, which represented 17% of the titles on our database. These accounted for less than 2% of our sales!

We then proceded to write to each distributor and ask for those isolated titles to be deleted from our standing order. (This was negotiated successfully, once we convinced the distributors that we could use the space to sell more of their popular titles). Once this was agreed to, we marked each of these titles as discontinued in our stock database, which means they are automatically marked for early return upon receipt. These titles will no longer reach our store shelves.

The effect that this method has on our magazine display has been phenomenal. No longer have we overlapping magazines and cluttered shelves, a much more attractive display has transformed into a 12% increase on turnover, as compared to the same period 12 months ago. Now we have trouble keeping the stock up to the customers!

We wanted for all newsagents to have access to this handy software, so I apporached Andrew Lloyd, senior programmer at POS Solutions with the idea of writing a similar package for POS Browser. This would make it easier for agents to do this range optiomisation themselves at store level, and on a regular basis. So Andrew took the time to write the software into a comprehensive, but user-friendly format. The results and feedback has been outstanding. Newsagents now have the tools to isolate poor performing titles, delete them from their database, free up the space for better displaying of magazines that actually sell in their location, and more importantly, improve cashflow and overall segment profitability.

I look forward to working with Andrew on developing this software even further, and on other tools to help us improve and grow our business in the future.

Regards,

Darren & Gary Tribe

Yarrawonga Newsagency

It is with great sadness we advise that Maurie Lovell of Lovell’s Shepparton Newsagency passed away on Sunday 4th February 2007.

We at Pos Solutions, extend our sincere and deepest sympathy to Maurie’s wife Shirley, children Gary, Louise, and Wendy and grandchildren Kane, Jake, Rodney and Samual.

We knew him for many years as one of the most progressive leaders in the newsagency industry in technology. He was keenly interested in how the computers work. What made them tick! How they could help the industry and his newsagency better! He was among the first in computerizing just about everything in newsagencies for example the newspaper distribution, cash registers, introducing point of sale, school book, EFTpos and magazine returns. His newsagency always took the lead in development. Much of the systems, you use now were designed in his newsagency.

I noticed in any industry project, he would be there. He was always admired and respected as it was a pleasure working with such a warm man, with a keen sense of humour. He was always and friendly to people and he related to all in a non-judgmental way.

For more details of the family's wishes please see the funeral notice in today's (Tuesday) Herald Sun.

I was reading an article by one of my competitors.

As I understand it, the software that you sell, if it is up-to-date, is worth, with no data, the current buy price. Of course, this is a real problem for people on the DOS system since the buy price has dropped dramatically in the past few years, resulting in some bad valuations for this item.

However, the data the Newsagency has put into it should add to a value. Ten (10) years of data should be worth something. The business brokers should address this point.

In the real world, say you sell a newsagency. At the sale time, you will have to sign many documents. Some of these include a statement that what you sell is in working order and fit to run a newsagency. If you think of it, someone would be crazy to buy something as expensive as a newsagency without such documents. But even if they did miss it, there are consumer affairs laws, federal and state, that deal with implied warranties. This means that a sold newsagency carries with it a legal obligation that the items sold are in working order and that it can do the job! Now

1) If the data is garbage, then it is fraud. The seller could find himself having to pay the cost of fixing the data. This has happened, and the seller had to reimburse the buyer for the cost of fixing up the data by a computer consultant and the time of the buyer's accountant.

2) We also had a seller with an old software version. After selling his Newsagency, the buyer stated that after talking to a few newsagent’s suppliers, the software lacks functions that a reasonable person in a Newsagency should expect. To her, it was not working. Armed with a few statements from these Newsagency suppliers, she went off to a lawyer. The seller made a deal and paid for the upgrade from an old Newsagency system to the recent version.

I suggest anyone considering selling a Newsagency with a computer discuss these two points with the business agent and how they should approach it.

By now everyone should have received instructions on how to handle the bumper inserts and newspapers over the Australia Day long-week end.

If you have not please contact reception on (03) 95322733 stating whether you are on DOS or windows software for the relevant iPos newsletter.

One of my clients got upset as a magazine that he wanted was always selling He felt that he was undersupplied. He contacted the distributor and felt ignored. So what he did was go to the magazine and got there website. He then wrote an email to the magazine company listing his supply and his sellout rates. He noticed it got an instant reaction when the magazine company rang him, then later he saw his supply increased.

I wonder if anyone has tried this out?

We were talking about some automatic way of putting stock locations into magazines. If we could get this going we could quickly do pocket analysis.

When someone pointed out that in the U.S. they recommend sorting the magazines using a slightly different method to what we do here. What they recommend is having two separate sections. One near the checkout and that holds only a few of the top sellers e.g 6 items. These are the publications that impulsive shoppers would buy. I notice the supermarkets here are do this too. It is a good idea to go to the local supermarket to see what they are. I notice the Woolworth's near me had a few sections for magazines. The main one had all the titled stocked but every checkout had about 6 items of some popular magazines e.g they had NEW IDEA, Cleo and NEW WOMEN.

If you try this I suggest that you check sales and efficiencies for checkout separately. Then add it to the main section to see if there is any increase. After all it is the most prize part of the shop we are talking of and you have to see if it pays.

By the way the top 5 magazines probably do about 40% plus of your magazine turnover so if works it should be noticeable.

Awhile ago, I made an appeal to the ANF to look into the issue of newsagents suppliers having fractions of cents in their price. As far as I know nothing happened as if this problem is going to disappear because no-one is going to look into it.

This is a recent problem as over seventeen years ago old-timers here like me can remember a massive effort in the Newsagency industry to make all prices in five (5) cent lots. It made sense. As people do not pay in fractions of cents, if they pay with EFTpos it is in whole cents and if the pay in cash it is in five (5) cent amounts. As a result retail is geared to whole cents. Since most people in our industry pay cash, five (5) cents still makes sense.

What is happening now are suppliers are doing a price increase with say 7.5% increase across-the-board so say an eight (8) cents a day delivery fee is now 8.6 cents a day. Retail customers want to see on their bill whole cents a day for example eight (8) cents or nine (9) cents. This is helping to create an unnecessary argument and/or bad will with the customers.

In different states there are different requirements and some papers that are Australian wide like the Australian probably need to be handled differently to the local state papers.

I think as an immediate measure the ANF should look into this issue and issue some broadsheet stating what newsagents are suppose to do with these fractions of cents. At the least it would be used by the newsagent when he is trying to justify his bill why he has done what he has done.

As a medium to long-term measure the ANF must talk to the newsagents’ suppliers and explain to them that these types of increases 7.5% should be structured to overcome this problem.

[Link removed]

Tobacco is an important part of our industry, and a short time ago, I was talking to a newsagent about it when he commented that chop-chop (illegal tobacco) was hurting his business.

Later, when I spoke to a few more and it came up. All reported that it was a major problem with them too.

It is not just costing honest retailers but the government too.

Officially about 10% of all tobacco sales now is chop-chop in Australia. About twenty-nine per cent (28.7%) of all smokers/recent quitters are aware of loose tobacco sold in plastic bags or rolled into unbranded cigarettes. Of these, 62.4% have smoked it, which accounts for about 20% of all smokers who use it.

I found this interesting report which you might want to read.

The conclusions of the report seem correct.

Australian growers find it hard to grow any other product.

They have plenty of product that is not good enough to sell in the legal market.

They cannot export it. I was stunned by his comment that Australian tobacco was inferior to overseas product. I am a light smoker. I have been overseas. I don't find Australian smoke bad at all. It is better than what I trying in the Middle East, India and Europe. I found it as good as the stuff in China and the US. Maybe the writer here means that it is not the quality you need for export. Also, I am sure that it is overpriced for the world market. You could make a good business buying high-quality smoke in China and selling in Australia if you did not have to pay the taxes along the way.

The growers want cash. More money in chop-chop for them than legal sales. All you need to do is put a few bags aside.

One thing is for sure chop-chop will be a problem for quite a while.

Last week, I went to a HWT Industry Data and Technology Workshop. These conferences in general I find both extremely interesting and physically draining as they tend to start at 8:15am (note in my experience, only conferences where newsagents go, start so early) and finish pretty early in the morning when at 3:00am you decide to leave the party.

Another issue is that as soon as the waiters discover that HWT was picking up the tab at a restaurant, the drink waiters tend to circle me like a vulture and as it was a nice place with good alcohol its would be hard for even the strong willed, which is certainly not me to say no.

Anyway the themes at the conference was subagents and subscriber data and technology and then how to better use technology to distribute newspapers.

Subagent data

Its clear that HWT intends to enforce their contracts which states that they should get the daily supply, sales and return figures for the newsagency and all its subagents. This means that a newsagents shop has to be added into the subagents systems as another subagent. They also want a lot of extra details on each of the subagents.

They put up a very good argument, I thought, for why they want this information when they quoted from a huge industry survey that they did, that showed some pretty bad statistics. One was that many people reported that they went to buy a paper and there was not a paper in the shop. 1/3 then bought no newspaper. That is a lot of lost sales.

HWT blame it on poor subagent handling by some newsagents. What they want to do now is address the issue! To do that, they want historical data from newsagents to help make an extensive computer model that will be used to help calculate the subagents orders. They have hired themselves an expert from England (The wise man from the North) whose profession is now, doing exactly that in England, Italy and a few other countries. Soon HWT intend to issue suggested orders for the subagents. Now let us say HWT suggested ten papers be given to a subagent, say you thought it was a bit much and only dropped off eight. You would be a bit of a hero is the next day you found they only sold six but what happens to you, if the guy sells out and complains! So although HWT strenuously deny it, my prediction is that soon this "suggested order" will become the "order" as newsagents slowly stop calculating subagent orders.

Subscriber data

This has been an issue since day one when the newspaper companies and newsagents started reporting differences in the information supplied. Yet again as in previous conferences everyone expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of subscriber data. Newsagents and HWT reported major problems matching up the customers in their systems. HWT were however more then willing to make changes here. Tentatively, we decided to adopt the Australian Post standards with their delivery points as a standard. Exactly how we are going to do this I am not sure, but what we don't want is for every newsagent to have to buy a copy of the Australia post delivery points data. What is more practical is for HWT to buy one licence, then the newsagents send the data to HWT to process. HWT then processes it and send it back to newsagents to put into their system.

Specifications

After the mess that I felt had occurred before with the magazine companies and us, when I felt that we had been dumped halfway though the project and left with a pile of unpaid bills, one point that I pressed which everyone quickly agreed too was that we require before we can proceed an *exact* specifications. One persons comments here I liked very much was when he stated "without a specification, we have nothing to discuss, afterwards we will have plenty".

Easypay

The other issue is that HWT want to promote a new system of customer payments called Easypay. Its an account system for buying newspaper products. Its been tried overseas quite successfully. There are many good points to this system, one that I am sure many of my clients will like is that they may not be changed any fees as they are now with credit/debit cards.

Technology

All this involves data transmission which is where today technology changes are extremely rapid. So it was inevitable that our DOS system would come up. As usual, many delegates in the newsagency industry, expressed major dissatisfaction with our policy of both supporting DOS and our policy of supporting old computers systems such as the 386s. I noticed Rayma Creswell from the ANF was prepared to get into the act when Gerard Attwood from Sorronto Newsagency made butted in, with his comments that some DOS systems out there are fairly extensive. I was pleased that none of the HWT representatives made any comments to join them.

At that point, it was taken off the agenda for a later off-workshop discussions although the HWT director, made it quite clear that he expected a certain technological standard from their agents. Then he quoted an example of P3s which is about 3 years old technology. I thought to myself "Oh, oh - here is comes" but nothing happened.

So later off several of us went for an all out discussion with the HWT director to discuss the DOS systems. The HWT director, obviously had no time to desire talk to us on this issue then although he did state that they may consider a partial certification for DOS depending on what exactly were their requirements. I suppose it really depends on what the expert wants. My understanding of HWT position is that they can demand that their agents to provide this data, how the newsagents does it, is the newsagents problem.

Conclusion

It was an interesting conference. Magpies like me always like to come. I had a great time and learned a lot.

Have you had a chance to check out some of the help files now on offer in the help section of your Posbrowser.

We've had had lots of positive feed back about the changes and we'd like to thank you for your comments.

If you haven't tried it yet just go to Help at the top of your Posbrowser and click on Help Topics. You can also press F1 while your in the register screen for the same set of information. Even if you are not stuck with anything, you could surf the documents to see if there is a topic or function that might be useful to you that you are yet to understand or never even knew about.

Any feedback, good or bad, is appreciated as the Help file will always be an ongoing project to make staff training and management of Posbrowser as simple as possible.