Modified: 2016/08/30 10:28 by admin - Uncategorized

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TrafficXP to Premier

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Introduction

In order to better prepare you for the move to Premier from TrafficXP and to ensure smooth operation after the move, this document provides details broken down into phases that occur before, during and after the transition.

NOTE: It is nearly impossible to cover all differences between TrafficXP and Premier; Premier is "not a new version of TrafficXP", the two products are two completely different products and should be treated as such. This document serves to highlight some of the differences at a very high level. It is very important that training be received with the mindset that this is a completely different product and to not "gloss over" any aspect of said training.

DISCLAIMER: All of the following information is subject to change without notice. All features discussed are available subject to your current product purchase agreement and are subject to availability based on the version of the products released since this document was last updated.

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1 - Preparation

In order to prepare for the move, there are several things that you can do in TrafficXP to “preview” some of the changes in behavior between the two product lines. At a high level, this means that you need to disable a few features and change the operation order of some of the tasks that you do every day.

Windows XP not an option

In order to prepare your machine, you will need to have a version of Windows newer than Windows XP such as Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. We highly recommend you utilize Windows 10. You should also have a computer with more than 4GB of memory, a 64-bit processor and matching OS, a processor with multiple cores and a decent video card with up-to-date drivers.

Features

In order to prepare for some of changes in behavior, the following items need to be disabled.

• Disable the following specific features.
  • Creating invoices out of thin air.
  • Ability to edit rotations without leaving the log editor.
  • Split-by-station mode when printing statements.
  • Automatic approval of orders mode.
  • Mass assign orders in legacy mode.
  • Open-ended orders.
  • Receivables Analysis report.
  • Fill list capability.
  • Fill list placement counter.
• Disable all *beta* features.
• Verify the status of availability of the following add-on's with your sales associate:
  • Sales Add-On
  • EDI Add-On
  • Electronic_Documents Add-On
  • Templates Add-On
  • Finance Charges (Legacy) Add-On
  • Email (Legacy) Add-On
  • EmailMyTimes (Legacy) Add-On
  • Production (Legacy) Add-On
  • Report Templates (Legacy) Add-On
  • Goals (Legacy) Add-On
  • Bank Accounts (Legacy) Add-On

Order Approval

When entering orders, you will need to remember to take the additional step of reviewing/approving orders. If you forget this step, the log editor will remind you that you have order(s) that need to be approved that affect the currently opened log. You can also see these using the Pending Orders inside of the Orders window.

Working with Copy, Orders, Rotations, Logs

You will also want to get used to operating under the Copy->Orders->Rotations->Logs pattern; meaning you will work your copy, then your orders/rotations and then your logs.


Invoices

In order to “create an invoice out of thin air”, you will need to create an order with an off-air revenue entry for some date in the past. This will create an invoice immediately.


Statements

If you desire to have statements “split by anything”, you will need to start splitting your customer accounts accordingly. In Premier, a statement of account is a statement of account. It will reflect exactly what the account is and there isn’t any “magic” splitting that can or will occur. If you want the information to be split across multiple documents, you will need to split the account accordingly.

Orders treated as Contracts

Orders in Premier are treated (and renamed accordingly) as contracts. The general idea is that once a contract has been approved/printed/mailed/delivered, it’s now a historical document. This document should not be changed except under the most extreme of circumstances. Under normal operations, the only thing that can be done to a contract is to revise or cancel the contract. There isn't really a facility in TrafficXP to help prepare you for how things will be done in Premier with regards to changes that fall under the normal activity category. See the 3 - Welcome to Premier section below for more details.

User Accounts

If you have multiple databases using the same username/password, these accounts will need to be split since this capability does not exist in Premier. Each database is treated as a completely separate entity since, by definition, the databases are separated because they are treated as different business entities. Customer service can assist in this process by placing a request in the system to have this done within a 24-48 hour turn around.

One Administrator

The Group Administrator role has been renamed to simply Administrator and there can be only one. This person is the only person (at any given time) that can manage the system confirmation related settings of the system. This person is also the only person that can delete data from the system. Additionally, the Administrator is the only one that can "change historical information". With regards to this later ability, there are several specific permissions that can be delegated to the Administrator Assistant roles; however, this is not recommended and should only be done after careful consideration with regards to your environment and needs.

Satellite Operation

If you are in a satellite operation scenario where it’s possible that you don’t have enough spots to cover the “required filled breaks”, you have a few options. The first is to review whether or not your automation system has a “must fill” satellite operation mode/setting where it will automatically substitute/insert material for times when the material is invalid/missing. The automation system knows the exact length of the spots, the appropriate amount of time to be filled and can possibly do this without using any additional material by using stretch/squeeze capabilities. The automation system is closer to the problem, so it can best handle the solution.

If your automation system does not have this capability, you can use the “must fill” capabilities included in Premier. This will require that you do the following:

• Create a customer named “Fill”.
• On the “Fill” customer, add any and all copy (cart #’s) that you want to use as fill material. Normally this is PSA’s, promos, liners, jingles, zingers, etc. Be sure to have material that is appropriate for your avail type operations (30, 60, 15, 10, 5, etc.). These pieces of copy and associated cart numbers do not need to be unique across all of your customers. We are just placing all of them on the “Fill” customer for ease of operations and spot management. Be sure to also check (enabled) the “Included in Fill list” check box on each piece of copy.
• Once you have migrated to Premier, you will update your formats/templates so that the necessary avails are flagged as needing to be filled (must fill).
• Whenever you are working your logs (in Premier), you can either manually place material in the must fill avails or leverage the automatic must fill processing that will occur whenever you lock the log. This process will pull randomly from the “fill list” to fill as much of the “must fill” avails as possible (limited based on length of copy).
• Note: If you “reverse a log”, these items will also be removed providing the ability for you to place additional spots in these avails.

If you desire to have more control over the placement of the material, you’ll need to treat this material as “bonus”. To do this, you’ll create additional contracts at $0 to generate the spots that can be used. Determine the number of spots you’ll think you’ll need so that the material is available in the bump list and/or make good list. It is possible to “pre-load” the make good list with this material by entering a contract in the (slight) past; doing so will automatically move the spots for prior days into the make good list. Periodically, these extra (“bonus”) spots will need to be cleaned up and the “bonus” contracts might need to be adjusted based on actual need.

Preload Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5

To prepare for the conversion, you can (optionally) make sure that you have the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 update installed. To do so, visit Microsoft Download Center.

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2 - Conversion Process

A RadioTraffic.com customer service person will review that Phase 1 has been completed and there are no outstanding issues or question before the move continues. Upon doing so, a final decision will be made as to when (and if) the move the Premier is going to take place and a date/time will be agreed upon.

When the day comes to actually transition to Premier, you will be working with one of our customer service staff to make the necessary adjustments. The process involves uninstalling TrafficXP, installing Premier and signing in with your existing username and password. Everyone at your organization that uses RadioTraffic.com will need to do this process.

• Launch "Control Panel".
  • For Windows Vista: Click on the Windows start menu and click on "Control Panel".
  • For Windows 7: Click on the Windows start menu and click on "Control Panel".
  • For Windows 8: Swipe in from the left hand side of the screen, touch "Settings" and then touch "Control Panel".
  • For Windows 10: In the "Ask me anything" (Cortana) type "RadioTraffic" (without quotes); once the application is visible in the list, right click and choose "Uninstall" from the displayed menu.
• Click on “Uninstall a program” (skip for Windows 10).
• Locate the RadioTraffic entry (under the Name column).
• Click the Uninstall/Change (located at the top) or right click on the RadioTraffic entry and select the Uninstall/Change context menu item to initiate the uninstallation process.
• Make sure that the “Remove the application from this computer.” option is selected.
• Click the OK button to continue.

Once done with uninstalling (RadioTraffic should no longer be showing in the list).

• Open your web browser (tested with Internet Explorer).
• Browse to http://www.traf.com.
• On the right hand side of the page, click on the “Install Now” button.
• Make note of the “this troubleshooting list” located just above the link described in the next step.
• Review the license agreement and click on the “Acknowledge and accept this agreement to begin installation…” link to accept and begin the installation.
• If any problems are encountered during the installation, refer to the “this troubleshooting list” link for information on how to resolve known installation issues.

RadioTraffic.com will need to make some changes as well which involves doing a few setting changes, migrating your data to prepare for Premier and reviewing that everything took place as expected. This process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours depending on several factors such as database size, number of databases, features, etc.

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3 – Welcome to Premier

Overviews:

Dashboard

• The first difference you’ll see is that there aren’t any charts/graphs; instead, you’ll see a dashboard filled with “sticky notes” containing important information regarding the health of your system, the status of items that should be completed daily, configuration warnings, etc. These notes bring to the forefront all of the information you need to “get things done” without having to go spelunking through the system to check on the current state of individual tasks.
• Administration is now Settings and moved to the far right hand side of the list (versus the far left side of the list)
• There is a new icon named Copy.
• Orders is now Contracts.
• There is a new icon named Billing.
• The Tools/Email menu item has been moved to Settings.
• We've added a Tools/Start join.me menu.

Permissions

• Group Administrator is now Administrator.
• Administrator is now Administrator Assistant.
• Accounting Manager is now Billing.
• Traffic Manager is now Traffic.
• Some roles have been removed or are only available based on access to particular Add-On’s.
• Introducing Traffic Read-only and Billing Read-only.
• When setting a person up as Administrator, no other roles can be selected since Administrator has access to everything.
• Adding a new user, the user is “active” by default.

All permissions except for Administrators have limited “reversal capabilities”; meaning, they are operating in a forward-only type of mode. Once something is approved, you’ll need to use an adjustment using another entry (normal operations) or contact your Administrator in order to “fix” any errors that occurred under extreme circumstances. In other words, all tasks/actions throughout the product are classified into two types of operations; a) normal and b) correction tasks. Normal tasks should not change historical information and Correction tasks, by definition, will. The person capable of modifying historical information (Correction tasks) should be the sole person responsible; limiting the potential confusion caused by historical information being modified across a multi-user system.

Sales people

• To make it easier to create a sales person, the Settings icon contains a Sales People tool. This tool still creates a “regular user”, but significantly reduces the amount of information required so that you can quickly create a sales person for operations where sales people will not actually be “using the system” (inactive logon). This icon is not visible to the Administrator role since they have access to the Users icon. The Sales Person icon is available to the Administrator Assistant, Traffic and Billing roles. It is possible for the Administrator to "convert" this account into an active logon account.

Copy

• Directly on the Dashboard you’ll find the Copy tool. This tool provides you the ability to manage all copy for all customers in a single place.
• When creating a new piece of copy, the selected customer in the Copy window will be the default selected customer in the new copy window; you can, of course, change this to another customer if this was not the desired result.
• When assigning a cart number to a piece of copy, a message across the top of the copy window will give you detailed information about potential conflicts with other clients.

Contracts/Rotations

• When approving an order in TrafficXP, you were prompted with the question regarding printing the confirmation at that time. In Premier, this question is no longer asked. Instead, you can access the Tools/Print Confirmations menu item on the Contracts window to print any and/or all confirmations that have not been previously printed.
• When editing a new contract, the rotation button will not be available unless you have a spot based line item(s) and there is copy available for the customer that matches the criteria of the line item(s).
• If you have an existing rotation and change the line item(s) in such a way that the rotation is no longer valid (length); the rotation editor is capable of reflecting this information and provides ease of fixing this situation.

Logs (Scheduling)

• Compared to the TrafficXP log editor, the Premier log editor will be noticeably different. However, all of the existing capabilities of the TrafficXP log editor regarding scheduling spots is functionally available.
• Spot Type, Break Type, etc. are now named Avail Type.
• The red, green and yellow colors on the log editor, by default, are now aligned with the rest of the software with regards to meaning. Essentially, Green is Good, Red is Bad and Yellow is “warning”. So on the log editor, Green represents the avail is full and ready to go, red represents that the avail is empty (or partially empty / not full in the case of MUSTFILL avails) and should be addressed and yellow means the avail has something in it, but is (or could be) a problem.
• Each avail has its own column headers. These can easily be reordered, resized, removed and or added to using the “Column Chooser” context menu item.
• The Cart # column now shows a preview of the assigned rotation item(s) as you edit the log based on the current state of the rotation(s).
• The Primary Conflict color no longer colors the entire line, instead it just colors the column of the line for Primary Conflict. This opens up the opportunity for the Secondary Conflict color to also be reflected/represented. Additionally, everywhere on the log editor (log, bump and make good list) reflects the configured conflict colors.
• When dragging an item from the bump or make good list to the log, immediate feedback is given (while dragging) as to whether or not the item can be placed in the position where the mouse is currently hovering over. The mouse cursor will toggle between a plus mouse cursor and a “no sign”. If the “no sign” is active, this spot cannot be placed in this position based on the rules that you’ve defined. The bottom left hand corner of the log editor contains details as to what rules are preventing this spot from being place. It is recommended that you review the rules that you’ve defined if this continues to occur; checking customer separation, conflict separation, avail types and other rules defined at the template/format and order entry levels.
• You can use the CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN keys to move spots within an avail.
• You can use the DEL key to remove a spot to the bump/make good list.
• The plus and minus keys can be used to expand and collapse an individual avail.
• Pressing the CTRL+N keys on a spot on the log will open a version of the Log Summary filtered to the selected order line.
• You’ll want to review Tools/Options/Print settings if you print your logs. Options now include: Font Size, Portrait/Landscape, include placement level, product code, rate, day part, break time remaining, sign on/off signature lines, announcer’s page, one hour per page and whether or not to include/inline the actual copy script for each piece of copy.
• The log editor, by default, treats Spots Per Week line items as per day schedule. If you are using the SPW option, you can use the Tools/Options window to toggle the behavior of SPW items in the bump list to be “per day” or “per week”. Per day limits the SPW items to being only those schedule “today” and “per week” shows all spots for the whole week.
• If you are operating a satellite based station where some (or all) of your avails need to be filled to prevent “dead-air”, please refer to the section above in Phase 1 regarding the “must fill” capabilities for options, configuration and usage. The actually application of MUSTFILL takes place at the time you lock the log. If, for some reason, you decide to reverse a locked log, all of the placed MUSTFILL material will be automatically removed.

Logs (Locked)

• It is possible to completely leverage MyViews when viewing a locked log; meaning you have full control over the sorting, grouping, filtering, column choices, etc.

Logs (Reconciling)

• It is possible to completely leverage MyViews during the log reconciliation process; meaning you have full control over the sorting, grouping, filtering, column choices, etc.
• When you are reconciling (using automatic log reconciliation), items that aired outside of their original scheduling window will be highlighted in red.

Billing

• The actual billing process is drastically different than what you utilized in TrafficXP. The first major change is that the process now exists under the Billing icon from the Dashboard. All billing related capabilities have been consolidated in this tool providing the ability to review, finalize, pay, print all invoices as well as process statements.
• The window is built so that the process is broken down individual task oriented steps providing complete control over the entire billing process. These include Gathering, Pending, Pay, Print and Open.
• The Pending, Pay, Print task lists contain a single Process button to process each individual list.
• Each individual task list can be configured as you desire using MyViews giving you more control over the review process.
• The Gathering tab contains all invoices that are still in the process of being added to throughout the scheduling/airing process. Invoices move from the Gathering tab under two conditions being completed; a) all spots for the currently defined billing cycle for the order have aired as described by logs being reconciled and b) all spots that have not aired and exist on the make good list are taken care of.
• The Pending tab contains all invoices that are “done”, ready to be reviewed and approved. Pressing the Process button approves all of the invoices currently marked with a check mark.
• The Pay tab provides the ability to automatically apply any existing unapplied payments to any and/or all of the invoices on this list. The invoices on this list are invoices that can have money applied, not representing that they can all be 100% paid. Clicking on the Process button attempt to pay the invoices check marked by applying the oldest matching payment amount to the oldest matching invoice amount; failing that, the oldest payment will be applied to the oldest invoice until either all of the invoices are paid or there is no more money to be applied.
• The Print tab contains all invoices that have not already been printed. The Process button initiates the print process for all of the selected invoices.
• The Open tab exist for informational purposes; the invoices on this tab are “open”, meaning they are outstanding and unpaid.
• All active tasks on the Billing window are also reflected on the “sticky notes” of the Dashboard.

Payments

• When entering payments, you have two options with regards to how the payment and adjustments are “assigned” to a station, revenue source, revenue type and sales person. The first (and default) option is to leave the payment (or adjustment) station set to “Any”. When set to any, the payment can be applied to any station, revenue source, revenue type and/or sales person. Once the payment (or portion of the payment) has been applied to an invoice, that payment (or portion thereof) takes on the characteristics of the invoice (station, revenue source, revenue type, sales person). The unapplied portion of a payment does not have an assigned station, revenue source, revenue type, sales person and this is reflected on the report as None. As the payment is applied, the money will move from the any (escrow) “account” to the station, revenue source, revenue type and/or sales person and this will be reflected accordingly on all relevant reports. This, technically, is very similar to how TrafficXP works except for the fact that you could “fudge” the information for the unapplied portion. The second option is that you can select a specific station, revenue source, revenue type and/or sales person. Doing so means that this payment is now assigned to that station, revenue source, revenue type and/or sales person and can only be applied to invoices of the matching value(s).

Reports

• The word Detail has been dropped from the name of all reports.
• The Aging report has been improved with additional columns and split into two different version. The Aging report presents the aging across a 30/60/90/etc. number of days while the Aging (by Month) report presents the information across whole calendar months. Additionally, these reports have been moved out of the A/R category to a new Aging category.
• The Inventory report has been significantly improved with regards to performance and placement accuracy. The first is that the report is "virtualized" across the number of stations that you have; meaning there will now be a separate report for each and every station that you have in the reports list. When running the report, there is a multi-phase “scheduling” process that takes place when running the report. The first phase places all spots into the respective day parts based on actual placement (on a log). The second phase processes all spots that are not place (bump list) into their respective day parts whenever they are scheduled singularly within a particular day part. The third and final phase will take all spots that are not place (bump list) and “schedule” them based on which day part is “less filled”. This report sees a significant improvement in performance based on the machine having more core processors.