With total assets of over $470 million, Brotherhood Bank & Trust has eight branch locations and over 155 employees. The stated mission of the 82-year-old bank is “To help all clients realize their dreams by providing financial solutions and service experiences which produce fully-banked, profitable, lifetime relationships, while providing growth, prosperity and pride of ownership for our shareholders, employees and community.” It’s a nice folksy bank, to be sure.

Founded in 2000 and based in Birmingham, Ala., Marketing Solutions, Inc. today lays claim to being “the fastest growing provider of Customer Relationship Management solutions for community financial organizations.” The company’s flagship product is Connections – CRM.

Mars National Bank has more than $280 million in assets, five branches and approximately 30,000 customers. Open Solutions is a provider of integrated enabling technologies for financial service providers throughout the United States, Canada and international markets.

Open Solutions Inc. offers a fully featured strategic product platform that integrates core data processing applications built on a single centralized Oracle relational database, with internet banking, cash management, CRM/business intelligence, financial accounting tools, imaging, digital documents, Check 21, interactive voice response, network services, Web hosting and design, and payment and loan origination solutions.

Davidson’s Equity Capital Markets will be employing Pivotal CRM for its comprehensive, integrated, industry-specific application that promises to increase operational performance, streamline processes across the value chain, and improve responsiveness to client requests. When Pivotal installation is complete, Davidson Companies plan to have approximately 200 users in 20 offices supporting 16,000 contacts.

Davidson Companies, founded in 1935, is an employee-owned financial services holding company based in Great Falls, Montana. Davidson Companies owns D.A. Davidson & Co., the largest full-service investment firm based in the region. Also part of the Davidson Companies family are Davidson Trust Co., a wealth management and trust operation; Davidson Investment Advisors, a professional money management firm; Davidson Fixed Income Management, a registered investment adviser providing wealth management and other fixed income services; and Davidson Travel, a full-service travel agency.

Pivotal Corporation is a software unit of CDC Corporation that boasts of clientele of 1,800 companies all its own, including Farm Credit Services of America, WCI Communities, Premera Blue Cross, Qiagen, ESRI, AvMed Health Plans, Sharp Electronics Corporation, and CMS Cameron McKenna.

CDC Software is a provider of enterprise software applications designed to assist organizations in delivering a superior customer experience. The CDC Software product suite includes Pivotal CRM, c360 CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform development tools, Ross enterprise resource planning, Ross supply chain management, IMI warehouse management, order management, Platinum China human resource solutions, and business analytics.

CDC Software now boasts more than 5,000 customers worldwide in the manufacturing, financial services, health care, home building, real estate, and wholesale and retail distribution industries. CDC Software is a division of CDC Corporation, a provider of enterprise resource planning and supply chain management software applications in addition to its CRM solutions.

Richardson, he of AMR Research, presented a future in which “rapid adoption of service-oriented architectures will lead to the end of the ERP market as we know it.” Richardson’s vision has SAP and Oracle customers giving up on those firms’ ERP applications, instead contracting “low-cost Indian or Eastern European integrators to build custom composite applications.” By 2012, the old ERP backbones that had supported all the new independent work would simply become too expensive to maintain and by that time vendors of applications in India and the former Soviet bloc will have discovered their own way to build business process platforms.

Joe McKendrick of ZDNet picks up Richardson’s crystal ball and runs with it a bit, posing the question “Can SOA pick up where ERP leaves off?” McKendrick posted an interview with Washington Group International application integration manager Rich Colton. Washington Group is currently implementing SOA to “effectively fill in the gaps left by ERP systems.”

Headlining the list of quotes is Colton’s statement that “We have not found an ERP system that meets the engineering/construction industry’s requirements,” going on to state that firms such as Oracle and SAP have tried. Due to certain failings in product range, a company like Washington Group is forced to use different systems in data collection. ZDNet reports that “Washington Group employed Oracle Fusion middleware to move to an SOA that would abstract many of the functions used across the company into a common service layer.”

To explain, Colton stated that “By integrating these systems, we can — on the back end then on the front end — build some business processes that aren’t being executed within the legacy application execution systems, and have it done in a layer above that. We can then update the appropriate systems where needed.”

For the full interview and more details on Washington Group’s deployment, go to ZDNet. Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group is a provider of engineering, construction and management for projects ranging from bridge construction to weapons destruction.

Lancaster City Council’s nomination reflects the work done in the creation of a new contact centre in June 2005. Macfarlane Telesystems and Lagan CRM technology was selected and a tight integration between Macfarlane CallPlus and the Lagan solution was achieved within a single day. (Now that may be award-worthy in and of itself.)

The UK Communications in Business awards are run by Communications News magazine and sponsored by IT firms including Thus, O2 and ntl:Telewest. The winners will be announced at the London Marriott hotel, Mayfair on September 7.

Lagan was established in 1994 as a spin-off from Queen’s University Belfast, with backing from QUBIS Ltd. Lagan specializes in CRM solutions, principally for government. The firm has recently received kudos with its appearance in the Deloitte Fast 50 for four successive years and a listing in the Sunday Times ARM Tech Track 100 as one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies.

Founded in 1987, Macfarlane is a UK developer and supplier of communication solutions to service providers, enterprises and public sector organisations. Strategic partners include vendors Lagan, Capita, Northgate, Steria, Onyx, Sx3, and Deloittes.

The solution that I use is to add an additional dummy Extend tag for each required blank line to the Payments Disbursement file. These are created under the ‘OutboundPayment’ parent.

You can add new tags to the Payments file by calling PL/SQL package ‘IBY_FD_EXTRACT_EXT_PUB’. See previous blog post: http://kwoodrow.blogspot.com/2008/06/part-1-adding-new-fields-to-r12.html

After adding the new tags, the resulting XML file should look something like:
(Note – in this case, there are 3 blank lines added to the file)

Then, in the eText template, under the ‘OutboundPayment’ level, create a new record to add these blank lines to the file:
(Note – this is highlighted in yellow)

Finally, test the template using the BIP Template Viewer:

Anyone got a different solution?

ResourceOne promises to provide a more efficient way to track leads and referrals, manage pipelines and contacts, and will create custom marketing campaigns. United Bank of Michigan senior vice president Lisa Wenzel stated expectations with “We expect ResourceOne to help our organization excel by gaining greater market share and fulfilling the financial demands of our customers.”

Meanwhile, Coretrac sales and marketing vice president Alan Buhler virtually guaranteed results: “CoreTrac’s ResourceOne will provide United Bank of Michigan the capability to more easily adapt to customer expectations in the community banking industry…” United Bank of Michigan today claims assets of almost $450 million, and is a leading small business lender in the American Midwest. Austin, Texas-headquartered CoreTrac, Inc. is dedicated exclusively to providing the CRM / SFA solution ResourceOne to community financial institutions.

With its first annual CRM Rising Star Awards, CRM Magazine seeks to recognize vendors that are “paving the way in emerging markets with innovative product launches, bold initiatives such as mergers and acquisitions, or substantial organizational or product line restructuring.” Steve Apfelberg, vice president of product management at Callidus Software accepted the award on behalf of the company.

In the October edition of CRM Magazine, senior editor Marshall Lager describes Callidus by writing that “the company [is] at the forefront of the growing enterprise incentive management industry. Led by President and CEO Robert Youngjohns, the company focuses on enabling CFO’s to take a more active role in setting goals, creating revenue streams, and managing execution.”

Founded in 1996, Callidus Software is a provider of enterprise incentive management systems to Fortune 1000 firms. Callidus software is employed at six of the top ten US banks, three of the seven largest property and casualty insurance carriers, and four of the five largest telecommunications companies. Callidus clientele includes 7-Eleven, Accenture, CUNA Mutual, HP, IBM, Philips Medical Systems, Sprint Nextel, Sun Microsystems, Time Warner Corporation and Wachovia. Callidus is publicly traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol CALD.

Heartbeat’s KOL management suite is a collection of software tools that seek to assist pharmaceutical and biotech companies in managing the entire KOL management lifecycle including KOL interaction tracking, KOL profiling, segmentation, publication analysis, speaker program management, honorarium tracking, KOL portals, and KOL content management.

Alongside the announcement, Heartbeat representatives remind of research firm Forester and its review entitled “The Forrester Wave: Key Opinion Leader Management Platforms, Q2 2006.” This study of seven KOL Management vendors undertaken in June had Heartbeat Software’s current offering taking top spot. Report author Elizabeth W. Boehm wrote that the Heartbeat KOL management suite “is an especially good fit for buyers that want a soup-to-nuts KOL management solution.”

Headquartered in New York City, Heartbeat Software is a provider of KOL management solutions for the life sciences industry and marketing content management solutions for the financial services industry. Heartbeat Software’s client base includes over fifty of the Fortune 500 firms. Heartbeat Software’s KOL management software is currently being used by over 100 pharmaceutical and biotech departments.

TicketVERIFY hits the market after a reported five years of development. (“We saw a need back in 2002 and have been working to perfect [the technology] since,” said Stephen Cassar, TICKETsage president/CEO.) Developed to tighten security loopholes in unauthorized resale channels, the TicketVERIFY product uses a combination of patent-pending software, processes, and hardware to detect resold or transferred tickets.

TicketVERIFY is touted as a solution to venues and ticketing companies wishing to control the unauthorized resale of tickets and who may currently be forced to cancel tickets en masse or resort to legal action in cases of suspected mass forgery.

Fayetteville, Ark.-based TICKETsage was founded in 1999 with a mission statement stating the desire to “address the limitations of legacy ticketing systems.” TICKETsage can also lay claim to creating a true 64-bit architecture.