If you were unable to attend the Soprano Development Update webinar on Thursday 24th September or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on latest developments by watching the recording of the webinar below or by downloading the video.
Highlights include:

• Latest release – demo of new features
• Soprano and Local Data Services work in progress
• Acquisitions development started
• Reading RFID tags into Soprano

In the section on Acquisitions development we invited information from your acquisitions staff about their work. To give an idea of the kinds on information we’re interested in, a set of questions is given below. Please send comments to terry.willan@capita.co.uk.

Questions to prompt information from acquisitions staff

1. What initiates an acquisition at your library (who, how,etc).
2. Describe your daily activities in acquisitions (who, what, how? What takes most time?)
3. What would you improve about the acquisitions process? Describe your ideal acquisitions system.
4. Who is involved in acquisitions. How do you split responsibilities? How many people are involved?
5. What non-LMS systems are involved (spreadsheets, finance websites etc)
6. Where does acquisitions work take place?
7. Reporting – what do you need to do? Do you check stock performance, or is that somebody else?
8. Receipting – how do you do it. Who is involved?
9. Do you use Open Orders? To what extent? How many serials etc are acquired via Open Orders?
10. Export to finance. Do you have finance integration, what are the pain points?
11. How much of your process uses EDI? Do you print many orders? How do you send these?
12. Do you manage donations, gifts, etc? What do you do? Quantities?
13. How do you communicate with suppliers. For what reasons? How often?
14. Volume of orders – per day/week? How many queries/problems, e.g. part-supply, non-supply, invoice discrepancies, different item supplied, etc?
15. Do you use verification? What are approvals criteria?
16. How many funds do you have active? How are they split?
17. Are your acquisitions and cataloging processes integrated?