ASC Blog

SCI’s Jeff Seaman to Speak at MERX and ASC Sponsored ProcureCon Canada Event

Posted: April 10, 2017
Written by Angie Stockley

Kicking off today, the three-day (April 10-12) ProcureCon Canada 2017 event held at the Hyatt Regency in Toronto, ON, provides attendees with best practice strategies for procurement transformation and evolution from a straight sourcing and purchasing role of indirect goods and services to delivering strategic cost savings and value creation. 

The event brings together a unique blend of procurement, purchasing, and supply chain experts from across all industries to share their experiences and knowledge with a team of people who truly embrace the strategically important field of procurement. 

MERX (an ASC sister company) is a key sponsor of this year’s ProcureCon Canada event. MERX helps thousands of private and public organizations reduce strategic sourcing costs while improving efficiencies and accountability to stakeholders. Organizations of all types and sizes use MERX to manage hundreds of billions of dollars of spend while engaging our global network of over 200,000 suppliers.

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Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Management Best Practices

Posted: March 9, 2016
Written by Angie Stockley

The right pricing strategy can make or break a deal and timing can be everything when you are trying to stay on top of market fluctuations and competitors’ moves and ensure you make the right deal at the right time. This is further compounded with geographical, organizational and even account-specific pricing variances and complexities. 

Don’t waste your time juggling pricing spreadsheets and chasing pricing exception approvals  --  a best practice Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Management Solution will automate, streamline and centralize your complete pricing strategy and execution lifecycle, ensuring a trusted single source of truth for the management and control of your pricing data.  

The ASC Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Management Solution provides a single, integrated solution designed to solve your pricing challenges by delivering complete pricing control right at your finger tips!

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Lessons Learned Case Study – Fault Tolerant Integration and Syncing

Posted: March 9, 2016
Written by Angie Stockley

A recent third-party partner incident highlighted the strength (ISO-certified quality procedures) and flexibility of ASC’s fault tolerant integration and syncing practices. ASC is sharing the incident below to illustrate our best practice capability and our lessons learned quality focus.

Salesforce has a planned disablement of TLS 1.0 beginning in June 2016 and as part of the planned exercise is allowing selected clients to enable an optional higher security transport layer update ahead of the main June 2016 disablement schedule. One of our customers accepted the advance update which subsequently suspended the ASC-Salesforce API data sync feature for the customer instance (seems the API was configured to the TLS 1.0 parameters and ASC was inadvertently not engaged to update the related integration connectors in line with the client’s planned update).

Due to the fault tolerant design of the ASC data sync no data was lost and recovery was seamless and easy. The sync was suspended for just this customer, data queued and subsequently processed once ASC certified the update corrected the TLS issue (all within a business day).

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Lessons Learned Case Study – Disaster Recovery Plan

Posted: March 9, 2016
Written by Angie Stockley

A recent third-party partner incident highlighted the strength (ISO-certified quality procedures) and flexibility of ASC’s disaster recovery planning practices. ASC is sharing the incident below to illustrate our best practice capability and our lessons learned quality focus.

A planned data center provider’s UPS test during a weekend (normal procedure) resulted in an unexpected UPS failure causing a hard power down (full outage, full impact) for the whole data center for 15 minutes. As this data center is part of the ASC high availability, full redundancy focused data center network architecture, ASC's monitoring center was immediately alerted of the issue and standard Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) procedures instantly commenced. All data was recovered with no impact, however, the incident presented an opportunity for improvement.

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