Jim Phillips writes:

> It means he's a valued contributor to this list, as are you and several
>  other software providers.  There are some software providers; however, whom
>  we hear from only when they want to toot their own horns....

Because I'm the "he" in this discussion, and because the subject has become
"tooting your own horn," let me describe a new application that we've
developed over the past year or so for the HP3000. I won't even put a <plug>
notation on any of this simply because none of you are likely to be a
customer of this product.

The product is called "The GoldBook," and it's meant to be exactly that, a
gold standard for credit unions. It's a data mining product, built around our
primary product, QueryCalc. The GoldBook is designed to run in batch once a
month, without any form of human intervention and produce 110 pages of
reports, almost all of which are graphical in nature and all of which are in
full color.

There are two fundamental forms of reports that people write: functional
reports and analytical reports. The functional reports are things such as
"find me all of the people who owe us money and print me a list." These
reports are obviously critical to the operation of the business, but it's the
analytical reports that truly provide the opportunity to change the way that
you do business. These types of reports answer the very basic questions of
who are our customers? What products and services are they using? What's
making us money, and what's costing us money? What market segments are we not
serving well, and what opportunities are we not yet exploiting?

While analytical reports *can* be produced as twenty pounds of greenbar
paper, their best format occurs as graphs, and that's the manner the GoldBook
appears. It is 110 pages of graphs, produced wholly automatically and
organized into four or five chapters, depending on how the user credit union
is organized. The design criterion in putting the graphical reports together
was to make every page stand by itself, with as little repetition of
information from one page to the next as possible.

The GoldBook is targetted to the executive staff (CEO, CFO and board) of a
credit union, as well as to its marketing department. The GoldBook was also
designed to be sufficiently attractive so that it can be placed on the CEO's
desk and shown with pride to visitors. But even more importantly, it was
designed to be inserted month after month into the credit union's corporate
library in order to create a living history of the credit union's health,
community reach and growth.

Sample output of the GoldBook's four chapters is online at:

     http://aics-research.com/goldbook/goldbook1.pdf
     http://aics-research.com/goldbook/goldbook2.pdf
     http://aics-research.com/goldbook/goldbook3.pdf
     http://aics-research.com/goldbook/goldbook4.pdf

This output, when rendered on the screen is not nearly the quality that
actually appears on paper. Indeed, we're so pickly about quality that we
include an HP4550 color laser printer with each copy of the software.

Perhaps of greatest interest is that all of this requires no software newer
on the HP3000 than that material that was there in 1975. The entire process
is conducted in MPE namespace and uses only IMAGE and KSAM files.

More information about the product, if you wish to read it, is available at:

     http://aics-research.com/goldbook/index.html

While the intended market for this product is reasonably small and very
highly directed, it is a new product for the HP3000 and I thought that you
all might like to see it.

Wirt Atmar

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