Update on AMS Launch
This is an update on the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) association management system (AMS).
- The Leadership Portal for FY17 leadership reporting and FY16 financial reporting launched July 29, 2016. SWE staff entered any submittals that were sent to us prior to this launch date. SWE extended access privileges to this leadership portal through September 30 for FY16 leaders to complete the necessary annual reporting required.
- The section/committee roster is available, but requires some additional configuration and training at this time.
- The individuals listed as leaders have access to the section/committee data provided they are members of that section/MAL. These privileges need to be adjusted so counselors, faculty advisors, etc. who are not members of that particular section have access to that data.
- Configuration of the AMS required a SWE membership and a Section/MAL membership. The SWE membership contains information about the member’s join date, paid-through date, membership type and opt-out preferences. The Section/MAL membership does not contain this information. Unfortunately, the roster report data in the Leadership area is based on the Section/MAL membership and therefore is lacking some data we want to provide in the Leadership Portal. SWE staff will receive APEX training in September to allow us to manipulate the visible data, which will also include our ability to provide information on changed data. It will be some time after training before we are able to adjust the Section/MAL Roster data in the Leadership Portal to include this additional information. Contact membership@swe.org for this information in the meantime.
- The membership join/reinstate submittal launched July 18, 2016, but a few issues appeared that were not seen during our testing of the submittal feature. Those most impacted by these issues are new employer-sponsored members. Staff can use the AMS without encountering these same issues, so we are able to assist with processing of membership application, reinstatement or renewal if problems are encountered online.
- The enhanced membership directory launched July 29, 2016, and has been tweaked to improve the user experience. We have received positive feedback on the new feature and are pleased with the performance/speed of searching. We have scheduled a fix to correct the company name data which was converted from the old system without any spaces (e.g., TheBoeingCompany) and makes it difficult to query. The synchronization of the data between the directory and the AMS is running regularly; daily changes to member data are processed every night and a full data refresh is run each weekend.
- Finally, SWE staff will be receiving training on Advanced Business Objects reporting in September. Business Objects is a powerful business intelligence tool that our AMS uses for reporting purposes. Following this training, we will work on membership reports and SWENext reports to get them running on a monthly basis again.
Our goal is to have these improvements in place by the end of September. If you, or anyone you hear from, are having issues with the AMS, please ask them to send this information directly to membership@swe.org. The sooner we are aware of any issues, the sooner we can work to correct them.
We appreciate your support as we work though these improvements.
-SWE Staff
