We marked March 16th as The Day of Dual Milestones at our flagship acquirer-side OLS.Switch implementation.
First, on the Rx adjudication side, our client turned on the spigot on NCPDP format D.0 processing. This was a seminal event. Thinking back to the impetus of the effort to creation a switch capable of handling adjudication transactions, it was the D.0 mandate that spurred the whole thing. The US Federal government (providers of Medicare and Medicaid services) has mandated a January 1, 2012 deadline for switchover to the D.0 standard. Like most players in the industry, our client was processing NCPDP 5.1. They made a strategic decision not to develop D.0 functionality on their legacy platform...kind of a moot point because that platform didn't have the juice to do it anyway. Those facilities were already taxed to the max by 5.1. The D.0 standard represents about a 2.5x burden in terms of maximum message length, as well as increased formatting complexity.
Ergo, the switch to OLS.Switch. While we've fully converted all traffic to our platform on the 5.1 standard, seeing the first upshots of D.0 traffic reminds us of why we were drafted for the effort in the first place. The best part of the whole milestone: how it happened almost without notice...just an offhand comment in a status meeting that, oh yeah, D.0 got turned on that morning and "all looks good." That's the best kind of conversion: zero drama.
Second, on the Loyalty engine side, that same client went live with their Electronic Coupons ('eCoupons') initiative. We've been processing serialized coupons for some time now (the kind you get at the bottom of your receipt as an enticement to make a return visit), but eCoupons are quite different in character. In an internal document, I summarized the difference between eCoupons and serialized coupons for my colleagues:
eCoupons differ in following way:
- Serialized coupons are meant to be redeemed in return visits by the customer. By contrast, eCoupons are geared to be presented to the customer for real-time use in the current sale.
- OLS creates (‘issues’) serialized coupons indirectly through message management. By contrast, [OLS' client] 'issues' eCoupons directly by loading them straight into the new loyaltyecoupon table.
- Serialized coupons are redeemed individually in a special Loyalty Lookup transaction. If voided, that is noted subsequently in a Market Basket Analysis ('MBA') transaction. By contrast, eCoupons are redeemed en masse at the point-of-sale. If redeemed, that fact is noted subsequently in an MBA (a single MBA would contain a record of all redeemed eCoupons).
We've supported up to 150 million active serialized coupons on file at any given time for this client's 35 million-strong cardholder base. We expect the number of active eCoupon offers we support could be several times that number.
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