Allocation of strategies to the titles

General information about the assignment of strategies to titles

Part of the “intelligence” of IMMS’ intelligent distribution algorithm is based on the need for handling different items (different titles) in varying ways. For certain titles, it is a good idea to have a lot of copies on the shelves available for browsing, while for others, it is more appropriate to store them in a media hotel. This is managed with the help of various strategies along with their strategy consequences.

The task of creating strategies and then classifying the thousands of titles in those strategies is not trivial.

The Library Management System can optionally define the initial strategy when a title is transferred the first time. This initial strategy can be an good starting point for newly purchased titles. Whether a specific title ends up becoming a “bestseller”, “a one-day wonder”, “a classic” or something else can obviously not always be known at the time of purchase.
Typically, the Library Management System does not include the initial strategy as a part of the initial data.

Assignment of strategies using start rules

Using the IMMS module automatic life cycle management, it is possible to create rules based on LMS master data that defines strategies for the titles transferred from the Library Management System as a part of the initial data.

To help you get started, a basic set of rules can be created during configuration of IMMS, which split the titles into strategies and additionally serve as a starting point for the customization of the life cycle rules. To make this possible a set of strategies which correspond on a one-to-one basis with the strategy consequences are installed with the system.

The following rules are suggested created as inspiration and starting point:

These automated actions are not carried out at installation since IMMS is installed with the controlling parameters "Change strategies" and "Create weeding orders" disabled. This allows the customer to control the introduction of automated assignment of strategies to titles.

Assignment of strategies via a special initial run

To help with the assignment of strategies for the large number of titles loaded into IMMS at startup, Lyngsoe Systems offers to perform a special initial run, where all of the titles are assigned to a number of strategies that are defined based on a set of rules specified by the customer.

Typically, the following criteria are used as a basis for selecting a strategy for a title:

Item type: For example, a rough classification of the item types into books/audio books/music/film/plays/other is employed.

Date and time of purchase: For example, a classification of the year into quarterly periods is used. Since as far as the system goes, the acquisition date is based on individual copies and the strategy must apply to the entire title, a date for each title is calculated based on the date when the majority of copies was purchased.

Popularity: Typically, a simple classification into high/low frequency of loaning is used, based on the percentage of a title’s copies that were on loan at the time of startup. A limit value (e.g., 30%) is defined for the percentage that must be on loan in order for the popularity to be “high”. It is important here that the “lendable” check mark has previously been set correctly for the item collections.

Based on these criteria, strategies are created and the titles are assigned to these strategies. For example, a title with the item type of “Book”, where the majority of copies were purchased in February 2014 and the percentage of items on loan was high, can be assigned to the strategy “Bo2014Q1H” (Book, Q1 2014, High popularity).

In addition, a strategy consequence will be defined for the created strategies based on information from the customer. With this approach the customer can maintain distribution principles simply by changing strategy consequence on created strategies as times goes by.

The following information is needed from the customer:

A form can be supplied for entering this data, along with an example of a completed form.

It is of course always possible to change the strategy of titles manually. It is also the customer’s responsibility to create new strategies as needed and adjust the strategy consequences for strategies on a continuous basis.
The customer is free to create strategies that do not follow the auto-created pattern - for example, for special titles that need to be treated differently.