purchase alert reports

["Meg Westbury" <mwestbury at kcls dot org>]

Hi, all.  The canned purchase alert on Millennium is not working for us.  In fact, it's creating hours of extra work for the Acquisitions staff who have to do a lot of contortions to replicate the functionality of the purchase alert reports on our previous system.
 
The functionality that we desperately need is:

*	The Purchase Alert needs to report titles where the number of holds exceeds the number of copies by a five to one ratio. 

*	Ideally, we would like to adjust the ratio for video/DVD, where the check-out period is only a week. 

*	The Purchase alert should report both ON ORDER and received items. Our staff have been pulling a custom report for the ON ORDER titles, but the report cannot apply the ratio so it pulls every ON ORDER title with even a single hold. 

*	The items should appear on the report every time the title exceeds the holds ratio. Now the title appears once and will not appear again until all the holds the system counted the first time are filled. 

*	The number of copies and the number of holds should appear as part of the report. For both the canned and custom ON ORDER report, we have been having support staff look up that information (hence the 30 hours of staff time a week). It isn't enough for us to know that we need to buy more copies of an item, we need to know how many copies to buy. 

Are there other libraries running home grown purchase alert reports or have developed workarounds with Millennium?  One idea I had was to try an SQL report.  Anybody out there have luck with that?

 

Thank you very much for your insights.

	

	

	

	

	Meg Westbury

	King County Library System

	mwestbury at kcls dot org