Cascade is our innovative and unique semi-automated Supplier Selection tool, which offers our customers the most flexible approach to acquiring stock.

Our expert IT team developed cascade in-house, with the assistance of Maggie Sumner, Chair of National Acquisitions Group and formerly of the East Riding of Yorkshire. Maggie has a wealth of experience in stock selection and assisted greatly in creating a tool that reflected the thought processes a librarian went through when deciding whether or not they should purchase a title.

Our aim was to provide a product that enabled customers to create their Supplier Selection specification in a set formatted way, ensuring that the vagaries of individual authorities, and that we avoided a “one-size fits all approach”.

Cascade is basically a series of web-based templates that enable the user to create their own specification. We have significant experience in providing more “traditional” Supplier Selection to customers and it seemed the hardest part for was drawing out the knowledge, experience and reasoning from a selectors mind onto a sheet of paper to create their specification. The Cascade templates are designed to assist in that process by with a number of prompts and asking a series questions of the selector.

All selections are applied against our pre-publication data on a monthly basis, which ensures stock will be with customers on or before publication, providing library customers the level of service they have come to expect. For fiction categories customers have the option to specify against certain authors – all of which have been rated by our hugely experienced Stock Specialists, to minimise the level of preparatory work, or genre/publishers for a more general selection.

Non-Fiction has been approached differently with every title within the Askews core database star rated by our Stock Specialists. This enables the customer an easy identifier of the titles that libraries should be stocking on their shelves, again minimising the time taken to draw up the specification.

Users have the option have a “fully managed” option, where Askews will manage and monitor your budget spend. Alternatively, users can be “non-managed” where selections are created using your criteria and these are made available to the customer for approval prior to ordering. This is the initial status for all Cascade customers and allows for amendments to the specification before going “fully managed”.

Additionally, there are options to allow users to set up rules for the allocation of stock to individual branches, tiers, groups, etc. allowing specific types of material to be directed to the most appropriate service point.

To further support what is a genuinely time and cost efficient ordering tool, full EDI facilities are available, although users do not have to have EDI routines in place to benefit from Cascade.

Adult Fiction was our first venture into semi-automation, after a rigorous pilot process and was live September 2006. Many customers are now benefiting and they have warmly received our innovation.

Adult non-Fiction was live in July 2007 with Children’s – both Fiction and non-Fiction – soon following.

We have been delighted with the response from our customers and will continue to develop more features and enhancements to Cascade as the needs of our customers change.