Modules

Description

Based on the unique Platform, modules are organized based on the specific aspects of the licensing business process they address.

Modules include :

• Deal Memo for creation & management of deal memos
• Contracts for creation & management of contracts
• Assets which provides digital asset management capabilities to all moduless
• Approval which automates the products approval process
• Royalty which provides the financial management functions including AR, AP

Benefits

• All modules leverage a single database, enabling a single "system of record"
• Participation of internal and external stakeholders, eliminates expensive and error prone manual processing of time sensitive licensing info.
• High configurability enables customers to configure modules to the way they do business without developing system from scratch.

Deal Memo

Description

Deal Memo allows sales professionals to efficiently prospect and manage licensing deals without the hassles of time consuming manual processes resulting in time delays and lost opportunities. Based on configured business rules and templates, the Deal memo module steps them through the deal memo process along with providing them with an up to date rights map against which they can check for available rights etc. Approved Deal memos can be smoothly transitioned into the formal contract phase and formalized in Contracts.

Benefits

• Increase licensing revenue by reducing the number of the lost deals due to the slowness of the deal approval process
• Improve licensee satisfaction via a faster more flexible deal approval process
• Lower operating costs by eliminating and/or reducing non-value added activities
• Increase visibility into the deal pipeline via a consolidated repository of up-to-date deal memo
• Reduce training time by simplifying deal guidelines and templates, streamlining the approval process, and creating a standard vocabulary

Features

• Built for busy sales professionals, Deal memo is easy to use and intuitive to learn.
• Tightly coupled with Rights Master for checking of up to date available rights based on the sales users territory or worldwide.
• Rule based routing for approvals based on pre-defined rules ex. $10M+ deals from UK for Publishing needs approvals from specific executives, CFO etc.
• Complete Pipeline view of each deal in progress and the status/phase it is in.
• Full history of all deals that have been done, with status and comments. Ability to learn from what happened and why in order to improve chances of getting the deal done faster.
• Ability to attach & view and all types of deal documents (in office formats) and images.
• Search and find deal memos by a combination of various relevant attributes includes rights
• Real-time alert and monitoring based on user specified parameters. For example, letting the appropriate Sales user know about an expiring right in his region
• Supervisory function for Sales Managers or executives who want to get an overview of the pipeline at any given time
• Extensive reporting capability to drill down on open and closed deals By Licensee, By Territory, By Property, By quarter etc. Reports can be printed out in company format for presentation purposes.
• Pre-built report templates include
  • Deal memo Status (By Licensee, By Territory etc.)
  • Rights Opportunity Report
  • Pipeline Report
  • History Report (By Licensee, By Territory etc.)

Contracts

Description

Contracts provide a broad range of capabilities for creating and maintaining contractual relationships between licensees/licensors and third party representation. A number of user-defined capabilities provide for multiple licensor representations. The software recognizes the each relationship uniquely, calculating the appropriate percentage for the parties involved for royalty splits including prepayment provisions for third party relationships.

Features

• Intuitive design and interactive forms makes it easy to maintain control of seemingly complicated agreements.
• Seamless integration between Contractual Agreements and Accounts Receivable
• Current contract types that include Monthly Royalty Collection, Quarterly Royalty Collection, Annual Royalty Collection,
• Invoice Type and Fixed Unit (unit breaks).
• Flexible payment schedules with automated calculation and invoice generation. Current payment schedules include advances, guarantees, fixed unit invoices (unit breaks), administration fee and marketing fees.
• Automatic application of advance payment amounts to incoming royalty sales until advance is exhausted.
• Exclusive relationship by product, property, territory and channel available at the product line item.
• Region definitions provided for grouping of territories and ease in contract construction
• Non-cross-collateralized and cross-collateralized capabilities available within contract version control
• Comprehensive reporting capabilities includes:
  • Deal Letters and Contract
  • Contract Performance to Goal
  • Licensee Performance to Goal
  • Licensor/Licensee Contract Status Report
  • Licensee by Licensor Report
  • Licensor Contract Expiration Report
  • Licensee Insurance Status Report
  • Licensee Infringement Report
  • Cure Notice Report
  • Licensee Contract Renewal Reports
  • Licensee Form Letters

Assets

Description

Assets provides an integrated digital asset management capability for all modules. It handles transformation, thumbnails, storage & retrieval of large amounts of image assets in multiple formats and resolution. Meta-data or attributes can be associated with each asset for search & retrieval at a later stage.

Licensees are able to access the latest style guides and reference materials based on their assigned rights. Creation & updating asset libraries based on workflow is also supported. At the backend, Assets can help build product catalogues of all approved submissions.

Benefits

• Reduction in time due to elimination of rework and mistakes due to leveraging updated style guide and reference material
• Improve licensee satisfaction via a faster approval process
• Lower operating costs by eliminating distribution of paper or CD based style guides
• Improve brand image due to usage of uniform set of guidelines which undergo constant change

Features

• Configurable Asset Library Creation and maintenance, based on By Property, By Character, By Season, By Key Events etc.
• Configurable workflow, which could involve internal & external stakeholders.
• Easy to use and intuitive to learn interface which allows users to navigate asset library quickly based on predefined templates relevant to the role a particular user plays.
• Automatic creation of thumbnails, when an asset is staged. This is then integrated and used during different phases of the licensing process. Thumbnail creation is image based and supports most popular bitmap file formats such as jpg, bmp, tiff, eps etc.
• Conversion of raster images to high-quality black and white, grayscale or color thumbnails for accurate, fast image selection on the Web.
• Extensive searching capabilities, which can be based on:
  • Unlimited combination of metadata
• Annotation and redlining
• Anti-aliasing for optimal display of documents
• Aspect ratio correction
• Auto detection of image formats
• Automatic pixel depth conversion
• Border removal / erase rectangle
• Brightness, contrast and gamma correction
• Color reduction
• Crop, paste and merge
• De-skew and De-speckle image cleanup
• Display functions including zoom, rubber band zoom, pan and scroll
• Dithering functions
• High-resolution printing (300-2400 dpi) direct to printer or
• EPS and PCL output.
• PDF reading and PDF text searching

Thumbnails

Automatic creation of thumbnails and usage in all modules of ensures a seamless linking of assets with contracts, approvals and royalty functions.

• Configurable Asset Library
  

  Highly configurable asset Library with unlimited hierarchy enables creation of a powerful asset browsing capability, which enables users to quickly locate and reuse assets. Access and rights govern what you see in the asset library. For example, if you are licensee with Spiderman rights for 2004 only you would be restricted to only seeing assets related to your rights and nothing more.

Approval

Description

Approval allows product submissions to be electronically submitted by licensee and approved by licensors resulting in significant timesavings during the approval phase. It also enables improved collaboration between licensee and licensor during the conception phase resulting in more innovative product ideas to evolve into designs thereby increasing revenues. Licensees & Licensors are able to capture their internal approval process across multiple offices and geographies resulting in a streamlined product development process worldwide.

Features

• Dynamic Process Management helps users manage a large number of projects from multiple licensees. provides a workspace for each user and their projects. Each project is a separate tree structure with its own phases and processes.

  Each user has a different set of workflow options available to them, based on their role. When the user logs in, the system automatically recognizes their role and where each of their projects is in the workflow. This allows the user to manage many projects in one application, without trying to remember what stage each project is at. also provides project sort and filter options (see Figure 1 below). This allows the user to focus on those projects that require their attention, or to easily find a project that another user has inquired about. With , managing 1000s of projects at a time becomes realistic.

  Based on their role in the process, each user only sees relevant projects and portions of the processes that they are involved in. Users collaborate with other users in a flexible, pre-defined workflow.

• Electronic review and approval enables the automatic routing of licensing packages for approval, based on workflow rules. All associated forms, documents, and images are included in each submission. Figure 2 below shows a submission that has been received from a Licensee with the attached form and image.
• The user may right-click on the image to view or markup the image using the Markup Utility. The Markup tool or electronic pen , supports common image formats including BMP, JPG, and TIF, and document formats including DOC, PDF and RTF. Imagine reviewing approvals anytime, anywhere securely without. Proposed changes can then be routed based on preset business rules or workflow.

  

  Once approved, the submission is returned to the Licensee, which enables the next phase of the project.

  Submit For Revised Art button allows the Licensee to go to the next phase. This is based on the customizable phases and business rules, which are configured based on your specific needs. The green check mark icon in the Response From Agent indicates the submission has been approved for the concept phase.

  Many processes require multiple approvals of a submission. allows a user to easily aggregate several responses into a single submission. The Creative Administrator can click on the button to include the approval into the response to the Agent and/or Licensee.

• Alert & reminders provides email alerts when the user has received new submissions. also provides reminders, which let users know which projects are approaching their due date. Figure 6 shows the Dash Board window, which includes New Items (not shown) and Reminders. New Items displays all submissions that are unread. Reminders displays all projects that are within a user-specified range of their due date.
• As the user is viewing their projects, the submissions that require attention are flagged with a red, yellow or green dot, for high, medium, or low priority reminders, based on due dates. An example of a process with a high priority reminder is shown in Figure 7.

  Reminders allow you to prioritize your workload and easily identify projects that require your immediate attention

• Reports provides reporting capability to analyze and improve the licensing process. Reports can be generated on the entire dataset specific to the enterprise. comes with a standard set of reports. Customized reports can be generated based on specific enterprise needs. Figure 8 shows an example Approval Time Report that shows the time taken for approval during various stages of the creative process.

Royalty

Description

Royalty is the accounting system, which manages all aspects of the financial process from royalty collection to invoicing to Account Receivables, Payables and General Ledger. Royalty is integrated with other modules such as Contracts & Approvals, which results in one "system of record".

The Accounts Receivable (AR) functions improves cash flow management by quickly invoicing goods and services accurately and as a result, reducing the clerical effort required to produce invoices, apply cash receipts and age receivables.

Accounts Payable (AP) provides complete procedural control for vouchering payables, payment selection, wire transfer payment, check writing and cash management. Increased cash disbursement control is insured through flexible payment tools.

Foreign currency support provides the capability to handle foreign currencies without losing any of the functionality in domestic trade transactions. Foreign currency is integrated with contracts, invoicing, purchase, receivables and payables activity.

Features

AR features includes

• Allows for non-AR receipts and unapplied cash.
• Creates charge-backs for unauthorized deductions.
• Easy access to orders, collection status and historic customer data.
• Easy-to-use finance charge generation.
• Simplified month-end processing.
• Flexible cash receipt posting capabilities.
• Highlights delinquent receivables and prints dunning letters using user-specified selection criteria and formats.
• Monitors all credit information.
• Performs on-line aging by activity or due date with drill-down to invoices, payments and comments.
• Provides receivables revaluation and/or analysis for selected and/or all currencies.
• Reports include:
  • Licensee Activity Status
  • Sales Journal Report
  • Cash Receipts Edit List
  • Licensee Aging Report
  • Order Status Report
  • Licensee Account Report
  • Licensee Statements

AP features include:

• Ages payables.
• Allows "hold" amounts with reason codes.
• Allows for flexible payment selection by supplier, invoice, due date.
• Assists in the check reconciliation process.
• Calculates discounts automatically based on credit terms.
• Creates manual checks.
• Distributes expenses to multiple general ledger accounts automatically.
• Facilitates liability control by providing an easy-to-use, interactive, supplier invoice entry process, a complete supplier database, and a comprehensive and flexible payment selection process, up-to-date cash requirement listings that itemize outstanding obligations.
• Facilitates management control by providing comprehensive reporting via standard accounting journals, audit trails, an extensive on-line query capability and ad-hoc management reports.
• Improves accuracy and control over the payment and reconciliation process.
• Includes check-void and check-cancellation processing.
• Maximizes cash retention and minimizes cash discounts lost through the payment scheduler process.
• Processes debit memos, which recognize returns to suppliers and automatic application to accounts.
• Provides payables and purchases revaluation and/or analysis for selected and/or all currencies.
• Provides three-way, on-line matching of quality and prices from purchasing, receiving and invoicing
• Records checks that have been manually written.
• Supports multiple bank accounts in multiple currencies.
• Uses existing data files extensively as data entry defaults to reduce data entry time and increase accuracy.
• Extensive reporting and data querying capabilities.