Effectively managing intellectual property, including your rights inventory, license revenue, and royalty payments, is challenging, especially for digital media companies that rely on licensed content for products and profits. To handle these complex issues, you need software that covers both media-specific business and customer relationship management tasks.

SAP Intellectual Property Management helps you manage these tasks by covering the entire value chain – from acquiring and creating intellectual property to managing incoming and outgoing royalty payments. You can manage relationships with rights holders, licensors, licensees, actors, and authors by effectively administering:

• Contract management – Manage contracts and relationships with business partners (licensors, licensees, actors, and writers). Create and maintain contracts for service sales, product sales, rights, and license deals – as both licensor and licensee of intellectual property rights. And you can track master data and the roles of a company or individual in different processes, customizing this information to meet your precise needs.
• Rights inventory – View vital information on all intellectual property rights, including status, availability, and restrictions, through complete records of rights that enter or leave your inventory. Check availability of rights using the intuitive user interface. Generate reports that provide essential facts on rights from different perspectives.
• Rights, licenses, and product sales – Use the rich features of SAP Customer Relationship Management to sell intellectual property. SAP CRM handles the entire life cycle of rights, licenses, and products – from marketing to sales to added-value services – and coordinates all customer-facing activities.
• Royalty accounting – Manage all essential royalty accounting processes with seamless data flows, including invoice generation and customer payment receipts, information entry into your accounts receivable system, and generation of royalty payments and statements after factoring in advances, prepayments, or bad debts.

With SAP Intellectual Property Management, you can increase revenue from sales and licensing through more accurate planning, greater transparency, and process optimization over the entire life cycle – ending costly, time-consuming work needed to ensure consistency among stand-alone systems.