Royalty Management
Royalty calculation is a traditional and existing process present in the MPE [media, publishing and entertainment] domain. There are no standalone solutions for royalty management but HCL has developed a unique solution by customizing on Oracle's Incentive Compensation (OIC) module. OIC has been used to pay commission to sales representatives in any field of business for successful transactions they bring into the company. Now, HCL has provided a custom solution in OIC which can be used to even pay royalties to artists.
In the case of greeting cards, HCL's custom solution duplicates invoice lines in OIC and appends artist information to each card sold. Using this information, the percentage on total sales is computed and a cheque issued to the artist. Here, artists are set up as sales representatives in the system to pave the way for royalty calculation.
For the music industry, the royalty management system is a web based application developed using Oracle portal. It provides a customer focused delivery channel through which music recording companies, groups or performers can review their financial information easily and have online access to the information. Artists can view and analyze their royalty payments received at each and every level (through a royalty payment & management tool) by role based homepage navigation with payment history of customers.
For a client in the entertainment business HCL developed a royalty management system that involved several processes including activities commencing from issuing licenses to broadcasters, to collecting royalties for music tracks played by broadcasters, and calculating the amounts received with respect to the music tracks.
The royalty management system allows (recording companies/groups) to:
- View electronic versions of monthly payments
- View all the components that make up the monthly payments
- Analyze payments and components through available reports
| Before Implementation | After Implementation |
|---|---|
| Royalty payments to the customer was available only on a monthly basis (through a statement) due to the volume of data involved in the process (above 50,000 records for single monthly payments) | Royalty payments to the customer was available on a monthly basis, distribution basis, music track allocation basis and music track source basis, in a well organized, easy to use manner. The on-the-fly creations of the reports enabled users manage their payment data, thus making the solution a "Customer Royalty Management Solution" |
| There was no data quality tool available to check low level data i.e. music track allocations which make up the monthly total. | A cleansing tool was provided using which, data quality at each and every level is checked. |
Business benefits derived from HCL's solution:
- Royalties and commissions are handled in a single Oracle module
- Annual cost savings due to reduction in manpower
- Reduced manual calculation errors
- Easy for third parties to audit Royalty & Commission plan processes
- Reduced dependency on resources - very process driven
- No customization impacting support contract with Oracle
- On time payment to artists and sales reps
