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IBM’s Royalty and Payment Management (R&PM) function supports IBM Business units in managing offering portfolios through third-party partner licensing and support agreements. They specialize in mitigating risks and facilitating activities throughout the end-to-end engagement lifecycle, from negotiations and payment setup to product and agreement termination. Central to IBM’s supply-side partnership onboarding and relationship management, R&PM ensures timely and accurate performance of agreements and payments.
The R&PM digitalization team recently deployed a transformative initiative that enhances operational efficiency and strengthens R&PM ability to fulfill its core value statements.
With this transformative deployment in place, complex administrative tasks are significantly reduced, freeing-up time for deeper analysis, operational improvements, and providing stakeholders with valuable insights, while offering a reliable and trustworthy automation that ensures the right parties and individuals are prompted to take timely actions and receive customized reports with precisely the data they need.
The RP&M digitalization strategy and the associated deployment have transformed key workflows, reducing operational complexity, and improving process accuracy and efficiency, including:
- Payment Calculation Automation: Transforming manual calculations into precision-driven, scalable workflows that reduce human error by up to 90%, increase operational efficiency, and enable teams to focus on higher-value tasks, driving overall productivity and accuracy across the organization. This transformation not only drives immediate improvements in productivity and accuracy but also lays the groundwork for in-progress AI-powered enhancements, further elevating organizational capabilities.
- Alert Systems: Implementing proactive alerts to notify teams of critical thresholds and compliance requirements, enabling timely interventions.
- Workflow Digitalization: Automating manual tasks, freeing resources for higher-value activities and improving overall workflow efficiency.
By integrating digital workflows into the R&PM infrastructure, the team successfully supports over 500 entities and facilitates $2B in payments to the several hundred IBM partners annually. These workflows underpin $8B in IBM revenue and support 70% of distributed software offerings with third-party assets. This modernization reduces manual workload and enhances R&PM team's efficiency and accuracy in managing high-stakes operations, enabling faster decision-making and a scalable framework for future growth.
These efforts not only contribute to the successful digital transformation of R&PM services but also position the team to achieve strategic goals with 30% greater agility and 6% cost savings. The RP&M Digitalization initiative has become a key enabler of innovation, driving operational excellence and fostering a data-driven environment that supports sustainable growth and efficiency improvements across the organization.
Royalty and Payment Management (R&PM) Digitalization team has successfully transitioned over 26 manual processes into production-ready digital workflows. This milestone represents a significant leap in its digital transformation, integrating automated scheduling with R&PM’s robust capabilities to modernize and optimize both manual payment services and IBM stakeholders day-to-day activities. The impact is measurable: over 650 hours of manual work per month is automated, showcasing the transformative power of automation and process optimization.
What sets this achievement apart is the speed and scale at which the team automated critical operations compared to industry standards. In many organizations, transitioning from manual to automated workflows is a gradual process that may span years, often encountering significant roadblocks. In contrast, this team’s ability to streamline processes and calculations, enhance notification systems, and centralize data management within a cohesive automated framework in just a year demonstrates exceptional execution.
These results not only highlight R&PM team’s operational efficiency but also reflect its proactive approach to problem-solving. By replacing cumbersome manual tasks with precision-driven automation, they have set new benchmarks within the organization, saving substantial time and reducing the likelihood of human error. In doing so, they have also created an adaptable and scalable system that positions R&PM for future growth.
Nomination Title: Royalty and Payment Management (R&PM) Digitalization
