SAP IPM Implemented in 4 Months

Medium sized publishers rarely look at SAP. They think that its too expensive and/or that it takes too long to implement.

That is not always true. The Nomos Publishing House implemented SAP IPM (Intellectual Property Management) and SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in four months with the assistance if IDS Scheer.

"After the initial identification of the specialist requirements, a small team began work on the project in mid-September 2006. The finished fee settlement for the publisher for the year 2006 was hot off the press at the end of January 2007. This enabled Nomos to start making automatic postings for financial accounting and payment runs to the authors — in record time and the result of an excellent partnership."

Read the press release about this implementation of SAP IPM.

If your publishing company has growing sales of $50M USD and needs a customizable intellectual property management solution I would include SAP IPM among the solutions that I would evaluate.

SAP Book Publishing Software

SAP's book publishing software offers two unique advantages when compared to other solutions.

First, it offers the most highly customizable software solution available for book publishers that want a customized solution. When Random House realized they a customized rights solution for their unique needs they were able to construct a customized solution in SAP. Standardized software for larger publishers; such as IBS Bookmaster or Klopotek, does not offer this flexibility.

Second, SAP is multilingual. Workstations in Japan, Germany, United States, Russia and France can access a centralized database in their own language. This feature allows a multinational publishing company to standardize their operations around a single solution that provides management with real time information on their global operations.

That said, in our experience, SAP is best suited for large book publishing companies with sales or $100M+ USD. Why? In the past we have suggested that multilnational publishers with sales of $30M to $75M contact SAP. SAP was not interested in dealing with them, and recommended that they seek other solution providers.

Oxford University Press Implements SAP IPM

At Book Business Expo 2007 we learned that Oxford University Press is implementing the SAP Intellectual Property Management module.

The SAP IPM module's functionality covers rights management; including rights availability tracking, and royalty accounting.

From our perspective, the key advantage of SAP IPM is that the publisher can extensively customize its functionality and user interface to meet the "unique" needs of their publishing house.