Optimizing Digital Revenues, Physical Sales, and License Income Processes
OverviewUniversal Music Group is the world leader in music-based entertainment, with a presence in more than 60 territories. Committed to artistry, innovation, and entrepreneurship, UMG fosters the development of services, platforms, and business models in order to broaden artistic and commercial opportunities for artists and create new experiences for fans. UMG implemented a high-speed, high-throughput, scalable platform capable of meeting the company's current and anticipated future data volumes. Replacing a variety of legacy systems, the new solution is highly flexible and configurable, allowing UMG to adapt to an ever-changing marketplace and enabling the company to quickly and efficiently adapt to new business models. With immense volumes of data to ingest, Vistex and UMG created a platform that is scalable to achieve higher throughputs and meet UMG's sales volume growth in the years to come.
Leveraging Vistex Solutions for SAP, UMG’s GCH platform processes 500 million new sales lines per month.
Solution Vistex Solutions for SAP, together with SAP HANA's in-memory database, proved to be the optimal, scalable, and highly configurable platform for high-volume, high-complexity business processes. Vistex implemented a Global Clearing House (GCH) for UMG that addresses all aspects of digital sales reporting, including: ingestion, validation, enrichment and transformation of sales data, allocations, reversals, revenue posting, and aggregation at month-end close. The GCH also supports the management of intercompany participation data based on rights & repertoire metadata for UMG's broad catalog, as well as the intercompany royalty settlement for all of UMG global revenue streams, from physical and digital sales to neighboring rights and license income. UMG additionally manages its European Central License agreement for mechanical copyrights on the GCH platform provided by Vistex.
Results
Leveraging Vistex Solutions for SAP, UMG's GCH platform processes 500 million new sales lines per month, and has transformed intercompany accounting, reducing the overall processing timeline by months. The Vistex solution allows the company to process sales files at a rate of 12 million lines per hour including ingestion, validation, transformation, revenue calculations, and other business rules executed on every line. With artist and copyright royalties processed more efficiently, UMG's artists, labels, and other rightsholders have greater frequency of insights and reporting.
Vistex Solutions for SAP was able to process sales file ingestion at the rate of 12 million lines per hour
About Vistex Solutions for SAP Vistex has a longstanding and unique strategic relationship with SAP, offering a number of innovative solution extensions for SAP software. Our products are tested, validated, licensed and supported by SAP, and utilize the core SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA environments to maximize customer investment.
How Vistex Makes it all add up in Music
The rapid-fire changes in the digital music landscape and the mass adoption of streaming music have amplified sales transactions and the complexities arising from numerous income streams. Today’s music companies are confronted with processing this unwieldy detail in an effective, efficient manner. Vistex provides a high-volume, easily configured solution poised for traditional, current and future music business trends. Contracts, metadata and all royalty activity are captured in a single system, which is used for registration, licensing, sales, royalty reporting, analytics, and more. This enables music companies to manage all aspects of their industry in a single solution.