Pearson – Granting all Learners the “Rights” to Learn

Pearson launched a major, 5-year, business transformation initiative to empower the company to work globally, efficiently and consistently across the organization and help 75 million learners and educators no matter how and where they are. Their mission – Digital First. Strategic to digital readiness was streamlining the process of acquiring and granting rights and permissions of all content assets – whether chapters, text excerpts, audio, video, graphs or images – in order to facilitate speed and innovation in the creation and delivery of their products.

FADEL IPM Suite™ Publishing Edition was brought in to automate Pearson’s business processes for Rights & Permissions, as well as Royalty Management, replacing dozens of disparate systems in order to standardize into a single global instance that supports multi-currency and multi-language requirements. “Historically, clearing all of the assets required for a product could take anywhere from 3-6 months and would include several emails and phone calls to various team members,” said Elaine Ferreira, Director, Rights Systems & Tools.

“Historically, clearing all of the assets required for a product could take anywhere from 3-6 months and would include several emails and phone calls to various team members,” said Elaine Ferreira, Director, Rights Systems & Tools. “IPM Suite enables us to move at a quicker pace required for our digital strategy. Today our UK team, for example, can log into a single system, enter an asset, have it automatically checked for rights, and then clear it, all while the US team is still offline.”

“IPM Suite enables us to move at a quicker pace required for our digital strategy. Today our UK team, for example, can log into a single system, enter an asset, have it automatically checked for rights, and then clear it, all while the US team is still offline.” — Elaine Ferreira, Director, Rights Systems & Tools

With IPM Suite, Pearson gains these benefits:

• Arm its content creation teams with a global system of record for content and asset rights. Pearson and its affiliates gain full visibility and accuracy into rights available, rights that are due for renewal, and rights that have yet to be utilized.
• By automating rights clearance checks, the company gains traceability of content back to the rights available and compliance with contract terms during original and continuous publishing operations.
• With full integration to Alfresco Content Management and Oracle Financials & Advanced Pricing, Pearson can now marry supplier information with standardized rights and preferred vendor pricing, in order kick off a straightthrough process from asset rights requisition to PO generation. • Customer requests to purchase rights for individual content assets can now be checked against the rights inventory in order to automate the asset rights grant.
• Through improved content reuse, a unified system and more efficient processes, the company is able to significantly reduce the time and cost of clearing assets and delivering products to market. Thousands of assets can be cleared in a matter of hours and overall Pearson can be more responsive to changing market demands, delivering innovative new content in half the time.