Contract Management

Archive for April, 2009

Intellectual asset management is a structured and disciplined approach for turning ideas and knowledge into intellectual property and revenues.

Implementing an intellectual asset management program requires a process driven approach. A process is “a sequence of activities that take an input and produce an output. In business, a process is supposed to add value to the input before producing the output.” Each step of an intellectual asset management process informs and directs the other, leading to greater efficiency with existing efforts.

Intellectual asset management program provides productive synchronicity between innovation management, patent management, intellectual property licensing and IP enforcement, thereby attaining efficiencies in many inter-connected business processes.

Leading companies in almost every industry have acknowledged the need for an effective intellectual asset management program. Companies such as IBM, Texas Instruments, Du Pont, Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Eastman Chemical, Rockwell, Mark and Cadbury Schwepps, among others, have achieved significant profit increases from their intellectual asset management program. Billions of dollars in revenues have been generated from intellectual assets that are identified, managed and licensed through corporate IAM programs. In this paper, we briefly analyze how your organization can gain the same benefits than several leading companies have achieved.

Implementing successful intellectual asset management (IAM) processes requires five fundamental pieces within an organization: an intellectual asset management strategy, a dedicated team, well defined processes, infrastructure and systems, and metrics for continuous improvement.

Intellectual Asset Management Strategy

Developing an intellectual asset management strategy starts with alignment with corporate strategy. It includes evaluating R&D and engineering practices to accelerate time to market and enhance the effectiveness of intellectual asset investment decisions. You should consider assessing and implementing organization structures and work processes that support intellectual asset management strategy. Successful intellectual asset management strategy is much more than a process for patenting and licensing inventions. It takes into account all types of intellectual assets.

These assets include valuable information and trade secrets as well as patentable inventions. For most companies, patents are just the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of intellectual assets are proprietary information, ideas and trade secrets. Your strategy should also include developing and implementing intellectual asset portfolio monitoring and enforcement programs to better protect current products and future development efforts.

A Dedicated Team

To successfully implement the intellectual asset management strategy, you need the support of a dedicated team. With the role of IP legal changing from support to strategic, the team should be comprised of members with complementary skill sets, including engineering, R&D, IP legal and outside law firms. Acceptance from inventor community is critical for the program to work. Clear communication, simplicity and adaptability to their culture goes a long way into setting the right course for long term success.

Well Defined Processes

Effective intellectual asset management is a process and not an event. Process optimization has the biggest short and long term impact on your business. Both you and your extended team achieve significant efficiency improvements. You should work towards mapping each step in your process and automate each administrative task. This approach will reduce cost and significantly decrease the time dedicated to patent management. You should start with setting structure to the innovation management process. By streamlining invention disclosure submission, review and approval process, you can maximize the use of technology skills available throughout the organization and hence improve the

effectiveness of your team in processing new ideas faster. Next, If patents are significant part of your IP portfolio, you should focus on automating patent management process. Whether you use law firms to do most of your patent prosecution or you use a hybrid model, you should map out each task in the process and analyze how it can be delivered with least resources and maximum impact. Similar to patents, you can structure processes for managing trademarks, assertions and enforcement programs, budget and invoicing management.

Infrastructure and Systems

Historically not the first corporate function to receive limited and expensive IT resources, corporate legal departments have operated with a hodge-podge of limited IT automation, piecemeal point solution applications to address a limited set of legal department functions. Such applications were typically created for external law firms, expert at optimizing for billable hours, rather than enabling the corporate legal, and geographically distributed service providers, employee contributors and stakeholders to operate as one for competitive advantage. More recently, while corporations intranet and document management systems have improved the legal departments’ document access, no where – until

Lecorpio – has there been a completely automated, modern and integrated suite of applications designed to optimize not only each legal function’s processes but also enable an extended enterprise, end-to-end collaboration and visibility of intellectual assets and legal processes.

Unlike all current legal application “point solutions” that limit their clients’ operations to how the vendor defines how to run their business with rigidly defined business application logic programmed directly into the product, Lecorpio uniquely provides both the benefits of standalone, turnkey applications for each corporate legal function, but also empowers corporate legal departments to select and choose how they choose to do business and also easily extend their application logic and workflows and do so without expensive, rare and labor intensive traditional computer programming skills. It is designed to work the way you do, work the way your business does, and work the way technology should.

Metrics for continuous improvement

A picture is worth a thousand words. You should make use of an advanced set of visualization tools that provides an easily understood visual essence of every import metric for your legal department. Spot trends, find anomalies, identify strengths and weaknesses by leveraging your legal assets data. The metrics should be designed to help your team understand what’s happening from both 50,000 feet and 5 feet level. By conducting historical and comparative trend analyses to gain insight into emerging opportunities and critical issues, you gain a competitive advantage over your competition.

Transform Operations and Maximize effectiveness with Lecorpio

Lecorpio, the leading provider of Legal Resource Management (LRM) solutions, empowers the world’s leading corporate legal departments, internal corporate constituents and law firms to do more with less with an integrated and collaborative suite of software solutions to automate, manage and optimize all legal functions and processes, individually or “end to end” across the extended enterprise.

Lecorpio Legal Resource Management includes applications for innovation management, patent management, trademark management, IP assertions and enforcement management, licensing compliance management, spend management, Contract Management, open source management and entity management.

* Lecorpio innovation management provides form, discipline and structure to the invention disclosure process. Innovation Management enables inventors to be actively involved in a dialogue with the legal department and gain insight into how their submissions are moving through the process. This provides organizations gain broader access to ideas and process them for better results. Innovation management provides right information in the right people’s hands at the right time. Each participant in the process is notified when they are needed to perform a task, and alarms are triggered if delays occur. The “top-down” view of the entire process improves strategic planning of solicitations and development of new technology and intellectual property.

* Lecorpio patent management provides for the implementation of measures to ensure that a patent department identifies the right law firm/resources, adequately protects, and controls intellectual property portfolio and budgets. Patent case information is organized into electronic tri-folders analogous to the current paper file folders. All participants in the process, including inventors, in-house counsels, law firm attorneys, administrators, docketing clerks, annuity payment service providers and others, are linked to this database and given

selective access to information relevant to their role in the process. Access privileges are controlled so that each participant sees only what is necessary to carry out their responsibilities. Docketing management is fully integrated with case files, docketing is automatically associated with cases, and the user can instantly link from docket to the case file, or from case file to docket.

* Lecorpio trademark management helps your team collaborate with corporate marketing, product development team members and others throughout the company regarding trademark issues and respond promptly to new trademark search requests. You can manage outside counsels more

efficiently and keep track of budgets, estimates and invoices for each search, filing and registration activity performed by outside counsels.

With Lecorpio trademark management, you can create, manage and analyze your portfolios and cluster them by technology areas, product groups and other business factors. Also, using trademark enforcement management, you can track disputes.

* Lecorpio IP assertion and enforcement management is a robust monitoring system for implementing an effective enforcement program. You can track disputes; create third party profiles, manage incoming/outgoing engagements, manage budget, assess risks and keep track of critical tasks and activities.

* Lecorpio licensing management streamlines the process of creating, managing, implementing, and tracking licensing agreements to optimize revenue, mitigate risk, and improve compliance. With Lecorpio licensing management, you can systematically track and manage your licensing and business agreements, diligently fulfill your contractual responsibilities and track the obligations of your business partners. You can manage various types of agreements such as patent, other IP or software license agreements (both inbound and outbound) and graphically analyze on terms, commitments, and obligations articulated in various agreements.

For more information about Lecorpio and the Lecorpio Legal Resource Management suite of applications, please visit http://www.lecorpio.com or call at 1-408-850-7260

Chris Jones
http://www.articlesbase.com/intellectual-property-articles/implementing-intellectual-asset-management-program-for-the-enterprise-125179.html

In areas of China and the Asia Pacific, most of software outsourcing projects are accounted at a fixed rate, and this contract mode brings a mistaken concept to firms that it will cause inconvenience but have no effect on project investment because of this project delay. In fact, any delay of project not only causes inconvenience but also affect operation and benefit of firms. If a new business can’t be put out into marker by reasons of not ready for its software or information related, and others occupy the opportunity, how it will affect the firm. Or a project is developed for simplify internal workflow and improve work efficiency, then delays of the project will prolong the operational choke point and increase operational costs. All these affect a lot on benefits of company directly or indirectly, not merely on the matter if investment will increase or reduce。
However, in Europe and America, outsourcing projects are mainly accounted by actual numbers of work days, so it will impel to overspend if project is delayed.In this case, to avoid project delay is an important target to judge management capability of project manager. Project managers have to monitor schedules and risks of outsourcing project effectively to avoid delay of project and extra development charges. We can learn this management idea to manage outsourcing projects in China to guarantee that project can be achieved before deadline.
1. Establish Our Own Project Plan
As a project manager, you can not adopt project plan of outsourcing provider completely and chuckle to yourself to pass over project planning. Even if it is an outsourcing project, you have to make a full project plan by yourself, then you will know exactly about the whole workloads, evaluate the price to negotiate with outsourcing provider, ensure technicians who will be involved, judge if outsourcing provider can provide sufficient resources and if the promised time is feasible.
Having made the project plan, firms should require outsourcing provider to provide a full development plan before starting the project. In order to avoid numerous paperwork, some outsourcing provider usually claim that the plan provided before signing contract is the whole project plan. This tell us that they have no system of integrity on development management and project management，and their project manager is not suitable for his job. Any employable project manager should realize that the preliminary plan for delivering the project made in period of contract negotiation can’t be all-around, and it needs modification to be a feasible plan according to actual contents of the contract, add actual workloads, assignment of resources, and time required.
After getting the project plan from outsourcing provider, we need compare and check it with our own plan carefully to understand if it tallies with requirements of the project, that is workflow of the whole project, contents, estimated workloads and arrangement of resources. It is necessary to clarify timely and make it acceptable to each other if there are obvious difference. The project will be started formally after the project plan of outsourcing provider has been confirmed, and now it’s time to monitor the project.
2.Concerned On Evaluating the Schedule
Outsourcing contract should ask outsourcing provider to provide schedule reports regularly. I have seen many project schedule reports, and they are different a lot in contents, however, most of them explain definitely which parts have been completed, which parts are going on, which parts will be taken up in next report period, and whether the work has been completed on time or not, even more, some use different colors such as red, yellow and green to show status of progress.Basically speaking, all these information can only allow directors to see the project roughly，but can’t make the project manager hold the schedule of the project in hand.
In my opinion, the best way is that we should know how many tasks have not been finished, how long they will be complete, which parts have not start and will they start as scheduled, and is there any change on planned resources. If answers are different from original plan, we are supposed to question ourselves immediately, find out main reasons why the task haven’t been finished or why not start according to the schedule. Consequently we can discuss it with outsourcing provider, how to bring the project into normal schedule. Such finished tasks have become history to us and they have little effect on the schedule of the project. The parts haven’t been completed or haven’t start are the key of project, and they are in need of monitoring in particular
We need confirm the schedule reports offered by outsourcing provider to make sure if tasks have been actually finished as planned. The best way is when each program module is finished, we need let outsourcing provider to list original codes and testing results of the program. And let technicians and user representatives check the results to confirm that work provided by outsourcing provider has been finished in fact. This procedure of confirmation doesn’t mean we do not trust outsourcing provider. We simply want to confirm if the schedules of the project have been finished as planned, and ensures the person in charge is able to report to boss about the accurate status of the schedule.
3.Closely Associated When Checking and Accepting
The biggest risk of the software outsourcing project is not in development progress, but appears after the project has been finished.Many of them often turn up problems in program logic or editing range of data entry during checking and accepting period, which result in differences between testing result and real requirement, outsourcing provider cannot but modify a lot to result in project delay. Sometimes, outsourcing provider complains that it ‘s not their fault. Avoiding these risks, you’d better check and accept the project at the same time of developing, but not to do it until tasks have been closed.
It is not a proper idea that some firms put it as a last work to check and accept. Checking and accepting of project should be on it’s way, begins and ends at the same time of project development, and then can make sure the final procedure of checking and accepting successful. Another mistake in software development is to ask developer to create testing data for module testing and system testing.
Technician have limited knowledge of business operation, and only users know ranges of these datas and what information of the data is accurate. Therefore, an experienced project manager usually asks user representatives to assist its module and system testing in project process, and establish testing data for technician testing. Testing data of every module are offered by users. To prevent us from disputing, outsourcing project is suggested to test with this method. When outsourcing provider delivers original codes list and testing report of each module, users and technicians of firm check it together, and guarantee the results consistency between testing and users’ data, and at last check and accept the system successfully, and cause no fatal delay.
4.Distributing Time in Reason
It is more complicated to manage an outsourcing project than develop it internal, and more milestones are necessary to be established to monitor the schedule of the project.More communication and negotiation are needed; firm members should cooperate with the schedule of outsourcing provider constantly and supply with data needed for testing, all these will be handled in extra time.
Generally speaking, it supposes that an internal project will be completed in 500 workdays, 50~75 workdays are for project management, about 10%~15% of the entire workloads. And the same 500 workdays of outsourcing project needs another 75~110 extra days to manage this project. In other words, it takes 15%~22% of workloads for firms to manage outsourcing provider. Certainly, these data are only for reference for software development outsourcing projects, every project and outsourcing provider have difference management requirements. However, it is an unchangeable rule of project management, we can not think that outsourcing allows us have no management requirement .

David Zheng
http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/complete-software-outsourcing-project-on-schedule-70075.html

Resident or hotel managers are responsible for the day-to-day operations of the property. In larger properties, more than one of these managers may assist the general manager, frequently dividing responsibilities between the food and beverage operations and the rooms or lodging services. At least one manager, either the general manager or a hotel manager, is on call 24 hours a day to resolve problems or emergencies.

Assistant managers help run the day-to-day operations of the hotel. In large hotels, they may be responsible for activities such as personnel, accounting, office administration, marketing and sales, purchasing, security, maintenance, and pool, spa, or recreational facilities. In smaller hotels, these duties may be combined into one position. Assistant managers may adjust charges on a hotel guest’s bill when a manager is unavailable.

Lodging managers are responsible for keeping their establishments efficient and profitable. In a small establishment with a limited staff, the manager may oversee all aspects of operations. However, large hotels may employ hundreds of workers, and the general manager usually is aided by a number of assistant managers assigned to the various departments of the operation. In hotels of every size, managerial duties vary significantly by job title.

General managers have overall responsibility for the operation of the hotel. Within guidelines established by the owners of the hotel or executives of the hotel chain, the general manager sets room rates, allocates funds to departments, approves expenditures, and ensures expected standards for guest service, decor, housekeeping, food quality, and banquet operations. Managers who work for chains also may organize and staff a newly built hotel, refurbish an older hotel, or reorganize a hotel or motel that is not operating successfully. In order to fill entry-level service and clerical jobs in hotels, some managers attend career fairs.

Because hotels are open around the clock, night and weekend work is common. Many lodging managers work more than 40 hours per week, and may be called back to work at any time. Some managers of resort properties or other hotels where much of the business is seasonal have other duties on the property during the off-season or find work at other hotels or in other areas.

Lodging managers experience the pressures of coordinating a wide range of activities. At larger hotels, they also carry the burden of managing a large staff and finding a way to satisfy guest needs while maintaining positive attitudes and employee morale. Conventions and large groups of tourists may present unusual problems or require extended work hours. Moreover, dealing with irate guests can be stressful. The job can be particularly hectic for front office managers during check-in and check-out times. Computer failures can further complicate processing and add to frustration levels.

Hotels increasingly emphasize specialized training. Postsecondary training in hotel, restaurant, or hospitality management is preferred for most hotel management positions; however, a college liberal arts degree may be sufficient when coupled with related hotel experience or business education. Internships or part-time or summer work experience in a hotel are an asset to students seeking a career in hotel management. The experience gained and the contacts made with employers can greatly benefit students after graduation. Most degree programs include work-study opportunities.

Community colleges, junior colleges, and many universities offer certificate or degree programs in hotel, restaurant, or hospitality management leading to an associate, bachelor, or graduate degree. Technical institutes, vocational and trade schools, and other academic institutions also offer courses leading to formal recognition in hospitality management. In total, more than 800 educational facilities provide academic training for would-be lodging managers. Hotel management programs include instruction in hotel administration, accounting, economics, marketing, housekeeping, food service management and catering, and hotel maintenance engineering. Computer training also is an integral part of hotel management training, due to the widespread use of computers in reservations, billing, and housekeeping management.

More than 450 high schools in 45 States offer the Lodging Management Program created by the Educational Institute of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. This two-year program offered to high school juniors and seniors teaches management principles and leads to a professional certification called the “Certified Rooms Division Specialist.” Many colleges and universities grant participants credit towards a post-secondary degree in hotel management.

Lodging managers must be able to get along with many different types of people, even in stressful situations. They must be able to solve problems and concentrate on details. Initiative, self-discipline, effective communication skills, and the ability to organize and direct the work of others also are essential for managers at all levels.

Persons wishing to make a career in the hospitality industry may be promoted into a management trainee position sponsored by the hotel or a hotel chain’s corporate parent. Typically, trainees work as assistant managers and may rotate assignments among the hotel’s departments—front office, housekeeping, or food and beverage—to gain a wide range of experiences. Relocation to another property may be required to help round out the experience and to help grow a trainee into the position.

Work experience in the hospitality industry at any level or in any segment, including summer jobs or part-time work in a hotel or restaurant, is good background for entering hotel management. Most employers require a bachelor’s degree with some education in business and computer literacy, while some prefer a master’s degree for hotel management positions. However, employees who demonstrate leadership potential and possess sufficient length or breadth of experience may be invited to participate in a management training program and advance to hotel management positions without the education beyond high school.

Large hotel and motel chains may offer better opportunities for advancement than small, independently owned establishments, but relocation every several years often is necessary for advancement. The large chains have more extensive career ladder programs and offer managers the opportunity to transfer to another hotel or motel in the chain or to the central office. Career advancement can be accelerated by the completion of certification programs offered by various associations. These programs usually require a combination of course work, examinations, and experience. For example, outstanding lodging managers may advance to higher level manager positions.

Renewed business travel and domestic and foreign tourism will drive employment growth of lodging managers in full-service hotels. The numbers of economy-class rooms and extended-stay hotels also are expected to increase to accommodate leisure travelers and bargain-conscious guests. An increasing range of lodging accommodations is available to travelers, from economy hotels which offer clean, comfortable rooms and front desk services without costly extras such as restaurants and room service, to luxury and boutique inns that offer sumptuous furnishings and personal services. The accommodation industry is expected to continue to consolidate as lodging chains acquire independently owned establishments or undertake their operation on a contract basis. The increasing number of extended-stay hotels will moderate growth of manager jobs because these properties usually have fewer departments and require fewer managers. Also, these establishments often do not require a manager to be available 24 hours a day, instead assigning front desk clerks on duty at night some of the responsibilities previously reserved for managers.

Additional demands for managers is expected in suite hotels, because some guests—especially business customers—are willing to pay higher prices for rooms with kitchens and suites that provide the space needed to conduct small meetings. In addition, large full-service hotels—offering restaurants, fitness centers, large meeting rooms, and play areas for children, among other amenities—will continue to provide many trainee and managerial opportunities.

Josh Stone
http://www.articlesbase.com/careers-articles/the-specifics-of-hotel-management-55279.html