The Portfolio Manager is a tool that is designed keeping in mind the specific requirements that an IP team would require if they want to accomplish all work related to portfolio management in one place. With this, there would be no hassle of juggling between several tools, spreadsheets, and other data sources like document stores, etc. This makes accessing the IP data more convenient and a pleasant experience.
The key features of the IP Portfolio Manager is that it allows an easy collaboration between all the stakeholders of document management with full text search. With this one can track costs of workflow automation, and track budgets using the alerts feature. Another key feature includes mapping of technologies and products by collating data inputs like reviews, data updates, renewals and executive decisions.
Take Control of IP Assets:
Typically the IP Portfolio Management team will involve data that is scattered across different systems which are not connected by any means. The data sources can be file shares, spreadsheets, and various databases. The Portfolio Manager takes data from all these sources and organizes them in one place which makes it easier for the team to manage the portfolio. Inventions, Patents along with the Brands and Trademarks are all brought in along with their concerned documents, contracts, parties and other products are all connected in one, easy to use, clean interface. By doing this, the user can take control of their assets by understanding the history of asset by checking what has happened and what is coming up and how the different assets are connected to each other.
Organize All Documents in One Place:
The easy user interface allows for convenient organizing of required documents by the user. Different sub folders can be created and documents can be easily dragged and dropped inside the sub folders. These sub folders and the documents contained within them can be arranged or filtered by attributes such as author, language, date, or individual custom tags. For quickly making a note of important points or the minutes of the meeting, there is a helpful Note feature which will let the user jot down points directly in the concerned folder or case. There is also a feature that allows direct sending of emails from the concerned records along with the documents that can be sent as attachments
Quickly Find What You are Looking for:
The Global Search feature of IPfolio lets the user search through their entire portfolio and database for specific topics, and the search results are displayed conveniently under sub categories such as Brands, Products, Inventions and Contracts.
Keep Track of Costs and Budgets:
Cost and budgeting information on any record can be documented, which can be used to aggregate the totals for easy comparison of cost for entire patents and families. It can also be used for budgeting purposes by assigning specific targets for different levels like business unit, technology area, patent family, etc. Even external service providers can be collaborated in IPfolio and the users can request for quotes from them using IPfolio itself which can be routed through the users internal approval process for efficiency.
Map your IP to your Business:
The tool is very useful in helping one understand the relationships between their business and IP assets and the role they play in improvement and growth of business. As the assets keep growing, there is a need created for keeping the asset and business information up to date as well, as there are new projects which are started, new agreements and negotiations, and new products are rolled out, leading to creation of new brands. IP folio helps in many ways to remain up to date, and to combine the asset and business information together. The mapping can be customized according to internal process of the organization. There can be custom menus like drop downs that can be created, and multi-select drop downs can be added as well. Product tabs can be customized to maintain additional information about the different product lines or individual products and the IP assets that are related to these can be mapped to them. A classification tree can also be flexibly customized to include more complex hierarchies like multi-level corporate structures to incorporate business units, and their sub units, or also a technology tree, etc.
Collaborate across your Organization:
One of the fun features of IPfolio is its built in social network functionality on an enterprise level. This functionality allows for easy sharing of information and collaboration of views from colleagues and mentors in a way similar to social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook.
By using the feed that is part of all the records in IPfolio, the users can comment and discuss on specific cases and also invite other fellow IPfolio users to provide their opinion or review. This collaborative approach allows for a unique approach towards internal reviews and supports the decision making process in a more streamlined manner, thus helping invention review boards pass their decisions.
