A Sustainable Solution for a Changing Industry

Managing profit participations is anything but easy. Contract terms are varied and complex. Data comes from many diverse sources. Constant evolution in business and technology makes change the norm. Consider the following:

• Can you easily adapt to variations in financial terms and changes in your business model?
• Is the processing of participations a constant drain on your resources?
• Do your participations processes provide the control and audit-ability necessary to ensure trusted results for all parties involved?
• Are you paying your valued talent, producers, and other participants in a timely and accurate manner?
• Are your statements clear, accurate and consistent with the terms of your contracts?
• Can you respond quickly and efficiently to the information demands of participants and management?

Alliant Participations is a software solution developed by REAL Software Systems to allow you to successfully address these and other issues. Developed with experience and input from the industry, validated with focus groups and tested through pilots at three major studios, Alliant Participations is deployed at large entertainment concerns both in Hollywood and Europe. It is the only software of its kind available to support the needs of the entertainment industry, whether in the theatrical, television, video or ancillary areas.

Alliant Participations' highly configurable architecture allows you to describe your most complex business terms, calculations and statements.

increase your power to manage deals

The financial terms negotiated in a typical contract aren't getting any easier to track. New sources of revenue must be found in order to leverage the original investment in properties. Industry consolidation and new distribution channels further complicate matters. Accuracy is important because money and valued relationships depend on the outcome.

With Alliant Participations, you maintain your deals in a controlled manner. You can create the fields and information types needed to track information specific to your company. This information is then available when you calculate, report on and administer your participations contracts. You have the flexibility to describe your financial terms now, regardless of their complexity, and the ability to evolve those terms as your company and markets change. Alliant Participations' flexible design enables you to handle today's needs while allowing you to evolve and address the diverse and unpredictable challenges of tomorrow.

Our contract management capability allows you to define deals, which represent sets of calculations used to outline the financial terms of a contract. These deals direct the system to the necessary data and define which calculations apply. Examples of deals include "Adjusted Gross", "Cash Break-even" or "Net Proceeds." Furthermore, deals can be linked to represent how terms change over the course of a contract (for example, calculating a break-even amount for use as an exclusion in another Deal).

With Alliant Participations, you not only decide when and how to enter, review and approve new and revised contracts; you specify who has access to your most sensitive contracts. Using the comprehensive security application, you can control access to your business data. And you never lose control. Alliant Participations maintains an audit trail for every version of each contract, allowing you to access and view a complete history of any contract at any time.

access the data you need

Just collecting the information needed to process participations can be a daunting task. You may require data to be provided from a number of different systems. With Alliant Participations, you have a way to bring all of this information together in a common repository. You spend your time managing your business, not chasing data.

Data can be interfaced from any type and number of systems and can be normalized into a consistent internal format. Sophisticated error detection processes analyze the data and suspend any invalid items. Suspended data can be reprocessed in a controlled fashion. Specialized query tools allow you to report on and analyze transactional data. Should a particular system change (for example, the corporate General Ledger, new systems added due to acquisitions, or the advent of new distribution methods), interfaces with Alliant Participations can easily adapt.

simplify complex processing with business rules

The growing complexity of participations calculations is often a challenge to manage. Alliant Participations enables simplification in defining these calculations, while providing the flexibility and controls to manage your business. Alliant Participations' powerful and reusable business rules management facility can be used to define how data is gathered and manipulated. Alliant Participations can apply business rules on a contract-by-contract basis, allowing for variation among contracts and over time.

Additional features are included to maximize Alliant Participations' flexibility and ease-of-use. Security features allow for the sophisticated, role-based control of access to both data and processes. A Notes facility allows you to associate notes with contracts, participants, products, territories, media and numerous other entities. These notes can consist of text, automatic reminders, and data files, such as spreadsheet and word processing files. User-defined keywords can also be associated with many entities, such as contracts, within Alliant Participations, allowing you to easily find, group, and report on these items.

the solution

When looking for a participations management system that will adapt to varied and changing business needs, accurately control payments, and protect your hard-won relationships and access to talent and content; Alliant Participations and RSS provide the solution. RSS has been developing and deploying software solutions to manage participations and other revenue sharing contracts across numerous industries since 1993. It is both our customer's diversity and the commonality of their needs that continue to drive the product and services innovation that has made RSS a market leader. The scale and diversity of these customers is a testament to the flexibility and scalability of our products and approach.

With Alliant Participations, you have the flexibility and control required to:

• Operate a cost-effective, streamlined and responsive participations processing operation.
• Generate timely, correct and meaningful statements.
• Respond to the information needs of your business.
• Adapt, as deals and industry practices evolve.

It all comes down to efficiently managing your obligations to profit participations and retaining relationships with your valued talent and business partners. Alliant Participations lets you take control of all your profit participations needs today and in the future.

Alliant Participations is a member of the Alliant family of software products, which simplify the complexities of managing licensed intellectual property.