Royalites at a glance

Royalties at a glance? The Cooperative Society of Music Authors and Publishers in Switzerland (SUISA) demonstrates how this works: It has developed a powerful BI solution that allows for more transparency and control over the royalties paid out.

In Short

CHALLENGE

The organisation was unable to evaluate vast amounts of data the way it aimed to.

SOLUTION

State-of-the-art reporting platform on the basis of Power BI for internal and external stakeholders.

BENEFIT

Being able to extract KPIs from data and to access information on royalties in almost real time.

Our Solution

SUISA collects the royalties owed to its members as soon as their music is played in public in Switzerland or Liechtenstein. And if their music is played online (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.), SUISA can represent its members across Europe, too. As part of its work, the organisation is able to trace back when and where each piece has been played over the course of ten years and uses a specific ratio to calculate which royalties are owed to the writers involved in the work. Thanks to agreements with over 100 of its sister companies around the world, it is able to exercise the rights of two million authors and publishers in total. SUISA processes the huge quantities of data involved in this work in applications on server, network and storage systems in its own data centre, in other words an on-premises solution. However, SUISA was keen to look into alternatives to the existing on-premises solution.

Under the project name “Cloud Research”, the organisation therefore analysed what would need to happen for it to shift towards the Cloud. The next step was to draw up a Cloud Policy. This document defines the principles that must be adhered to when introducing and using Cloud services. For the pilot project, SUISA’s Azure environment was prepared using a sophisticated best practice approach: the Trivadis Azure Foundation. The goal of this method is to address all key issues on the journey towards the Cloud and close up any potential gaps at an early stage. Thanks to its application in a number of successful projects, the Trivadis Azure Foundation offers the most practical approach possible and builds the foundations needed for enabling SUISA to achieve the coveted “Azure Cloud Enterprise-ready” standard.

In addition to this, the most important applications were classified and prioritised according to their Cloud suitability. “With help from Trivadis, we defined a step-by-step process for a potential migration, which factored in the risks and impacts on the overall landscape, business workflows and operating processes to an adequate extent,” sums up Jürg Ziebold, CIO at SUISA. What’s more, the structures required for data storage were automatically migrated to the Cloud with the help of the code generator biGENIUS, which kept the amount of time, costs and risks involved to a minimum. Another issue that was important to SUISA was its plan to provide internal and external users with easy-to-use analysis tools in future. The goal was to create a new reporting platform. The organisation opted for Microsoft Power BI. This tool meets SUISA’s various requirements in the field of reporting and also enables interactive reports and dashboards to be created and used on a variety of devices.

Trivadis has repeatedly generated important momentum for our work and is helping us to expand our Cloud and BI skills.

Jürg Ziebold, CIO, SUISA

The cooperative society introduced this pilot Cloud solution in two phases. In the first phase, Power BI was introduced for internal reporting. Authorised employees at SUISA were granted access to the solution online and are able to view daily updates for the performance of certain activities, such as how long a transaction takes, how many activities are currently in progress or how many are complete.

To start phase two, SUISA implemented an internal BI solution for evaluating invoicing data on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This tells users which pieces were played on what channels (for instance, on radio stations or music segments on TV, as well as on online platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube) in which time period and how much the copyright holders earn via SUISA’s intermediary service.

The next step will be to integrate reports for the cooperative's members into existing applications (Power BI Embedded on Azure). This will then allow artists to access their data directly and compile individual billing overviews in a dashboard. In addition, KPIs can be pulled from the data, and members can access information about their copyright royalties in near real-time. In this new business process, SUISA executives learned to better understand the benefits, possibilities and opportunities, but also the risks of cloud computing and to derive future measures from them. SUISA can now expand its capacities as required and, if appropriate, move further applications to the cloud. With the Cloud Policy, a binding framework has been created for all employees who introduce and use cloud services. During the implementation of the solutions, Trivadis experts provide ongoing advice and are on hand if there are any bottlenecks.

ABOUT SUISA

SUISA is the cooperative society for composers, lyricists and music publishers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein with 39,000 members.

Technologies used

Azure Analysis Services
On-Premises Data Gateway
Power BI
Azure Storage Account

Azure Data Factory GEN2
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure Active Directory
Azure VMs

Azure Monitor mit Log Analytics Workspace
Azure AD, Azure AD Connect und Azure AD B2C
Azure VPN und Netzwerk