See How a University Transforms Their Invention and Patent Tracking Process with Sales Cloud

The Challenges

Our client in higher education needed to simplify their operational processes and revenue tracking for inventions and patents. As a university that handles numerous agreements each year for various inventions and patents, they needed a system that could handle the complexity required to track revenue and historical data. 

Before working with Kelley Austin, our client was tracking the revenue stream generated from their inventions and patents manually with spreadsheets. This process had become tedious and overwhelming for our client’s staff who were working from over 100 spreadsheets on a daily basis. With hundreds of inventions, patents, and agreements, our client needed to streamline their revenue tracking process.

The biggest challenge our client faced with their Salesforce org was the complexity of processes required to track expenses and incoming revenue as well as disbursements to inventors. Our client was using Salesforce to track inventions and patents, but they were not tracking any associated expenses and reimbursements, including historical revenue tracking. For example, inventions could have multiple patents and both inventions and patents could be part of multiple different agreements. This level of complexity required Custom Development to enhance our client’s Sales Cloud instance. 

The Solution

We provided Custom Development services in Sales Cloud by designing a data structure and process to automate tracking for expenses and reimbursements. This simplified our client’s workflow by eliminating the need to move data around from spreadsheets. Our client is now able to simply upload expense CSV files and the system takes care of the rest. The custom data structure built by our team also allows our client to integrate historical data. 

“It was cool for me to work on this project because I have a background in higher education. As I was working towards a phD, I knew there were professors at my university who were doing this kind of work. It was interesting to learn more about how patents and inventions are handled on the back-end and how involved the university is in the entire process.” — Ben Doolan, Manager • Salesforce Development 

Custom Development helped us meet the complex needs of our client because there were not any standard processes within Salesforce to handle their specific use case. Our team of experts was able to jump in and quickly determine that a large degree of customization would solve some of their current challenges. 

Customer Impact

Our client had only two employees that handled all of their invention and patent tracking and their operational processes couldn’t keep up with the workload. By building a custom data structure in Sales Cloud, we were able to make the system work for the client and not the other way around. Now the majority of our client’s workflow is automated and staff no longer have to dig through countless spreadsheets, wasting both time and money. Our client now has access to valuable reporting insights with clear and concise data structures that make it easy for them to find the data they’re looking for.