Unlocking the Full Power of Your IP Management System
IP operations today face a complex balancing act between rising case volumes, tighter budgets, siloed systems, and increasingly demanding internal stakeholders. These competing considerations require the IP teams to juggle proving the value of the IP portfolio, continually staying globally compliant without dropping the ball, and responding to increased visibility and reporting requirements. All while still managing the day-to-day prosecution tasks.
What many don’t realize is that your Intellectual Property Management System (IPMS) can help you manage that complexity. A modern IPMS can make a meaningful difference in streamlining workflows, surfacing insights, and increasing stakeholder alignment. But too often, organizations stop at basic docketing, annuity tracking, and portfolio snapshots.
Here are five powerful features you may not be using to their full potential – but should be.
1. Advanced Invention Disclosure Management
Many teams have implemented some form of invention disclosure portal. They’ve moved past emailed PDFs and simple intake forms. But few are truly leveraging the full depth of invention workflow functionality available in a modern IPMS.
Modern systems now support:
- Two-way collaboration between inventors and IP teams for clarifying disclosures or attaching additional material. You don’t have to write complex workflow rules or generate an out-of workflow email to do a simple request for information from the inventor – just click a button and ask your question, all within the system.
- Automated routing based on your business rules. IPMS systems can now accommodate complex routing rules, including hierarchical technology lines and multiple classification trees.
- Integrated novelty and patentability search tools linked directly to disclosures. Are you still running searches from outside the platform and toggling between systems to get a complete view of the submission? The best IPMS systems have integrated AI search tools that not only run the search but display the results directly in the evaluation area of the IPMS with rankings and side-by-side comparisons for more efficient PRC meetings.
- Built-in patent review committee workflows for scheduling, scoring, and documenting decisions, with all the pertinent attachments, email, metrics, and strategic notes in one location.
- Custom scoring metrics to help align your decisions with your business goals, with the aim of prioritizing those high-value ideas and flag submissions for fast-tracking.
When leveraging these advanced features, your IPMS doesn’t just digitize disclosure intake—it creates a centralized, strategic pipeline for innovation. It also improves engagement with R&D and ensures you can fast-track the most important ideas so that they can be filed without delay.
2. Workflow Automation for Repetitive Processes
Your team already handles countless repeatable tasks: managing docketing deadlines, reviewing PTO updates, sending status reports, and managing office actions. Several IPMS systems offer workflow engines that can automate these with a few simple clicks, but due to a lack of training or the reliance on email, this functionality often goes underused.
If workflow and triggers are available in your system, consider leveraging:
- Trigger alerts when a matter status changes (e.g., allowance → issuance)
- Routing of tasks for formalities review after a new filing
- Auto-generated reminders to inventors or business units at key portfolio stages
- Post-allowance reviews and post-grant workflows to flag licensing opportunities
Automation frees your team to focus on higher-value work and reduces the likelihood of human error on process-heavy portfolios.
3. Real-Time Portfolio Analytics and Reporting Dashboards
With growing executive scrutiny on IP spend and ROI, IP teams need more than static spreadsheets. They need real-time insights. Most modern IPMS systems offer fully embedded or integrated analytics tools, with real-time (live) data. Gone are the days when you needed to wait 24 hours for the data to refresh or to show up on your report. Gone are the days when you had to contact the vendor for even the simplest report updates.
If you’re not yet utilizing:
- Fully integrated, dynamic, and live dashboards for global and/or segmented portfolio overviews
- Integrated drag-and-drop report builder functionality completely within the IPMS system (not an external tool), allowing you to be more self-sufficient and respond to report requests quickly and easily without charges from the vendor
- Dashboards that align your IP with your Business and the ability to visualize your portfolio against BU’s, technology areas, and products. You can leverage fully integrated AI-driven classifications to ensure accurate and up-to-date ongoing categorization of your company’s IP for strategic insight and decision making.
- Time-to-grant metrics by jurisdiction
- Prosecution efficiency trackers (e.g., number of office actions per allowance)
…then you’re missing a valuable opportunity to align your team with business outcomes.
A well-built dashboard becomes the IP team’s single source of truth – and a powerful tool for influencing leadership.
4. Granular Role-Based Access for Stakeholders
Your IPMS is likely packed with information – prosecution history, invoices, patent families, licensing details. But many IP teams still rely on manual searches and report generation for internal clients.
Instead, consider activating granular, role-based access so key stakeholders can:
- View the status of their team’s filings in real time on their own dashboards
- See upcoming deadlines, prosecution history, and statistical information
- Access dashboards without compromising sensitive or export-controlled material
- Self-service information requests, freeing up the legal team to focus on their core responsibilities
This approach turns your IPMS into a collaboration hub, rather than a black box. It empowers your engineers, product managers, and even finance teams to self-serve information, freeing your team to focus on more strategic work.
5. Patent Awards
If you are still fielding emails from your inventors to answer their questions about whether their patent has been filed or granted, and what the status is of their award, then you are needlessly expending time and resources which could be converted to higher value tasks.
You don’t need to rely on accounting spreadsheets, and if you are, you’re missing out on advanced patent award features like:
- Powerful award policy settings that reflect your own business processes, including both monetary and non-monetary, as well as a combination of jurisdiction and event-based triggers, so that the IPMS can calculate the award based on the policy and initiate the workflow and approval process at the right time.
- Enable the inventor to self-service award queries. Greater levels of granular access mean that you don’t have to restrict the inventor community from award information, just because you are restricting them from the patent module. Surface only the award information for the records they worked on directly onto their dashboard.
- Integrate with your payroll system to streamline the payment process
A tighter connection between the invention process and the awards calculations helps ensure accuracy and consistency, and automatically feeds the award information directly to the inventor, freeing up staff.
Final Thought: It’s Time to Go Beyond Docketing
Your IPMS should be so much more than merely a database. It should be your team’s strategic operations engine.
By ensuring that your IPMS system has modern and advanced functionality, and your team knows how to use it, especially those around disclosure management, automation, and analytics, you can relieve pressure on your team, reduce risk, and increase transparency across the organization, while elevating the strategic value of IP.
