Since its inception in 1982, Picnic Time- Family of Brands is a family-owned business to supply innovative, decorated, and non-decorated indoor entertainment and outdoor leisure products to inspire people to spend quality time with family and friends. Picnic Time has been an innovator in deluxe picnic options to create products that inspire friends and family to come together and make lasting memories.
Now Picnic Time has evolved into Picnic Time Family Brands featuring four sub-brands that carry products segmented by type: Toscana, Legacy, Oniva, and Picnic Time. Since 2009 Picnic Time & its new sub-brands have taken on the licenses of major brands and teams such as Disney, Lucas, Coca-Cola, NFL, MLB, NHL, and Collegiate teams.
Their challenge:
Picnic Time has been a licensee for more than 12 years. Their licensing portfolios have grown over the years as they adapt to the ever-evolving nature of the licensing industry.
When Picnic Time was busy growing their business, they were also becoming very strained with the process of manually processing royalty reports and dealing with audits. They faced challenges in handling their SQL database and exporting sales reports as each of the reports had to be manipulated to fit within the parameters of what the licensors were looking for in the royalty templates. Before there was an automated solution in place, their advanced balances were tracked using spreadsheets. Forecasting was also challenged as they had to run several reports to prepare each forecast template for the licensors.
Beside the financial challenges, the licensing team was having trouble with maintaining contracts, where they had to track payment schedules within the agreements, properly capture calculation requirements and chargebacks and deductions. The team at Picnic Time realized that each of these manual processes was becoming too time consuming.
Initially, Tiffany Brewer, Licensing Manager at Picnic Time was looking for a solution that would benefit her team and streamline their business processes.
Our Solutions:
Picnic Time joined the DSI family in the summer of 2018. The team at Picnic Time went through rigorous research into royalty management solutions. They evaluated many other service providers, and went through a lot of demos. During the search for an ultimate solution that meets their needs, Dependable Solutions’ name came up twice in the evaluation process.
“We were really drawn to the team and the software that was being shown to us; one of the main deciding factors was, Dependable was willing to create custom royalty templates for us,” stated Tiffany when they made the decision to go with Dependable Solutions.
Tiffany with her team was looking for a plug and play situation where they will be able to put information into the system and the system in place will process the information so that the final result meets the licensors’ specific requirements.
Royalty reporting was consuming too much of their time and it became the biggest driver to implement a licensing management software in the first place. Dependable Solutions was able to create customized royalty templates with custom fields as Picnic Time needed. They also liked the option that DSI’s brand licensing management software enables them to directly connect with their internal accounting system.
“The fact that Dependable provides ongoing training, at a fair cost to Picnic Time was very helpful in the decision making process. Basically, the system serves as a vital tool for the licensing team as the software has the contract management features, the forecasting tools, very detailed sales reports and the financial modules that assist the accounting team,” says Tiffany.
Picnic Time is also enjoying the other perks of the system, such as contract management, through which they can maintain all their SKUs and IPs in a visual database.
The huge benefit of having such a solution in place is that their licensing processes became more efficient and accurate. The system flags errors when there is any input mistake and generates accurate royalty reports for the users which helps with audits in the long run. The sales team at Picnic Time is greatly benefitted by the system as the detailed data helps them understand their business better and make more informed business decisions.
Added Benefits:
Picnic Time is pleasantly surprised with the extensive and constant training that is provided to the team and with DSI’s ability to make customization in the software to address their specific needs. The team from Picnic Time recalls continuous relentless support from Dependable Solutions’ team to help them implement the best system for them to reduce manual labor in their day to day job.
Dependable Solutions’ brand licensing software has become a one stop shop for Picnic Time and that’s the hub they turn to for every licensing need.