Newport Sports

Company Profile

Newport Sports Management specializes in the representation and management of professional hockey athletes.  Operating the single largest agency in hockey today, Newport Sports has more than 125 National Hockey League clients.  The Newport Team provides their clients with services in finance, tax, insurance, legal, marketing and contractual matters.

Newport Sports head office is located in Mississauga Ontario with regional Canadian offices in Alberta and Quebec.  They also have a worldwide network with offices in the United States, Russia, Finland, Czech Republic and Sweden.

Solution

The Dynamics CRM solution encompasses three primary functions of Newport Sports' business; Player Management, Contract Management and Financial Management.

Player Management includes the tracking of targeted player information, and providing dashboards for Newport administrative staff and agents to get quick access to the information they need.  They have a 1 shot view of all relevant player information.  This also includes Calendar views for player marketing initiatives and banking responsibilities.

The Calendar functionality provides a critical element to the insight and automation objectives for Newport Sports, allowing them to view and control task reminders around critical aspects of the players contract.  For example; following a player appearance, as determined by their respective marketing contract, an invoice has to be generated and sent to the vendor, with a trigger task to ensure the fees are then paid to the player.  Each of these tasks are handled by different departments, but they all have visibility into the activities and are notified of their respective tasks, as per the timelines and details determined by the contract.

Contract Management includes the tracking of Standard Player Contracts (SPC), Standard Player Agent Contracts (SPAC), Marketing Initiatives, vendor payouts and their related details.

Effectively managing the intricacies of contracts is vital for Newport Sports.  With many variables affecting the players' salaries, bonuses ad vendor payments, there are complex calculations involved in determining Client Fees owed to Newport.  Once the basics of the contracts are entered into CRM, these calculations are automated with minimal amount of user interaction, and placed as line items for invoicing.  This automation has removed the need to perform the complex calculations manually and streamlined the amount of steps needed to complete the invoicing process.

The process established to automate calculations and populate line items for invoicing has eliminated duplication in entering data.  Entering information once to accomplish multiple tasks as an exercise in improving efficiency.

Financial Management includes the management of daily banking responsibilities for financial clients such as tracking player bank account information and the associated transactions completed by Newport on the players behalf, expenses incurred by the agency pre-contract, annual taxes and tax statements for players, various insurance policy renewals and invoicing of players and vendors.  Dashboards for Financial Management provide relevant and timely information to Newport Sports.

Consistency is the key objective achieved in financial management matters.  Having all of the data collected in a common, central platform has allowed Newport Sports to adopt consistent terminology across the organization so all departments now refer to types of data with common terms.  This improves internal communication around shared information.

Having consolidated data has provided organization wide consistency with invoice formatting, while still providing flexibility to deal with contract exceptions.

A central platform also allows cross reporting and Newport has the ability to compare Financial Management information with the data entered into Contract Management, when they receive payments from National Hockey League teams.

Benefits

Newport Sports has a solution that meets their core objectives and their business process needs.  They have established a common platform that all departments can now leverage in their respective roles.  Dynamics CRM provides a strong solution platform that will grow and expand with Newport Sports.  Positive user adoption has been demonstrated using Microsoft Outlook as the interface.  All users of Dynamics CRM now have a mechanism to improve their management of daily business tasks.

Given the improved visibility into internal process variables provided in the Newport Sports CRM solution, ultimately the service to the players has become more streamlined and efficient.