Publishing company discovers licensing variances with forensic royalty review

Client background

Our client is a leading expert in supporting the development, publishing and licensing of complex and specialized electronic data interchange (EDI) standards. They provide licensing for standards related to EDI, which is a foundational technology that supports businesses electronically communicating transactional information such as purchase orders, advance ship notices, and invoices.

The business challenge

Our client had a customer who was a large channel partner. During an annual review of the customer’s accounts, it appeared that some customers were not purchasing the proper amount of licenses to cover all their users. Our client needed a forensic audit and royalty review, using a data science approach, to determine where licensed products were being used in their customer’s applications.

Strategy and solution

This project was in collaboration with Baker Tilly’s Forensic, Litigation and Valuation Services team. They provided the forensic analysis and forensic investigation background, while Baker Tilly's digital team supported the data science approach by formulating analytic questions, creating data requests to make sure the client was providing the right data sets from the correct sources during the correct timeframes. Through this approach, we created evidenced-based conclusions to help develop an audit report that documented our procedures, the data sources considered, test results and our findings.

Baker Tilly's digital team analyzed the internal workings of large-scale SaaS applications to understand how the EDI standards were being used to complete the conversions for our client’s licensed products. We also had to make sure they were using licensed products for the provided sample data.

Amazon Athena and AWS Lake Formation were used to create a foundation for database storage and queries. Then Amazon SageMaker was used for statistical testing and anomaly detection and Amazon QuickSight was used for data visualizations and dashboarding. OpenSearch was used as a database for testing EDI transaction sets for the use of the client’s intellectual property. These datasets appeared as unstructured text, making OpenSearch a suitable tool for this analysis on semi-structured and unstructured data at the scale required.

After the analysis of the customer’s software products, EDI standards and EDI transaction sets, it was determined that our client’s licensed products were being used within the customer’s SaaS application. The report and Baker Tilly’s testimony were used during the arbitration hearing with the customer, which lead to a positive outcome for our client.