IBMS automates many of the business processes in the sales/traffic and programming areas, delivering competitive advantage through reduced operational and systems costs and increased efficiencies.

Whilst reducing the duplication of effort, time, and systems within the organization, IBMS also increases sales effectiveness on the national, regional and local levels by managing airtime availability across the station group in real time, pricing it more market-sensitive and enabling the broadcaster to contract with clients more quickly and flexibly.

Systems to manage the broadcasters advertising sales staff are included in IBMS, providing managers with quick access to details of individual sales representatives and enabling them to place staff in appropriate groups and to assign sales targets to individuals or to groups.

An unlimited number of contracts, station, scatter or demand rate cards are supported, each of which may have a unique effective date range. Comprehensive impact analysis allows users to review the impact of rate changes before they are finalized.

The Campaigns and Booking module covers the whole negotiation lifecycle, from brief through multiple-proposal options, reservations and, finally, confirmed bookings. Research and monitoring facilities cover rate and ratings analysis as well as inventory usage and yield, and are able to interface with third party analysis software to calculate reach and frequency.

Once proposals are confirmed IBMS captures the contract, including user-defined discounts, surcharges, bonus guarantees, deadlines and sponsorship agreements. The system monitors the achievement of contractual goals and targets. Spot availability is instantly updated as bookings are made.

The billing management capabilities enable the management of pre- and post-campaign billing, credit and debit adjustments as well as standard reporting. Credit checks can be conducted to control the acceptance of booking confirmations.

By retaining comprehensive details of the contract, campaign and deal to which any spot belongs, and by maintaining links between spots and customer transactions, IBMS can provide a wide-ranging set of reports on revenue and yield by customer, contract, campaign, channel, deal and sales group.

Separate program and sales schedules are maintained, enabling independent long-term sales scheduling, and also provides sophisticated schedule change management facilities, which allow users to process program changes on an on-demand basis.

IBMS includes interfaces to a wide range of external systems, including ratings providers, financial systems and systems for revenue analysis.