Business Requirements Document

Plant Variety IP & Royalty Licensing Management Platform — Systems Replacement Project

Document IDBRD-PIM-001

Version1.0

StatusApproved for design

AuthorAnthony Apollis, Business & Systems Analyst

Synthetic portfolio artifact. Fictional organisation, stakeholders, and figures — written independently to demonstrate BRD authoring, not derived from any real employer or client document.

1. Purpose

This document defines the business requirements for replacing the organisation's legacy Microsoft Access database used to manage plant variety intellectual property (IP): cultivar registration, licensing, royalty collection, block management, and cross-border movement of plant material. It forms the basis for the target data architecture and the phased migration plan.

2. Business objectives

BO-1 — Establish a single source of truth for licensing and royalty data to eliminate reconciliation errors.
BO-2 — Reduce the time to close a royalty collection cycle from weeks to days.
BO-3 — Provide a full audit trail from plant importation through to commercial sale.
BO-4 — Support concurrent multi-user access without file-locking conflicts.

3. Stakeholders

Role	Interest	Engagement
IP Management Lead	Accurate licensing & royalty reporting to management	Requirements sign-off, steering committee
Licensing Officers	Day-to-day licence and contract administration	Process walkthroughs, UAT
Finance / Royalty Team	Reliable royalty reconciliation and payment tracking	Requirements workshops
Nursery & Grower Liaison	Order fulfilment and block status visibility	Stakeholder workshops
Quarantine & Pathology Officers	Compliance tracking for import/export and testing	Stakeholder workshops
IT / Data Team	System build, migration, and support	Design review, delivery

4. Business requirements

ID	Requirement	Linked objective	Priority
BR-01	The system shall maintain a master record for each cultivar including IP owner and release status.	BO-1	High
BR-02	The system shall link each licence to exactly one cultivar and one licensed stakeholder, with enforced referential integrity.	BO-1	High
BR-03	The system shall calculate royalties due per contract based on a configurable rate and calculation basis (per-unit or percentage).	BO-2	High
BR-04	The system shall track royalty payment status (outstanding, paid, overdue) per transaction period.	BO-2	High
BR-05	The system shall record pathology test results against the specific block tested, not the cultivar generally.	BO-3	Medium
BR-06	The system shall link import/export permits to quarantine records to close the compliance audit trail.	BO-3	High
BR-07	The system shall support concurrent updates from multiple users without record-level file locking.	BO-4	High
BR-08	The system shall retain a full change history sufficient to reconstruct block status at any prior date.	BO-3	Medium
BR-09	The system shall support nursery order tracking from placement through fulfilment.	BO-1	Low

5. Assumptions & constraints

Migration will be phased by subject area, starting with licensing and royalty (highest business risk per the systems audit).
Historical Access data will be cleansed and validated before migration; the legacy system remains the source of truth until cutover.
Target platform: PostgreSQL, to support concurrent access and enforced referential integrity (see data model).

6. Out of scope

Field-level apparatus systems (temperature and irrigation control) are excluded from this phase, consistent with the original systems audit scope.

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