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Establishing a search department in Bangalore, India
World Patent Information 30 (2008) 132–134 www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin
Establishing a search department in Bangalore, India Gerard van der Ligt High Tech Campus 44, P.O. Box 220, 5600 AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands
This article has been developed from a presentation by the author at the International Patent Information Conference, IPI-ConfEx, in March 2007, in Sorrento, Italy.
Abstract Philips Intellectual Property & Standards (IP&S) decided in 2001 to start a search department in Bangalore to cope with an increasing amount of novelty searches and as a more attractive alternative to outsourcing. Bangalore was chosen for the availability of a Philips infrastructure, well educated people and a comfortable cost level. Supported by the efforts of the existing staff, the WON/GO training and a mature management system, a stable well performing search department is now in place. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Search department location; Outsourcing; Bangalore; India; Recruitment; Training; Department management; Quality control
1. Introduction Philips is active in the areas of healthcare, lifestyle and technology. Philips is the market leader in medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring systems, energy efficient lighting solutions, personal care and home appliances, as well as among the world’s top-3 consumer electronics companies. In 2006, the turnover was Euro 27 billion, achieved with a multinational workforce of 121,700 employees. Philips IP&S is responsible for all intellectual property (IP) related activities in Philips worldwide. This includes the creation and exploitation of patents, trademarks, designs, domain names and technology and the setting of technical standards and influencing general public standards. IP&S has 500 employees working in 23 offices worldwide within 16 countries. 2. The search department in 2001 Like most IP operations in major companies, IP&S has a search department responsible for all the usual activities, like novelty and validity searching, patent landscaping and
E-mail address: [email protected] 0172-2190/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2007.07.009
an alerting service. The search department was located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and staffed with about 25 patent searchers. This was sufficient to do all the necessary search work in house. Since 2000 the number of our patent filings increased rapidly. Our basic policy is to do a patentability search before filing. So the amount of novelty searches increased accordingly. Obviously, it was not possible to do all this extra work with the available staff. We hired additional staff, but it turned out that this was not sufficient to cope with the steep increase in the amount of work. A suitable solution to consider was outsourcing a serious amount of work, around 25 searches per week. 3. Outsourcing It will be clear that outsourcing this amount of work is quite challenging. Amounts like this can hardly be absorbed by the market. Outsource agents we knew for their high quality all were quite small, offering capacity for a few searches per week only. Moreover, managing the outsource process for such amounts also requires quite some efforts. Another complicating factor was that the subjects of the searches covered the whole spectrum of Philips’
G. van der Ligt / World Patent Information 30 (2008) 132–134
activities, from shavers to image processing and from lamp construction to GSM protocols. To be able to deal with these challenges we defined two conditions
133
until now we have hired about 30 trainees. A few trainees moved to other positions in IP&S and a few of them left Philips for various reasons. 4.2. Training
• The outsource agents should be large enough to deal both with the amounts and with the variety of subjects. • The skill level of the outsource agents should be sufficient to understand, process and report the search without any additional efforts from our side. So we did not want pre- or post-processing. The agents should just deal with the request as we receive it from our attorney and report directly to the attorney in the format we defined for novelty searches. Finally we managed to select outsource agents that, in theory, met our requirements. However, in practice the quality delivered did not always meet our internal standards. Especially the fluctuations in the quality level were a problem. The main problem seemed to be the lack of experience in our technical areas. The areas are sometimes quite specific while our own senior searchers often have 10– 20 years experience in one of these specific areas.
For every group of about 6 trainees we used the same approach. We started with a 3-months stay in Eindhoven, where they received training and where they worked under the supervision of a coach. During this stay they all took the WON/GO training course for Patent Information Specialist, in total 15 days. After these 3 months they returned to Bangalore and started carefully with their first real searches, coached on the job by a senior patent searcher from Eindhoven, who stayed in Bangalore for 2 months. The training was organized in such a way that hardly any capacity of searchers was lost. If any, we compensated this with outsourcing. The trainees also had intensive contacts with their coaches in Eindhoven and their search results were checked by senior colleagues. Especially communication via Philips chatting service, Sametime, proved to be very useful. It was much more interactive than email, while telephone calls could be difficult due the different pronunciation of the English language in Holland and in India.
4. Bangalore 4.3. Management As said before, hiring people in Eindhoven was not sufficient. Outsourcing was expensive and did not provide the quality meeting our standards. We came up with the solution that it was a better option to let the searches be conducted by Philips trained people, at a location where good educated people were readily available. In Bangalore, India, Philips runs a software development centre with more than 1000 employees. So local contacts, a human resource department, housing, and IT-systems, for example, were already in place. Young good educated engineers were available as well. Although hardly any basic IP knowledge existed, we considered the other circumstances advantageous enough to successfully start a search department. In 2002, we really started our adventure. 4.1. Recruitment Our first step was asking one of the local managers to support us and to start together with the local HR manager the recruitment process. The first task was to give them basic training in IP and a clear job description of a patent searcher. In other words, we had to overcome the idea that entering a few keywords into a database cannot be that difficult. An advertisement in the appropriate newspapers yielded literally thousands of responses. It appeared to be quite normal that this number of people replies to a job opening in India. However, just selecting on the asked requirements allowed us to cut down this amount to a shortlist of about 12 candidates and finally we recruited 6 trainees. In the following years we repeated this process several times and
As usual in IP&S, employees have two managers, a local hierarchical manager and a functional manager located in the corporate IP&S centre in Eindhoven. The local manager manages the people and the functional manager manages the process. This was also the case for the searchers in Bangalore. A smooth cooperation and understanding between these two managers was a critical success factor. Setting clear and transparent objectives was really helpful in managing from a big distance and also in the view of the different cultural attitude. Depending on the maturity level of the trainee we defined objectives for the number of searches they had to do. For everybody it was very clear what we expected now and in the following years. We also defined a range of expected quality scores; in the following section the quality scoring process will be explained in more detail. 4.4. Quality control We use three types of quality checks: 1. Ad-hoc feedback of customers. This can be both positive and negative and both on request or unsolicited. This quality check is especially important for less experienced searchers. 2. Written feedback from senior colleagues or the so called peer reviews. In a peer review, we do not ask people to repeat the search, but to check the queries and the results. The most important issue of this check was whether the trainee understood the invention he or she had to search.
134
G. van der Ligt / World Patent Information 30 (2008) 132–134
3. A quality score, as the result of a yearly assessment by the attorneys. Every attorney is asked to give his searchers a score on a five point scale, the final quality score is the average of typically 5–10 scores. With 15 years experience of using this system, it was very useful for managing such a large and distant group in Bangalore. The criteria for the assessment are • Correctness of the search criteria as specified in the report: We consider the specification of the search criteria as very important. The searcher has to specify what exactly he searched for, but, not how he searched, because that is his own responsibility. The customer can read from this specification whether the searcher understood the search request. • Reliability of the search results: The reliability of the results is of course the toughest one; a reliable opinion heavily depends on the experience of the attorney. • Relevance of the as ‘‘(very) relevant’’ cited documents: We categorize the search results in three categories, very relevant, relevant and background, more or less comparable to X, Y and A in EPO search reports. • Usefulness of the documents cited as ‘‘background’’. • Sufficient references to relevant parts in the cited documents: The searcher is expected to make clear references to the relevant parts of the cited documents. Remarks like ‘‘whole document’’ are not really appreciated. 4.5. Quality scores Our initial goal was that the Bangalore quality would be better than the outsourced quality. As shown in Fig. 1, this was achieved right from the beginning. We also see that Eindhoven is still slightly better, but in considering this we have to take into account an experience gap of about 15 years. Another interesting observation is that the outsource quality also is improving. Due to our capacity in Bangalore we could reduce the outsourcing and in doing so we have retained the better outside search offices. This, combined with an increasing familiarity with our technology, will surely have caused the observed improvement. 4.5
5. The search department in 2007 The search department is formed by two teams now: one team of 18 searchers in Bangalore and another team of seven searchers in Eindhoven. Both teams are managed by one of the searchers in Bangalore, who was among the first six trainees in 2002. The teams are responsible for all the novelty and validity searching in IP&S worldwide. To underline their growing importance and to facilitate a focussed attitude, the patent landscaping and competitive intelligence activities have been separated from the search department. They are carried out by a newly established Business Intelligence department in Eindhoven, staffed with among others, 10 former patent searchers. 6. Conclusions and lessons learned The move to Bangalore has proven to be very successful. A stable, well performing search department has been established. The costs are under control and management is mostly done locally. What went well? • • • • •
Availability of Philips infrastructure in Bangalore. Education level of recruited people. WON/GO Training Course. Efforts of senior searchers in Eindhoven. Enthusiastic and positive attitude of trainees. What could have been better?
• Initial IP knowledge of trainees. • Coaching during first searches. Further reading [1] Schoeppel H-R, Naetebusch R. Patent searching in a large electrical company, as exemplified by the situation at Siemens. World Patent Information 1995;17 (3):165–72. [2] Jassin Marjorie. The flat track: to new career options for information professionals. Online 2005;29 (5):22–5. [3] DiMattia Susan S. Offshoring hits home; some companies are moving research overseas – a threat and an opportunity. Library J. 2004;129 (6):42.
4 3.5 3 Outsourced Bangalore Eindhoven
2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Fig. 1. Quality scores.
2006
Mr. Gerard van der Ligt, a national of the Netherlands, is Director of Business Intelligence at Philips Intellectual Property & Standards. In this function he is responsible for all activities in IP&S related to IP intelligence and market intelligence. Gerard is member of the WON and the advisory board of the training course Patent Information Specialist. He started his career in 1981 at Philips Lighting. After several other positions in Lighting and Research he joined IP&S in 1996 as a Patent Searcher. In 2001 he became manager of the search department, established a search department in Bangalore and took up his current assignment in 2006.
Establishing a search department in Bangalore, India Gerard van der Ligt High Tech Campus 44, P.O. Box 220, 5600 AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands
This article has been developed from a presentation by the author at the International Patent Information Conference, IPI-ConfEx, in March 2007, in Sorrento, Italy.
Abstract Philips Intellectual Property & Standards (IP&S) decided in 2001 to start a search department in Bangalore to cope with an increasing amount of novelty searches and as a more attractive alternative to outsourcing. Bangalore was chosen for the availability of a Philips infrastructure, well educated people and a comfortable cost level. Supported by the efforts of the existing staff, the WON/GO training and a mature management system, a stable well performing search department is now in place. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Search department location; Outsourcing; Bangalore; India; Recruitment; Training; Department management; Quality control
1. Introduction Philips is active in the areas of healthcare, lifestyle and technology. Philips is the market leader in medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring systems, energy efficient lighting solutions, personal care and home appliances, as well as among the world’s top-3 consumer electronics companies. In 2006, the turnover was Euro 27 billion, achieved with a multinational workforce of 121,700 employees. Philips IP&S is responsible for all intellectual property (IP) related activities in Philips worldwide. This includes the creation and exploitation of patents, trademarks, designs, domain names and technology and the setting of technical standards and influencing general public standards. IP&S has 500 employees working in 23 offices worldwide within 16 countries. 2. The search department in 2001 Like most IP operations in major companies, IP&S has a search department responsible for all the usual activities, like novelty and validity searching, patent landscaping and
E-mail address: [email protected] 0172-2190/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2007.07.009
an alerting service. The search department was located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and staffed with about 25 patent searchers. This was sufficient to do all the necessary search work in house. Since 2000 the number of our patent filings increased rapidly. Our basic policy is to do a patentability search before filing. So the amount of novelty searches increased accordingly. Obviously, it was not possible to do all this extra work with the available staff. We hired additional staff, but it turned out that this was not sufficient to cope with the steep increase in the amount of work. A suitable solution to consider was outsourcing a serious amount of work, around 25 searches per week. 3. Outsourcing It will be clear that outsourcing this amount of work is quite challenging. Amounts like this can hardly be absorbed by the market. Outsource agents we knew for their high quality all were quite small, offering capacity for a few searches per week only. Moreover, managing the outsource process for such amounts also requires quite some efforts. Another complicating factor was that the subjects of the searches covered the whole spectrum of Philips’
G. van der Ligt / World Patent Information 30 (2008) 132–134
activities, from shavers to image processing and from lamp construction to GSM protocols. To be able to deal with these challenges we defined two conditions
133
until now we have hired about 30 trainees. A few trainees moved to other positions in IP&S and a few of them left Philips for various reasons. 4.2. Training
• The outsource agents should be large enough to deal both with the amounts and with the variety of subjects. • The skill level of the outsource agents should be sufficient to understand, process and report the search without any additional efforts from our side. So we did not want pre- or post-processing. The agents should just deal with the request as we receive it from our attorney and report directly to the attorney in the format we defined for novelty searches. Finally we managed to select outsource agents that, in theory, met our requirements. However, in practice the quality delivered did not always meet our internal standards. Especially the fluctuations in the quality level were a problem. The main problem seemed to be the lack of experience in our technical areas. The areas are sometimes quite specific while our own senior searchers often have 10– 20 years experience in one of these specific areas.
For every group of about 6 trainees we used the same approach. We started with a 3-months stay in Eindhoven, where they received training and where they worked under the supervision of a coach. During this stay they all took the WON/GO training course for Patent Information Specialist, in total 15 days. After these 3 months they returned to Bangalore and started carefully with their first real searches, coached on the job by a senior patent searcher from Eindhoven, who stayed in Bangalore for 2 months. The training was organized in such a way that hardly any capacity of searchers was lost. If any, we compensated this with outsourcing. The trainees also had intensive contacts with their coaches in Eindhoven and their search results were checked by senior colleagues. Especially communication via Philips chatting service, Sametime, proved to be very useful. It was much more interactive than email, while telephone calls could be difficult due the different pronunciation of the English language in Holland and in India.
4. Bangalore 4.3. Management As said before, hiring people in Eindhoven was not sufficient. Outsourcing was expensive and did not provide the quality meeting our standards. We came up with the solution that it was a better option to let the searches be conducted by Philips trained people, at a location where good educated people were readily available. In Bangalore, India, Philips runs a software development centre with more than 1000 employees. So local contacts, a human resource department, housing, and IT-systems, for example, were already in place. Young good educated engineers were available as well. Although hardly any basic IP knowledge existed, we considered the other circumstances advantageous enough to successfully start a search department. In 2002, we really started our adventure. 4.1. Recruitment Our first step was asking one of the local managers to support us and to start together with the local HR manager the recruitment process. The first task was to give them basic training in IP and a clear job description of a patent searcher. In other words, we had to overcome the idea that entering a few keywords into a database cannot be that difficult. An advertisement in the appropriate newspapers yielded literally thousands of responses. It appeared to be quite normal that this number of people replies to a job opening in India. However, just selecting on the asked requirements allowed us to cut down this amount to a shortlist of about 12 candidates and finally we recruited 6 trainees. In the following years we repeated this process several times and
As usual in IP&S, employees have two managers, a local hierarchical manager and a functional manager located in the corporate IP&S centre in Eindhoven. The local manager manages the people and the functional manager manages the process. This was also the case for the searchers in Bangalore. A smooth cooperation and understanding between these two managers was a critical success factor. Setting clear and transparent objectives was really helpful in managing from a big distance and also in the view of the different cultural attitude. Depending on the maturity level of the trainee we defined objectives for the number of searches they had to do. For everybody it was very clear what we expected now and in the following years. We also defined a range of expected quality scores; in the following section the quality scoring process will be explained in more detail. 4.4. Quality control We use three types of quality checks: 1. Ad-hoc feedback of customers. This can be both positive and negative and both on request or unsolicited. This quality check is especially important for less experienced searchers. 2. Written feedback from senior colleagues or the so called peer reviews. In a peer review, we do not ask people to repeat the search, but to check the queries and the results. The most important issue of this check was whether the trainee understood the invention he or she had to search.
134
G. van der Ligt / World Patent Information 30 (2008) 132–134
3. A quality score, as the result of a yearly assessment by the attorneys. Every attorney is asked to give his searchers a score on a five point scale, the final quality score is the average of typically 5–10 scores. With 15 years experience of using this system, it was very useful for managing such a large and distant group in Bangalore. The criteria for the assessment are • Correctness of the search criteria as specified in the report: We consider the specification of the search criteria as very important. The searcher has to specify what exactly he searched for, but, not how he searched, because that is his own responsibility. The customer can read from this specification whether the searcher understood the search request. • Reliability of the search results: The reliability of the results is of course the toughest one; a reliable opinion heavily depends on the experience of the attorney. • Relevance of the as ‘‘(very) relevant’’ cited documents: We categorize the search results in three categories, very relevant, relevant and background, more or less comparable to X, Y and A in EPO search reports. • Usefulness of the documents cited as ‘‘background’’. • Sufficient references to relevant parts in the cited documents: The searcher is expected to make clear references to the relevant parts of the cited documents. Remarks like ‘‘whole document’’ are not really appreciated. 4.5. Quality scores Our initial goal was that the Bangalore quality would be better than the outsourced quality. As shown in Fig. 1, this was achieved right from the beginning. We also see that Eindhoven is still slightly better, but in considering this we have to take into account an experience gap of about 15 years. Another interesting observation is that the outsource quality also is improving. Due to our capacity in Bangalore we could reduce the outsourcing and in doing so we have retained the better outside search offices. This, combined with an increasing familiarity with our technology, will surely have caused the observed improvement. 4.5
5. The search department in 2007 The search department is formed by two teams now: one team of 18 searchers in Bangalore and another team of seven searchers in Eindhoven. Both teams are managed by one of the searchers in Bangalore, who was among the first six trainees in 2002. The teams are responsible for all the novelty and validity searching in IP&S worldwide. To underline their growing importance and to facilitate a focussed attitude, the patent landscaping and competitive intelligence activities have been separated from the search department. They are carried out by a newly established Business Intelligence department in Eindhoven, staffed with among others, 10 former patent searchers. 6. Conclusions and lessons learned The move to Bangalore has proven to be very successful. A stable, well performing search department has been established. The costs are under control and management is mostly done locally. What went well? • • • • •
Availability of Philips infrastructure in Bangalore. Education level of recruited people. WON/GO Training Course. Efforts of senior searchers in Eindhoven. Enthusiastic and positive attitude of trainees. What could have been better?
• Initial IP knowledge of trainees. • Coaching during first searches. Further reading [1] Schoeppel H-R, Naetebusch R. Patent searching in a large electrical company, as exemplified by the situation at Siemens. World Patent Information 1995;17 (3):165–72. [2] Jassin Marjorie. The flat track: to new career options for information professionals. Online 2005;29 (5):22–5. [3] DiMattia Susan S. Offshoring hits home; some companies are moving research overseas – a threat and an opportunity. Library J. 2004;129 (6):42.
4 3.5 3 Outsourced Bangalore Eindhoven
2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Fig. 1. Quality scores.
2006
Mr. Gerard van der Ligt, a national of the Netherlands, is Director of Business Intelligence at Philips Intellectual Property & Standards. In this function he is responsible for all activities in IP&S related to IP intelligence and market intelligence. Gerard is member of the WON and the advisory board of the training course Patent Information Specialist. He started his career in 1981 at Philips Lighting. After several other positions in Lighting and Research he joined IP&S in 1996 as a Patent Searcher. In 2001 he became manager of the search department, established a search department in Bangalore and took up his current assignment in 2006.