Today, for the first time, anyone with an Internet connection can access details of over three million patents. Derwent Information, the international provider of patent information has launched Patent Explorer. This innovative new product, developed in co-operation with Microsoft, is the first Internet service to provide both full text searching and facsimile images of documents from the US and European Patent Offices.

Patent Explorer offers users a unique point and click research tool. Even without specialist training, patents can be searched using over 40 different criteria, including company name, date, technology area, patent number and inventor name. Once the search is finished, the patents can be reviewed online, either as text or an exact image including diagrams, or downloaded to a file for local viewing and printing. Complete documents can be ordered online for delivery by fax or post.

Patents can provide a wealth of data for companies including technical and business information. With Patent Explorer, users can monitor the research activities of competitors, alert themselves to developing new technologies that may have an impact on business and also ensure that their own intellectual property rights are not being infringed. Within a week of publication by the relevant Patent Office, Derwent customers can search all European and US text and image data. As well as the latest patents, Patent Explorer can be used to trace the development of a particular technology as it holds all US patents dating back to 1974 and European patents from 1978 onwards.

For advanced users, Patent Explorer is packed with additional features. Customised search and display templates can be created and sophisticated Boolean operators can be used to tailor the search further. Individually tailored search profiles can be created and saved and set up to run on a weekly or monthly basis as a technology alerting service, with users prompted by e-mail when matching documents are loaded onto the database.

The first commercial release of Patent Explorer is aimed at the corporate user. Companies with large usage requirements can opt for an attractive discounted pre-payment arrangement. Alternatively, organisations with a lesser requirement can make use of a pay as you go option.

The service is open to visitors atwww.patentexplorer.com

©In Press PR Ltd1997

January 1998

When Asea Brown Boveri, the Zurich-based Swedish-Swiss power engineering multinational, bids for a major contract it assembles a special “capture team”. The team generally includes a design engineer, technology specialist, legal expert and other business specialists. ABB’s highly structured approach is one reason why it is among the world’s most successful contract bidders. Now new research has pinpointed the key reasons why some engineering companies are more effective at winning new business than others. The research, carried out by Policy Publications as part of the on-going research for itsWinning Major Bids: the Critical Success Factorsreport, uncovers what it is the superbidders do that the less successful don’t to make them more successful. Researchers studied 30 engineering companies with turnovers up to £500 million among a total sample of 293 from many different industries. Seven of the engineering companies – the “superbidders” – won more than half the contracts they pitched for. But the other 23 won less than half, with 12 winning less than a quarter. The survey reviewed the effectiveness of the companies across 47 key bidding activities – from positioning the company to attract bid invitations to negotiating the final contract. It showed that while the performance of the most and least successful companies was similar across many of these activities, the “superbidder” engineering firms scored heavily in certain key areas. Superbidders are nearly twice as likely to understand the value and benefits customers expect to gain from their products as the less successful. Similarly, they are twice as likely to understand the decision-making process the customer uses to make a purchase. They are also twice as likely as the less successful to develop good person-to-person relationships with the customer. They are four times more likely to understand the roles different managers at the customer company play in taking a purchasing decision. Most tellingly, the superbidders are seven times more likely to be very effective at understanding factors customers consider when making the purchase decision. The superbidders score across a whole range of other bidding activities. They are more than three times as good at establishing the superiority of their products over rivals and of developing a distinctive image of their company. They are also nearly three times as good at finding and using competitive intelligence and at preparing detailed bid documentation. And they are twice as good at guaranteeing quality, delivery dates and after-sales service. These findings come against a background of growing global competitiveness for engineering projects. Increasingly, companies may find themselves as part of an international consortium bidding against other consortia for giant contracts. For example, BT, Lockheed Martin and General Electric Company beat Racal, Logica and W S Atkins for the £1 billion contract to supply upgraded telephone networks to the British armed services. Bidding can consume huge resources. During the summer of 1996, British Aerospace had 15 000 technicians working on bid projects. BAe’s bid prizes have included a £1 billion Australian order for the supply and maintenance of Hawk trainer aircraft and a further £500 million order to supply Hawks to the Gulf States. Massive contracts, such as these, carry strategic prizes beyond their book value, points out Colin Coulson-Thomas, Willmott Dixon professor of corporate transformation at Luton University, who led the research project. “The winners are well placed to fund their R&D projects and gain export orders that may be worth many times the value of British contracts.” Yet the research suggests too many engineering companies lack the world-class bidding skills they need to beat global competitors. For example, in positioning a company so that it gets invited to bid, 72% of engineering companies say the way buyers view the quality of their products and services is “very important”. But this masks the fact that the most successful are twice as likely as the least successful to attach importance to this key factor. “The pre-bid activities are critically important because they establish the platform from which the rest of the bid will be conducted,” says Coulson-Thomas. “The superbidders help to shape the way the buyer considers the bid in a way the other bidders cannot.” This puts them in pole position as the bid process proceeds. Yet, even then, the superbidders outstrip the others in most bid management activities. What is striking is that the superbidders are significantly more successful at the “soft” issues such as understanding the buyer’s business environment or his decision-making process rather than the “hard” issues, such as communicating the value of their products – although they excel at these as well. One chief executive of a systems design consultancy pointed out that trust and confidence were key issues. “We go about creating that trust by giving the customer the impression we understand his needs and the commercial pressures that help to shape the system we design.” Not surprisingly, most superbidders excel at building effective bidding teams, although most engineering companies recognise the importance of senior management leadership, including team members with product knowledge and building team spirit. One strikingly successful aerospace sub-contractor operates a two-team strategy on bids. Each bid is “owned” by a board director and includes other managers representing all the technologies involved. When the proposal is drafted it is checked by a red team of non-involved senior managers for compliance against the tender document and company strategy. According to the company’s marketing director, the red team can tear apart a proposal put together over months and running to six or eight volumes. “It has caused grown men to weep,” he says. When the red team is happy with the proposal a black team, chaired by the marketing director and with the finance director to the fore, moves in to check the cost structure of the bid and provide a financial check. This approach, says the marketing director, makes the chances of winning contracts “measurably better”. Most engineering companies recognise the importance of a range of negotiation stage activities. And, interestingly, there is generally less differential between the superbidders and the rest. By the time a bid reaches the final negotiation stages, the superbidders often have it sewn up, says Coulson-Thomas. “The over-riding lesson is that bids are won or lost in the early stages of a bidding process, very rarely at the end negotiating stage.”

• A free brochure describingWinning Major Bids...the Critical Success Factorsis available from Policy Publications by faxing your name and company address details to 01234 357231 or telephoning 01234 328448. The 128 page report itself costs £295.

February 1998

So how much value do you put on your engineering data? How critical is your data to your business?

This is where disaster recovery comes in. Ask any company director whether his or her business is insured and the answer will be a puzzled “yes, of course”. Yet, ask if they have a disaster recovery policy and they may give a just-as-puzzled “no, what for?”

Disaster recovery services are often seen as an optional business strategy, rather than a fundamental requirement to ensure that business operations continue as usual. Anything, from a fire or flood, to a basic system fault, can bring about the failure of a company’s IT system, which in turn can mean that business operations grind to a halt. When a disaster does occur, and while insurance claims are being processed and replacement IT systems implemented, how does a company maintain its business operation?

One of the largest disaster recovery companies in the UK is Guardian Computer Services, which earns around £20 million per annum providing backup hardware and communications facilities for around 750 companies. In some cases, companies which invoke the policy are given alternative premises to work from while their existing ones are restored to their former state. In other cases, a mobile disaster recovery vehicle takes the replacement facilities to the site and could be set up as an alternative working environment in the car park, for example. Over 20 clients have invoked their disaster recovery services since January 1996.

In a recent survey of 25 city firms, nearly one in four said they were sufficiently worried about the cessation of the IRA ceasefire to change their DR policy. But in the same survey, two-thirds said that, over the last year, their computer systems had been unavailable for use at least once. This high proportion gave hardware failure as the most common problem, followed by network failure and software failure. Guardian director Roland Mann says: “Although we have clients unfortunate enough to have needed our services after terrorist bombings, about 90% of invocations are the result of computer system failures caused by a variety of events, from staff deleting the wrong files, plumbing leaks drenching equipment, to faults in the air conditioning system”.

Clients are of all sizes. Minimum contract prices are surprisingly low. Yet the total market in the UK for contract backup facilities is perhaps no more than £100 million. Of course, there is probably getting on for £1 billion in the market accounted for by in-house disaster recovery Ð companies such as the major banks and building societies which maintain complete mirror sites of their whole IT setup.

So many companies go to great lengths to protect their financial data and to ensure that they can be up and running again within a short space of time. An example of an engineering company which uses Guardian’s disaster recovery service to protect its financial and sales activities is Xerox Engineering Systems. A hardware fault last January cost the company one day of operational time, when without disaster recovery, there could have been several weeks’ downtime. The on-site recovery system was operational for over four weeks.

But shouldn’t there be more of a market for disaster recovery amongst manufacturing companies seeking to maintain continuity in design and development? How important is it to have your manufacturing data, as opposed to financial data, back on line within one or two days, should the unthinkable happen?

“It’s all about response time”, says Mike Quinn, Sales & Marketing Director of Guardian Computer Services. “If you need to be up and running with seconds or minutes, there’s no alternative to running your own on-site backup, but it’s very expensive. We come into our own when you need to be up and running within a time frame of 12 to 48 hours. But if you can survive for a week or two without your IT system, then you don’t need the services we offer.” Quinn is yet to be convinced that there is a lucrative market for disaster recovery in the manufacturing arena. But it could certainly be argued that times are changing.

Pressures on companies to complete design and development projects within tight schedules are increasing. Time-to-market is increasingly recognised as a critical parameter contributing to profitability. A company which is six months late getting a product to market can close off over half of its life cycle profits, surveys show.

Companies offering design and development services on a contract basis, as well as second and third tier suppliers to major industries such as automotive are all under great pressure to design to a tight timescale, often with penalty clauses hanging over them for late delivery. Design departments are beginning to think about 24 hour working, where projects are passed around the globe, following the sun, with continuous work on projects by teams on three continents. Such a policy is being adopted by Kvaerner John Brown, which has implemented 24 hour working with minimised shift or overtime rates. Through this system, a customer’s plant can be completed and be on-stream earlier, generating more revenue for the customer. Yet it costs Kvaerner John Brown less to do the work and they can get paid more by negotiating a cut of the extra revenues.

A recent agreement between Guardian and Silicon Graphics for UNIX workstations implies an increasing move into the manufacturing sector. Recovery services for PC LAN users are also offered to incorporate client/server functionality into a full IT recovery plan.

“SGI has a significant base of clients in the manufacturing sector, an area which is becoming increasingly IT-dependent”, says Peter MacLean, Guardian’s Managing Director. “With pressure mounting to meet increasingly tight deadlines, particularly where just-in-time manufacturing procedures are applied, even a temporary loss of the system can be catastrophic. It is essential that contingency planning is factored into the overall business strategy.”

Many companies believe that disaster recovery arrangements form part of their existing maintenance agreements, but it is unlikely that this is the case, according to Guardian. The Guardian service includes regular opportunities to do trials on the backup facilities available. ” Unlike fire-safety checks which hardly vary, business continuity plans need to be continually updated every time a new dimension is added to the business Ð whether it’s a new piece of equipment or a new person. We often find that companies do not carry out trials frequently enough, even though it is included as part of our package”, says Mann. “When they do, we frequently find unexpected problems, such as an incomplete set of backup data, when the company assumed it had been protecting its data absolutely.”

Some critical questions

• 1 Have you assessed the effect of an interruption on your business?
• 2 Have you accurately identified the critical areas of your business?
• 3 Do you have an audited contingency plan drawn up? If so, are you confident of its viability and is the plan frequently tested under simulated disaster conditions?
• 4 Does your plan guarantee full recovery within a timeframe agreed to be acceptable to the business, whatever the cause of failure?

• Guardian Computer Services
• Tel: 01932 835900
• Fax: 01932 835901
• Contact: Michael Quinn (Sales & Marketing Director)

January 1996