patent information at henkel: from documentation and information to collaborative information...

6
Patent information at Henkel: from documentation and information to collaborative information commerce Christoph Haxel * Henkel InfoCenter, Henkel KGaA, D-40191 Dusseldorf, Germany Abstract The history of provision of patent information at Henkel is outlined. The situation today is contrasted with the extensive in- house databases of the 1970s. The current strategy, of using intranet and internet capabilities in an integrated system relying much more on externally available databases, is described. Some particular elements of this are detailed, such as the use of and links to Lotus-Notes, SciFinder, Web of Science, Derwent Innovation Index and Micropatent. Notwithstanding these extensive and ad- vanced information technology solutions, the author highlights the continuing need for professional intellectual support to obtain the best results. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Patent information management; In-house databases; Intranet; Internet; Direct charging; Globalization; Integrated systems; Professional intellectual support 1. Introduction Patent information has a long history at Henkel, going back to the Company’s first patent application in 1896. More than 100 years have passed since then, during which an imposing archive of documentation has accumulated. In the early 1970s the Company invested substantial sums to set up huge in-house patent infor- mation databases. Now, in response to the opportunities offered by new developments in internet and intranet technology, Henkel is following a new strategy. The emphasis is no longer on the creation, maintenance and integration of its own data processing systems, but ra- ther on integrating external sources of information and cooperating with external information providers. A new and forward-looking information architecture is being established, based on global agreements and alliances. An essential prerequisite is the readiness of information providers to cooperate on a global scale to ensure the provision of electronic information to a globally oper- ating company. 2. Who we are: Henkel KGaA Henkel is an internationally operating Company with a widely diversified product portfolio that includes ad- hesives, household cleaners, body care products, prod- ucts for surface treatment and industrial cleaning, and chemical products. The Henkel Group is managed by Henkel KGaA in Dusseldorf, Germany. At the end of 2000 Henkel em- ployed more than 61,000 people worldwide, including 16,000 in Germany. Henkel prides itself on being one of Germany’s leading global players, conducting the ma- jority of its business internationally. Securing the future through innovation is the core task underlying Henkel’s research and development effort. Innovation is crucial to our Company’s com- petitiveness and thus to its continued success. Some 4000 employees work in research, product de- velopment and applications engineering in Henkel com- panies worldwide. In 2000, the Company devoted 320 million EUR to R&D (15% more than in 1999). The proportion of this investment in relation to sales rose to 2.5%. Henkel spent additionally 118 million EUR on applications-related advice and customer consultation. The utilization of external know-how to supplement Henkel’s own core competencies is becoming increas- ingly important. Henkel will thus invest more heavily in World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30 www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin * Tel.: +49-211-797-9509; fax: +49-211-798-8787. E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Haxel). 0172-2190/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0172-2190(01)00072-2

Upload: christoph-haxel

Post on 02-Jul-2016

212 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Patent information at Henkel: from documentationand information to collaborative information commerce

Christoph Haxel *

Henkel InfoCenter, Henkel KGaA, D-40191 D€uusseldorf, Germany

Abstract

The history of provision of patent information at Henkel is outlined. The situation today is contrasted with the extensive in-

house databases of the 1970s. The current strategy, of using intranet and internet capabilities in an integrated system relying much

more on externally available databases, is described. Some particular elements of this are detailed, such as the use of and links to

Lotus-Notes, SciFinder, Web of Science, Derwent Innovation Index and Micropatent. Notwithstanding these extensive and ad-

vanced information technology solutions, the author highlights the continuing need for professional intellectual support to obtain

the best results. � 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Patent information management; In-house databases; Intranet; Internet; Direct charging; Globalization; Integrated systems; Professional

intellectual support

1. Introduction

Patent information has a long history at Henkel,going back to the Company’s first patent application in1896. More than 100 years have passed since then,during which an imposing archive of documentation hasaccumulated. In the early 1970s the Company investedsubstantial sums to set up huge in-house patent infor-mation databases. Now, in response to the opportunitiesoffered by new developments in internet and intranettechnology, Henkel is following a new strategy. Theemphasis is no longer on the creation, maintenance andintegration of its own data processing systems, but ra-ther on integrating external sources of information andcooperating with external information providers. A newand forward-looking information architecture is beingestablished, based on global agreements and alliances.An essential prerequisite is the readiness of informationproviders to cooperate on a global scale to ensure theprovision of electronic information to a globally oper-ating company.

2. Who we are: Henkel KGaA

Henkel is an internationally operating Company witha widely diversified product portfolio that includes ad-hesives, household cleaners, body care products, prod-ucts for surface treatment and industrial cleaning, andchemical products.

The Henkel Group is managed by Henkel KGaA inD€uusseldorf, Germany. At the end of 2000 Henkel em-ployed more than 61,000 people worldwide, including16,000 in Germany. Henkel prides itself on being one ofGermany’s leading global players, conducting the ma-jority of its business internationally.

Securing the future through innovation is the coretask underlying Henkel’s research and developmenteffort. Innovation is crucial to our Company’s com-petitiveness and thus to its continued success.

Some 4000 employees work in research, product de-velopment and applications engineering in Henkel com-panies worldwide. In 2000, the Company devoted 320million EUR to R&D (15% more than in 1999). Theproportion of this investment in relation to sales rose to2.5%. Henkel spent additionally 118 million EUR onapplications-related advice and customer consultation.

The utilization of external know-how to supplementHenkel’s own core competencies is becoming increas-ingly important. Henkel will thus invest more heavily in

World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30

www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin

*Tel.: +49-211-797-9509; fax: +49-211-798-8787.

E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Haxel).

0172-2190/02/$ - see front matter � 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

PII: S0172-2190 (01 )00072-2

venture capital funds and start-up companies, and enterinto research partnerships worldwide.

Henkel’s business is organized in five business sectorsoperating worldwide: Adhesives, Cosmetics/Toiletries,Laundry and Home Care, Industrial and InstitutionalHygiene/Surface Technologies, and Chemical Products(Cognis).

3. Who we are: The Henkel InfoCenter

Five years ago we concentrated all the traditionalservices of the Henkel libraries, the professional searchand end-user systems, audio-visual media, business in-formation and the Scientific and Technical Informationdepartment in the Henkel InfoCenter (Fig. 1). Themission of the Henkel InfoCenter is to supply Henkelunits worldwide with information––efficiently and ondemand. This is achieved by:

• Professional and end-user searches.• Professional evaluation, storage and distribution of

information.• Global contracts and economies of scale.

All services are offered and charged at market prices.None of the Henkel business sectors is obliged to pur-chase services from the Henkel InfoCenter.

Thanks to this new system of direct charging, theglobally competitive service department that has evolvedfrom the former budget-financed information and doc-umentation department has gained in professionalismand efficiency. Users now determine the future of Hen-

kel’s internal information services in much the same waythat customers determine the market success of Henkel’sproducts.

4. The history of patent information at Henkel

Patent information at Henkel has a long history [1–3].This is a relatively simple business if a company onlymarkets one product, or possesses one patent, or worksin a narrowly defined technical field, which was Henkel’ssituation when its success story started (Fig. 2). TodayHenkel markets more than 10,000 different products.

The expansion of Henkel’s product portfolio wastracked closely by an equivalent increase in the vol-ume of patent information. Some important milestonesare:

• 1876 Henkel founded by Fritz Henkel in Aachen.• 1896 First patent application.• 1910 Henkel Library.• 1967 Foundation of International Documentation in

Chemistry (IDC) with BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, De-gussa, H€uuls.

• 1968 Member of the Patent Documentation Group(PDG).

• 1970 Patent abstracts from Derwent.• 1973 IBM computer for the Patent department.• 1976 First online searches and IBM’s Storage and In-

formation Retrieval System (STAIRS) implemented.• 1991 CD-ROMs and jukeboxes.• 1992 Optical archives and huge in-house databases

(whole INPADOC file with all legal status informa-

Fig. 1. Henkel InfoCenter Homepage. An e-commerce tool dispatching orders since 1998.

26 C. Haxel / World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30

tion, Derwent Chemical Index, 10 million patents asfull text).

• 1995 Patent abstracts in Lotus-Notes/intranet.• 1998 Link from Lotus-Notes to internet/esp@cenet�.• 1999 Micropatent introduced worldwide.• 2000 SciFinder introduced, with link to e-journals

and Micropatent.• 2001 Derwent Innovation Index and Web of Science

introduced worldwide.

New technical developments and new media have al-ways strongly influenced the milestones of patent in-formation at Henkel.

For many years paper archives and filing cabinetswere the favored choice of the patent specialists. Asnew storage options became available, e.g. microfiche,microfilm cards and CD-ROMs, the importance ofpaper archives steadily diminished. In the mid 1970s thefirst computers revolutionized the information world ofthe patent specialists. Henkel’s patent documentationsection had always welcomed innovation, but to manypeople’s horror the introduction of terminals and com-puters was followed by the relatively rapid disappear-ance of all filing cabinets, complete with contents,microfiche and paper archives, into the garbage can.From the 1980s a start was made on building up in-house databases and systems with the help of large-scale investment. In the mid 1990s Henkel had theworld’s biggest in-house electronic patent informationarchive. The Derwent file of all chemically relevantpatent citations (CPI), the complete INPADOC data-base with all patent family and legal status information,all Derwent documentation abstracts and millions ofpatent specifications were stored on hard disks, main-frame computers, servers and optical archives. The ac-tivities of market partners were analyzed at a relativelyearly stage with sophisticated evaluation and analysisprograms. And, of course, the services and optionsoffered by external hosts have been used since 1976.

Refined systems were used to carry out online or in-house searches in the light of cost and quality aspects.The relevant documents were then selected from thedifferent databases as cost-efficiently as possible. TheCompany’s own IT department managed, organizedand programmed the increasingly complex and contin-uously expanding documentation system. The cost trendwas one-directional. The associated necessary restruc-turing then formed the basis for the new strategy.

With the early introduction of internet access for al-most all employees, the information landscape changedfrom one day to the next. We are now in the tense phaseof relinquishing parts of our extensive and valuablein-house documentation to improve efficiency. A similardramatic decision was taken around 30 years ago, whenthe availability of new service providers and technologiesled to a drastic reduction in in-house patent documen-tation. The intellectual coding of patent documentationwas taken over by Derwent and Chemical Abstracts. Weput our trust in the reliability and quality of the externaldocumentation archives. At the same time we continuedto cooperate with a number of chemical companies foranother two decades in the context of a joint venture, theInternationale Dokumentationsgesellschaft f€uur Chemie(IDC), allocating a considerable budget to improvingquality and indexing. Due to problems of financing theannual budget of around 15 million euros, the partnersdissolved and liquidated the IDC in the 1990s. More than100 patent documentation specialists lost their jobs. Thepartners still use the IDC databases, which remain un-excelled for carrying out complicated searches but are nolonger up to date. The databases are thus steadily losingtheir value.

Today our primary aim is to reduce storage space andIT costs rather than personnel. Patent offices, hosts anddotCOMs now provide sometimes very good qualityinformation cost-effectively, and in some cases highlyefficiently. Excellent quality with value-added informa-tion still always comes at a price, of course.

Fig. 2. Persil––yesterday and today.

C. Haxel / World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30 27

In future we will rely increasingly on our suppliers.However, we know we are in good company. The au-tomotive industry and other industrial sectors receive allthey need for their many production processes in theright quality from their suppliers ‘just in time’. Whyshould this not be possible in the patent informationindustry?

Today we no longer face the question of whether westill need large in-house databases for freely availableinformation. We have already decided to rely on exter-nal databases and a new information strategy.

5. The 5I strategy: innovation through integration of the

information available on the intranet and the internet

Around 30,000 of Henkel’s 60,000 employees workwith Lotus-Notes. Since Lotus-Notes was installed asHenkel’s standard mail system at a relatively early stage,for many employees it ranks alongside SAP (SAP is alarge inter-enterprise software company) as their mostimportant software. From travel expense reports toelectronic ordering of books and other literature, there isa Notes database for everything. With the new Dominotechnology, all Notes applications are accessible with asimple browser such as Netscape or Microsoft Explorer.Henkel employees are given generous access to the in-ternet and many of them have become accustomed toacquiring the information they need on the internet orthe intranet––provided they know where to find it. Weface the problem––or rather the challenge––of makingall information available efficiently and at a reason-able cost to the company. We have identified three keyaspects:

• A single search system for the intranet and the inter-net.

• Visualization of the search results.• Integration and linkage of the available sources of in-

formation on the intranet and internet (Fig. 3).

6. Successful end-user system––SciFinder

The researchers’ favorite ‘do it yourself ’ end-user toolis SciFinder from Chemical Abstracts. We have realizedour 5I strategy as a prototype here with the three pro-viders Chemical Abstracts, EBSCO and Micropatent.Henkel researchers have worldwide access to more than40 million full texts from Micropatent and all e-journals.EBSCO––one of the world’s biggest suppliers of perio-dicals––provides us with all print journals––more than1000 in all––as well as our e-journals. Henkel end userscan carry out searches with SciFinder in the language oftheir choice with chemical formulas, structural formulasor simply free text and obtain very good results. Theycan use a search engine to hunt through the literatureand patents, while SciFinder allows high-level visual-ization of the results. Each researcher is identified as aHenkel employee and can gain direct access throughChemport to the e-journals or patents that are availableon the internet. In the case of patents, the researcherscan call up almost every document directly from Mi-cropatent. Despite the relatively high costs, this systemis very popular among Henkel researchers.

7. Web of science and Derwent innovation index

We offer the Web of science for literature searchesand the Derwent innovation index (DII) for patent

Fig. 3. Digital integration and networking with the global partners of Henkel.

28 C. Haxel / World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30

searches. The search system was developed by ThomsonScientific and has a uniform user interface for literatureand patents. Unfortunately we have not been able tointroduce our 5I strategy here in the way that we havewith SciFinder. Integration of the e-journals and thelink to the Micropatent patents are still on our wish listat Thompson Scientific. The collaboration between theindividual market partners requires a little more pa-tience and moderation. We do not foresee any technicalproblems. With their IP addresses (Internet Protocol),all Henkel employees should be able to use their internetidentity to open all doors leading to the value-addedinformation they are authorized to access under theterms of the global corporate contracts that have beenconcluded. The 10 million literature sources from thelast 10 years and more than 10 million patent abstractsfrom Derwent with corresponding links to 40 millionfull texts would open up an immensely valuable andunrivalled pool of information for the end-users.

8. Micropatent

In the field of patent information, the Micropatentfull text and archive service still enjoys the greatest de-gree of acceptance among our end-users [4]. More than20,000 patent specifications are downloaded annually atHenkel and several thousand searches are carried out.The archive function of Micropatent is certainly moreimportant at the moment than the search function. Thisis clearly indicated by the growing number of down-loaded patent specifications and the feedback fromusers. Despite the partly free services of the patent of-fices, we will continue to pay to download our patentspecifications from Micropatent, as we need a profes-sional and efficient provider for their acquisition. It isalso our opinion that the professional provision of pa-tent specifications will remain a task and an attractiveservice for the information industry. In view of the newtechnical possibilities this market will certainly not growstrongly but will be a worthwhile field of business.

9. In-house databases with Lotus-Notes

Naturally we still maintain smaller in-house data-bases, insofar as we are able to contribute internal addedvalue. A good example is our Patent Watch database,with which we electronically support and partly replacethe printed patent specification cycle still required bymany colleagues. We simulate the total patent cycleelectronically with the help of the barcodes of patentspecifications and the coding system applied by the Pa-tent department. Comments can also be stored in theNotes database. The citations concerning the selectedpatents are all in English and are obtained from Der-

went. Together with Micropatent, we programmed thelink to the published original patent specification andhave even applied for protective rights for the technicalsolution [5,6]. This Lotus-Notes application system issuitable not only as a pull-information system but canalso be linked with our grapeVine knowledge system asa push system.

GrapeVine gives employees the option of submittingtheir information requirements independently and beingprovided with business and economic information. Thecontent of the prefiltered information is evaluated withthe help of electronic profiles and is assessed and pri-oritized by a gatekeeper. Each end-user can thereforecontrol and adjust the flood of information with the helpof his or her individual profile.

10. Collaboration and 5I strategy

The new virtual information landscape can be com-pared to a huge building site, where individual ordershave not yet been clearly assigned but the developmentplan has been defined. As in the expansion of a majorairport, we are still seeking a number of partners whowant to realize our vision of integrated informationprovision. Starts and landings will have to carry onuninterrupted, just as they do while an airport is beingexpanded.

In future, not only the end-user systems will offer allpossible links. The search results generated by oursearch experts from the classic host will be transmittedby e-mail with appropriate Henkel-world links. Thisassumes that all hosts and database providers will adoptand support our strategy. There is no place on ourbuilding site for providers who want to go their ownway. Fig. 3 shows a number of potential partners. Weare confident that we will be able to convince almost allinformation providers of the merits of our concept bythe end of 2001. We have already booked our firstsuccess with SciFinder.

11. Outlook

All new information systems offer major opportunitiesfor improving a Company’s information acquisition andinnovative strength. We also view these options as newbusiness for the Henkel InfoCenter and we continue toinvest money, lots of time and commitment in all newdevelopments. Despite all the enthusiasm for new op-portunities, we repeatedly observe that the new contentmanagement, visualization and search systems are stillno substitute for many traditional information systems.Up to now, all these new tools have been good add-ons.Books still serve a useful purpose. Print journals are stillvery popular among Henkel employees, whether at work

C. Haxel / World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30 29

or in the home, the train or the plane. Unfortunately,high quality documentation and intellectual effort canscarcely be replaced by IT systems. With the increase inthe numbers of end-user systems, knowledge systems andthe sometimes free internet services, our complex searchqueries are steadily multiplying. The work of the searchexperts is in greater demand than ever to help deal withcomplaints and questions about levels of technology andpatentability. Although technology provides us with evermore opportunities, we see no suitable alternative forprofessional intellectual support. Certainly it will soonbe possible to travel through the information landscapewith the help of technology, robots and computers alone,but this is not desirable. Collaboration between all par-ties is more important than ever. The future of patentinformation lies not in e-commerce, but in c-commerce:collaboration and co-operation.

Acknowledgement

This article has been developed from a presentationthat the author gave at the 2001 EUSIDIC AnnualConference in Baden–Baden.

References

[1] Lobeck MA. Patent documentation in industry––a Report from

Henkel. World Patent Information 1985;7:101–25.

[2] Lobeck MA. Patent information on CD-ROMs. World Patent

Information 1990;12:200–11.

[3] Lobeck MA. SUPRAPAT: a value added patent database a

personal view and vision. World Patent Information 1994;16:

14–27.

[4] Montenegro HC. Management von patentinformationen in einem

Großunternehmen, 22. Kolloquium der Techn. Universit€aat Ilme-

nau €uuber Patentinformation, 15–16/6/2000, Patentinformation und

Patentanalyse als Mittel zum Markterfolg.

[5] DE 200 18 013 U1.

[6] Scherler D. Proceedings of the 2000 International Chemical

Information Conference, 2000. p. 99–108.

Christoph Haxel

30 C. Haxel / World Patent Information 24 (2002) 25–30