"In a highly competitive environment infoapps solutions ensure us to be always up to date on our competitiors IP activities."

Kertin Uhde
Head of Patent coordination SALZGITTER AG


For over 80 years the Salzgitter Mannesmann Forschungs GmbH is the central R&D unit for the global operating Salzgitter AG. About 300 experts are dedicated to topics all around steel technology.

>15
Patent filings per year in average

>50
Experts from IP and R&D working with infoPatent

>30
Countries monitored

>30
Competitor´s activities being monitored


The challenge

Competitors
One of the big challenges was to cover the complete filing activities of Salzgitter-Mannesmann's competitors 

Alerts
To be constantly updated on the competitor activities, an alerting system was necessary

Quick reaction
Once an alert was set off, an efficient workflow was needed to react as quick as possible to the competitors' activities.

The solution

All names
All variant spellings of applicant names are included in the database, and can also be cosolidated for statistics and analyses. In addition, Salzgitter is able to find even misspelled applicant names due to the family consolidated presentation of the hit-lists.

New information
Patentmanagers are able finely graduated adjust about what new information in the database hewants to get an alert via e-mail. For example about new families, new families with a specific country code or about all changes in families that are already in the database.

Assessment
Due to the infoPatent assessment workflow developers get immediately informed about new patents to assess and can give their opinion quickly to the patent department. Because of the intelligent sorting of the to do lists in the assessment it is nearly impossible to miss an opposition deadline.