Welcome to the new year. I trust everyone had an excellent Xmas and holiday season, I certainly did. Apologies for the delay in getting a new article published but it has been hard to get back into a work mindset after a nice and lengthy holiday!!
2009 certainly promises to be an challenging year from a business viewpoint. In fact, the financial crisis is nothing like I have seen in my life time and I suspect this is the case for the majority of people. Governments reaction to all this with the traditional Keynesian response of pushing public funds into the private sector to stimulate demand, using both monetary policy and budget deficits, but does this economic theory hold true today? For myself, I could never have imagined a position where the entire car industry in the US could have self destructed (and where it still may) and most commentators are saying that it will get worse before it gets better.
The legal profession, and IP law firms in particular, have always been very recession resilient. The nature of the work changes but the volume and the margin remain. It will be interesting to see if this remains the case this time around.
In any case, the market will turn around at some stage in the future and growth will return, if for no other reason than we keep populating the planet. Of course, the $64 million question is how long it will take but, once again, most commentators can’t see this happening for the next 12 months at the earliest.
So what should a firm be doing in this uncertain environment? My general view is that this year is a great opportunity to be preparing the business for when the growth returns, focusing on operational efficiency, business development and optimizing investments already made.
At this point I'll take a caveat and skip the basic financial stuff where I think you need to be very, very confident to be extending any debt facilities and leave that for another forum. Equally, major investment needs to have a quick return guaranteed. Significant investment that has a return in 1, 2 or 3 years time would need to be considered very carefully.
So how can Inprotech help?
Operational efficiency is the area that I would be focusing on first. I’ll write a future article about how the product can help with business development and marketing.
The product itself has been designed with excellent automation facilities that can both lower the cost of a performing a transaction while improving quality. Look at reviewing the workflow and processes around your higher volume transactions. For example, if a major part of your work is filing locally or PCT national phase entry, look at fine tuning these processes. When was the last time these workflows were looked at? Are all the steps still necessary, can they be deleted or consolidated? Removing 1, 2 or 3 steps in a highly used process can release a lot of clerical and/or professional time with affecting margin.
Do you do a lot of European Patent, CTM or Madrid applications? Have you made effective use of the automatic copy facility for creating national phase or related removal/opposition cases?
Then the renewals process. Can this be improved and streamlined? For foreign renewals can you make use of the fees & charges module to automatically calculate and manage estimated charges for reminder letters (even if you are not using the Billing module – I must write an article on this)? Is the reminder letter process efficient and effective? Do you, for example, make use of the multi case reminder letter approach and bulk instructions receipt for those clients that require reminding in this fashion or is there an expensive manual process in place that manages this? Are you using standing instructions to handle auto renew processing and differing reminder letter numbers and frequency for those clients that request processes outside of the norm? Can the substitute letter functionality be used for those clients that require correspondence in a different format?
Overall, the system has a lot of power in this area and renewals is one “department” that should be highly automated from both a productivity and risk management perspective.
Next area to look at are letter templates. A simple SQL query on the database can return the list of letters produced over the last 12 months so that you can isolate the letters most used. Take the top 10 or 20 or whatever is appropriate. Is there any manual intervention involved to produce the final version of these letters that could be removed by a slight modification to the file take on or data capture process thereby allowing data to be captured and hence included in the letter automatically rather than manually. A simple change to a highly used document template could bring high return at low cost.
Please note that I am not suggesting a review of all templates, just the ones that are highly used. Remember the Pareto 80/20 rule. 80% of the effort is generated by 20% of the tasks. Focus on this 20%.
A similar thing should be done with letter templates that are created on an ad hoc basis through the PassThru process. Simple changes to highly used letters could bring big return. Question why things are done in a certain way. Just because they have always been done that way doesn’t mean that it still needs to be.
Another thing to consider is maybe using the Fees List program for lodgement processing if you have a spreadsheet, Word-based or manual process. This program can be used standalone without the need to use the charge generation. Simply set up the Fee Types and create the lodgement list with the program by selecting the case and the lodgement type. The integration will bring in the relevant case details without the need for re-typing and potential errors. If you want to go a bit more advanced the system can be set up to calculate the official fee but I am not sure that the benefits in doing this outweigh the set up effort so I would probably suggest just entering the amount manually.
I would also be looking at the name & address management process. Take on of new clients is often an area that causes issues and improvements and tightening of control here can bring big productivity gains right through the process. Ask yourself whether control should be centralized? Can the name copy facility be used to assist with getting some of the base data right? Have the country defaults been set up appropriately? Have you implemented audit trails so that issues can be tracked down and investigated to iron out issues as they occur?
Are the facilities for credit control being used effectively? If you are not using Billing and the Accounts modules then the Restrictions functionality is the main assistant here but the Correspondence and Billing Instructions fields could be used to warning on outstanding debt. Of course you would have to weigh up the effort required to keep this up to date but, depending upon your accounts module, maybe some simple SQL could be built to make this a process that doesn’t require that much manual intervention.
If you have Billing maybe putting a budget against a case and monitoring against it can be of assistance in managing your financial exposure to clients. You can also use Billing to collect, use and monitor prepaid funds even if you don’t have Accounts Receivable. If you are using Accounts Receivable are you making use of credit limit monitoring?
If you have Billing and are not using Fees & Charges then you can get big benefits. I know the set up is counter intuitive and there can be a bit of maintenance involved but if you can work through this and understand the concepts there is a lot of power there that can lead to productivity and control improvements. Once more I would look at initially implementing with the high transaction load areas such as renewals, filing applications, examination requests and for areas that you suspect fees are slipping through the cracks with the manual process.
Of course, I am probably preaching to the converted here but hopefully there may be one or two areas to explore. It always difficult to be generic with these types of things. When you know the specifics of customer it is much easier!!
In any case, the goal should be to fine tune, to improve, to build greater productivity & quality that means your systems are as effective as possible, both for the short term return and to be ready for growth when it returns.
