Combustion Engine Innovation
Dinex is a leading global manufacturer of innovative exhaust emission systems for diesel and gas engine commercial vehicles. They are in the business of cleaning up the exhaust emissions generated by commercial internal combustion engines. Their innovative technologies assist their customers to build vehicles that are more effective at eliminating harmful pollutants and particulate emissions. In a highly competitive industry, Dinex’s team has stayed ahead of the curve & saved valuable time and resources with the help of PatSnap’s Professional Services team.
Understanding Your Competitors
Andreina Moreno, Dinex’s Technical Manager of Gas Powertrain, is involved with developing Dinex’s catalyst products in their 3-way catalyst category. She develops the products that are used to clean emissions out of the burning of natural gas, biogas, liquified natural gas, and gasoline. At the level of development, Moreno often finds herself working in a densely populated research field in which her innovation is sitting – there is a high probability of interfering with other innovations; she estimates. To her, having access to information and analytics on innovation and technology “is a must”.
When it comes to understanding their competitors, Moreno says “Knowing what other developers are doing, how their patent landscape looks and their areas of innovation, is an important due diligence process in our development cycle.” Enabling their researchers to have access to this information at the early stages of development allows Dinex to have the needed data to steer their development in the right direction.
Prior to using PatSnap, the work was done by hand. “We had different researchers assigned to different areas digging through peer review articles, purchasing market data, books, google, basically whatever was readily available” says Moreno. Collecting all this information from many different sources presented a slow and unsafe way for them to work. “It all depended on what you fed the search. The quality of information you fed into the search determined, to a great extent the quality of answer we would get out of it.” says Moreno, “We were able to do it, but it was very inefficient, and because of the different sources we had a lack of confidence in our findings, resulting in our first trial of your software.”
Professional Services
To address these challenges, Dinex turned to PatSnap’s team. The Dinex team utilizes multiple PatSnap licenses, but when it came to conducting freedom to operate (FTO) reports, they wanted to be sure that they extracted all the information they could. Andreina found that herself and her colleagues all use PatSnap differently – when conducting FTO she felt there was a better way they could do this. They wanted a standardized process, that saved them time with the minimal investment of people.
That’s when they decided to trial PatSnap for the making of a critical FTO report. Moreno found it gave them a standardized way of analyzing what was already out there, and “it saved us time that previously required, at minimum, the investment of people. We previously would have up to 5 people who were searching – instead by having the PatSnap Professional Services team take care of it we are now saving the man hours from each one of those five people, leaving our research staff to focus on other development tasks.” By outsourcing this work, the Dinex team was confident that the search was done thoroughly and properly. “No one understands the PatSnap platform better than the PatSnap team. As we are the industry experts and you [PatSnap] are the tool experts, collaborating to provide the key terms for the assignment, combined with expert usage of the platform, the results were stellar” says Moreno.
Defining Direction
An important matter that Dinex wanted to analyze was where other major players were operating, “We wanted to commission this report at the point in development where we were still early onset – the whole point was to have visibility of the landscape and make decisions on what direction to take” says Andreina.
One of the main ways this outsourced report has helped the Dinex team was by allowing them to see what needed to be restructured, the trends geographically of granted patents, legal statuses, and more. “The report gave a lot of information in a structured, easy to handle and understand format, that I think it saved us months. If I’ve had to come up with all that information on my own, if would have taken me half a year, and I for sure would have missed or overlooked something” added Moreno.
Cross Company Collaboration
The overall procedure was very collaborative, the queries were discussed in detail between the PatSnap and Dinex teams. There were periodic reviews, where the content of the report was discussed ensuring the detail needed and wanted was there. Moreno described the process as “fluid and easy” because she had visibility on what they [the search team] were doing. “Although they [PatSnap] are the professionals in using your software, you may or may not be familiar with the things we are asking you to look for. Getting an understanding on your side of what our business is takes a little bit of effort in the beginning, but it sure saved a whole lot of time in the end.”
When asked, Moreno stated that “Overall the experience working with the Professional Services team has been awesome. I have had many structural calls where they made the tool so easy to use and they took the time to understand exactly what we needed and wanted from the report.”
The Need
- Reliable and fast FTO
- Understanding where the main players are operating
- FTO conducted early enough in the development process to steer the development in the right direction
