The problem
Where the time was going
An aerospace and rocket-motor company depends on patents to protect its products and income, and patent rights are fragile. In the United States, failing to file within a year of certain disclosures forfeits the rights entirely, and many other countries allow no grace period at all. This statutory bar can cost millions in lost revenue from a single missed patent.
The company's intellectual property law department faced exactly that exposure. Obtaining a patent crossed so many departments, from research to legal to marketing, each with its own priorities and timelines, that unusual cases could quietly set off a chain of events long enough to exceed the one-year limit. With no view of the whole process at once, those risks were hard to spot.
What we modeled
Mapping the process, then testing the fix
A member of the department who had modeled processes before built a working model of the patent flow. It captured the real path of an invention, from a researcher's disclosure, through management and the patent board, to the patentability search and the outside attorney who files the application, including the rebuttal loop when the board first rejects an invention.
Running the model in compressed time, with live animation standing in for disclosures, applications, attorneys, paralegals, and the patent board, let the department and management see the whole process interact. Bottlenecks and staffing pinch points that caused delays became visible, and proposed changes could be tested against the goal of minimizing statutory-bar risk before anything changed in practice.
The result
The proof, and the payoff
The animation was the model's real strength: it made both the problems and the fixes easy to see. The team increased the frequency of patent-board meetings and moved patent searches and other time-consuming legal work to outside help, easing the load on in-house attorneys and paralegals and shortening the time to process each disclosure and application.
Most important, the unusual process flows that could have cost the company a patent were identified and corrected, protecting intellectual property whose value runs into the millions. The department kept the model to keep testing future changes before adopting them.
Part of our work in services.