Getting Your Intellectual Property Quickly

The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) was a winner at the 5th Intelligent Enterprise Asia Awards 2004. Its Trade Mark System (TMS) project which aims to completely overhaul the traditional paper-based workflow processes into an integrated and fully automated system has made IPOS one of 15 winners from a field of 47 entrants from across Asia.

Under the traditional paper-based system, the act of filing a single trade mark application would require an IPOS staff to go through a tedious process of accepting the application in hardcopy, filing the application form and correspondences into the physical file, indexing the marks manually using index cards before searching for similar marks manually. When the application is approved, the registration certificate and other documents for updating are typed manually.

Besides being time-consuming, the whole process was not making cost-effective use of the office space. Storing paper files took up valuable office space and creating files and filing correspondences were also becoming inefficient.

With these constraints in mind, IPOS developed TMS, an imaging and workflow system which extends to all aspects of processing a trade mark registrations to address all the above-mentioned issues. A key feature of TMS is the tight integration with a document imaging system that enables IPOS to electronically process trade mark applications more efficiently.

The system can also search conflicting/similar trade marks from IPOS' huge database of trade marks. This feature has made trade mark filing easier. Mr David Lam, IT consultant from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) managing the TMS project says, "A manual search for conflicting trade marks used to require days but now it takes mere seconds."

Implementation was also not easy. Mr Lam says, "Developing the TMS has its difficulties. For example, during the course of the eTrademarks eFiling project, another major TMS project was undergoing at the same time. Managing resources such as users and vendors was a challenge. Thankfully, all our stakeholders showed a great commitment to the projects and both were finished on time."