Patent May Lead to 60 Percent Savings for Businesses

April 22, 1998
Contact: Andrew Careaga; 573-341-4328; [email protected]

PROFESSOR'S PATENT MAY LEAD TO 60 PERCENT SAVINGS FOR BUSINESSES

ROLLA, Mo. -- A University of Missouri-Rolla professor's recently patented process for evaluating every phase of a product's development -- from conception to marketing -- should mean big savings to AT&T, Paradyne and other companies.

The process, invented by Dr. Bahador Ghahramani, a UMR associate professor of engineering management, incorporates some 40 complex formulas to assess the system for developing a product or service. It is, Ghahramani says, the first "objective and quantifiable way of measuring quality" at every stage of product and service development. The process also could cut the cost of getting a product or service to market by as much as 60 percent, he adds.

Ghahramani developed the process while a distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories. A patent for the process, titled "A Method for Measuring Usability of a System and for Task Analysis and Re-engineering," was awarded on March 3 to Paradyne Corp., a Bell Laboratories spin-off company. Ghahramani is listed on the patent as the inventor.

Although the method relates primarily to engineering, ergonomics, reliability and information systems, practically any business or organization can use it to determine the feasibility of a product or service, Ghahramani says. AT&T, Paradyne and two other AT&T spin-offs -- Lucent Technologies and NCR -- have incorporated the process into a software program and are using it in their engineering processes.

"The system measures the usability, productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of a system from the concept phase to the final phase of a product or service," Ghahramani says.

According to Dr. David V. Rossi, the patent attorney for Morgan & Finnegan Attorneys at Law of New York, which handled the patent application for Bell Laboratories, "This state-of-the-art 'top down' quantitative methodology should result in many immediate benefits, including reduced costs, increased efficiency, increased quality and increased user satisfaction."

Dale E. Stone, the chief information officer and chief technical officer for architecture for AT&T's CCS business unit, notes that Ghahramani's method was one of the top inventions within CCS and Bell Laboratories.

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