Wednesday, December 19, 2007
NewsAlert Exclusive: A Revolutionary Technology … Patent PendingCompany secures patent on instant quoting process after seven years in limboBy David Mantey, Assistant Editor
 The concept of QuickQuote is as simple as going to Amazon.com to get a book at a set price,” says Dr. Ron Hollis, president and CEO of Quickparts. “But custom manufacturing is a little bit harder than buying books so we created algorithms and technology which analyze the parts and CAD geometrics ... |
Quickparts is a business that has been providing custom-designed plastic and metal parts to product development companies since 2000. Many companies, from the multi-billion dollar operations to the two-man design shops, have come to this Atlanta, GA-based company over the years to purchase their low volume custom parts.
“For [Quickparts], low volume can be one part that is going to be used for prototyping up to traditional manufacturing and plastic injection molding ranging from 20,000 to 30,000 parts,” says Dr. Ron Hollis, president and CEO of Quickparts. “Our position is to make it easy to buy low volume custom parts for product development companies.”
After seven years of back-and-forth with The United States Patent and Trademark Office, the company’s position in the market recently became much stronger with U.S. patent #7,305,367 detailing “a system and method for generating instant binding price quotations for custom manufactured parts using the Internet.” That system is QuickQuote.
Make Me A Business Plan
In 1999, Hollis and the current Senior Vice President of Operations Michael Maurice came up with a concept to provide engineers with the opportunity to get an instant quote for a custom part without human intervention.
“The concept of QuickQuote is as simple as going to Amazon.com to get a book at a set price,” says Hollis. “But custom manufacturing is a little bit harder than buying books, so we created algorithms and technology, which analyze the parts and CAD geometrics, and we then created pricing algorithms that will price the product.”
The concept allows an engineer to upload his 3-D CAD data, press a button, and have the program analyze the specifications and generate a product that is presented to the customer on the screen. From that point, if the customer is satisfied, they don’t have to do much more than enter a quantity and push the “buy” button to a make a purchase at the instant binding price.
According to Hollis, the new system virtually eliminates the traditional Request for Quotation (RFQ) process and lowers quote-to-part time.
Less Time; More Money
In the past, an engineer would e-mail or use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to send product specifications to a service provider with a quantity for each item. An ensuing give-and-take between the engineer and the provider would lead to the order being fulfilled. According to Hollis, “The user now has the information he needs in less than five minutes, and is empowered to make changes and order updates.”
As a result of the quick turnaround, Hollis adds “People are buying more parts than they had anticipated because [the customer] is getting the price instantly.
“If the client thought the part was going to cost $1,000 and it instead costs $500, they sometimes by twice as many parts,” Hollis adds. “With a traditional, human interface RFQ process, you don’t have that luxury.”
Seven Years: A War, An Itch And A Patent-Pending Crusade
Securing the patent was “not a trivial exercise” for Hollis and Co., but it came as a reassuring validation as the decade mark peered around the corner.
“[Our] patent isn’t simple, and that certainly didn’t make the process easy,” Hollis notes. “It’s a very complicated system, and the [patent office] examiner struggled to understand the technicality of what we were trying to do. It took many [discussions] to go through and help him understand.”
The Quickparts CEO adds that it was difficult to work with the patent office’s inefficiency, and the back-and-forth dialogue that can cause a patent pursuer to lose track of time.
“There are literally 12- to 18-month gaps between response and rebuttal,” Hollis recalls. “You wake up one day and it’s seven years later.
“This year, we finally got a face-to-face with the examiner in [Washington] D.C,” Hollis says. “You tell the guy what [the product] does, and he says ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ Then you say ‘Yeah, well that’s why I’m applying for a patent.”
As the company continues to grow 30 to 40 percent a year, clones are bound to pop up throughout the industry. “It can be [frustrating], but we’re just flattered by it,” Hollis adds about the ill-advised idea theft.
Hollis expects that now that he has the intellectual property rights, he hopes to legitimize the adoption of the QuickQuote system by more companies and help those customers grow “bigger and better.”
ADVERTISEMENT