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A question of time<\/strong><\/p>\n The pace of innovation is accelerating. Accordingly, applicants to the EPO expect the rapid production of meaningful, reliable search reports for their inventions - and fast enough to make other important business decisions. The EPO is responding to these demands by streamlining its processes, so that the time required for search reports and patent grant decisions is reduced.<\/p>\n The time to deliver searches has already been reduced to six months, and review times should continue to reduce dramatically over the next three years. The challenge for the BI environment is to strictly meet deadlines, provide effective workload management monitoring, and generally keep up with the rapid changes in processes. The landing page framework and its agile BI component were developed using SAS technology. A simple drilldown report that used to take six months to produce is now accessible online within two hours.<\/p>\n \"With SAS, our reporting has become agile, accessible to everyone and strategically underpinned,\" says Yvan de la Fuente, Head of Application Management at the EPO, summarising the benefits of the project. \"Make it simple - that was and is the most important motto for the landing page project. We made complex changes in three months rather than years, and simple reports can now be created in two hours. SAS solutions made this possible.\"<\/p>\n