Appeal No. 2004-0588
Application No. 09/387,174
in progress rather than the movement of material. Therefore, we find the examiner’s
inherency argument tenuous at best.
Therefore, we find that the examiner has not established a prima facie case of
obviousness since the examiner has not shown in the statement of the rejection and
arguments that all the claimed elements are taught or fairly suggested by the applied
prior art references.1
Appellants argue that there is no motivation to combine the teachings of Lin and
Burney. (See brief at page 5.) The examiner maintains that both references relate to
balancing work in a manufacturing line (answer at page 9) and because the combination
would increase production yield by minimizing material handling losses (answer at page
7). We disagree with the examiner and agree with appellants that the system of Lin is
directed more to adapting the tools and personnel to optimize the production and
Burney is directed more to adapting the material handling. While the combination of the
two would optimize the overall system, they would be directed to two very different parts
of the overall system. We do not find that the examiner has made a persuasive
showing as to why it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the
1 We do note that the teachings of Burney are more in line with appellants’ claimed invention than
the examiner has applied, but we do not make any findings thereto. For example, we direct the
examiner’s attention to Figures 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, and 15 and column 3, line 54+, column 4, line 57+, column
6, line 4+, column 18, line 45+ (shell game), column 22, line 34+(path arbitration), and column 24, line 63-
column 25, line 18. These portions tend to imply that the carriers may be dynamically redirected. We
leave it to the examiner to fully consider the totality of the teachings of Burney more fully than in the
present rejection.
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