Appeal No. 2006-1817 Page 19
Application No. 09/851,514
The appellants argue that Harhen is not directed to marketing promotion
campaigns to customers and thus there is no motivation or suggestion to combine
Harhen with Gerace. (Appellants’ Reply Brief, p. 5.) The appellants further argue
that Harhen does not teach or suggest engines that determine trade-offs or balance
factors in a contradiction of management information. (Appellants’ Reply Brief, p.
5.)
We sustain the examiner’s rejection. We find that Harhen discloses an
efficiency frontier engine that recognizes inconsistencies in business objectives and
determines a trade-off based on a hierarchy. As found by the examiner on pages
29-30 of the Answer, Harhen teaches that a user can create a model of an enterprise
by declaring and instantiating objects and assigning attributes and values to those
objects. The method of Harhen provides for a categorization hierarchy of objects.
(Harhen, col. 4, line 50 – col. 5, line 5.) This hierarchy allows Harhen to determine
trade-offs between the objects when using the business enterprise model to
determine its final hypothesis and projection values for strategic decision making.
(Harhen, col. 6, lines 44-56.)
As such, we hold that a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the
invention, possessed with the understandings and knowledge reflected in the prior
art, and motivated by the general problem facing the inventor, would have been led
to apply the teachings of Harhen to the system and method Gerace in view of
Deaton to make the combination recited in claim 16.
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