Appeal No. 2006-1918
Application No. 10/279,529
to determine the arrangement of goods on the gondola. However, appellant argues that
Tenma does not teach or suggest using forecasted sales information to arrange the goods
on the gondolas. Further, appellant argues that Usrey does not teach or suggest
processing the received electronic item information and the electronic shelf information
to produce forecasted sales information as claimed in the invention. On page 9 of the
brief, appellant argues that the examiner’s interpretation of the claims as only requiring
producing and displaying one of either the predicted sales information or the predicted
supply information is improper.
The examiner’s response to appellant’s arguments is on pages 12 through 14 of
the answer and the examiner’s rejection is on pages 3 through 7 of the answer. On pages
3 and 4 of the answer, the examiner finds that Tenma teaches a method for assisting and
displaying the arrangement of items on a gondola, which makes use of item assortment
information and shelf management information. On pages 4 and 5 of the answer the
examiner finds that Usrey teaches a method for optimizing the profitability of the product
assortment with the limited shelf space wherein the method displays predicted financial
information relating to the assortment of selected products.
We concur with these findings of the examiner. However the examiner also finds
that it would have been obvious to modify Tenma to include projected financial
information. While we concur with the examiner’s findings that one skilled in the art
would be motivated to combine Tenma’s teaching of a method of determining how to
arrange products on a shelf with Usrey’s system for the selection of products to sell, we
do not concur that the combination teaches projected financial information, as recited in
the claims.
Claim 1 recites “processing the received electronic item assortment information
and electronic shelf management information to produce one of forecasted sales
information and forecasted supply information for the retail products.” Thus, the scope
of the claim recites that both the electronic item assortment information and the
electronic
4
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007