DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This application is a 371 of PCT/IB2022/061093 11/17/2022
This application has PRO 63/381,214 10/27/2022
This application has PRO 63/264,299 11/19/2021
Status of Claims
Claims 1-7, 11-13, and 15 are currently pending and rejected.
Claims 8-10, 14 are canceled.
Claim Interpretation
Although the present claims appear to recite analyzing investment in stock portfolio, but the examples in the specification and FIG. 4 and FIG. 5 suggest the term “portfolio” actually means inventory and “portfolio components” corresponds to items in inventory.
Claim Rejection – 35 U.S.C. 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-7, 11-13, and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The rationale for this finding is explained below. In the instant case, the claims are directed towards generating pricing information in the form purchase price index using company internal spend data, company proprietary price index, and public available price index. The concept is clearly related to generating company transaction data to manage company transaction activities, thus the present claims fall within the Certain Method of Organizing Human Activity grouping. The claims do not include limitations that are “significantly more” than the abstract idea because the claims do not include an improvement to another technology or technical field, an improvement to the functioning of the computer itself, or meaningful limitations beyond generally linking the use of an abstract idea to a particular technological environment. Note that the limitations, in the instant claims, are done by the generically recited computer device. The limitations are merely instructions to implement the abstract idea on a computer and require no more than a generic computer to perform generic computer functions that are well-understood, routine and conventional activities previously known to the industry. Therefore, claims 1-7, 11-13, and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 as being directed to non-statutory subject matter.
Step 1: The claims 1-7, 11-13, and 15 are directed to a process, machine, manufacture, or composition matter.
In Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Intern., 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), the Supreme Court applied a two-step test for determining whether a claim recites patentable subject matter. First, we determine whether the claims at issue are directed to one or more patent-ineligible concepts, i.e., laws of nature, natural phenomenon, and abstract ideas. Id. at 2355 (citing Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289, 1296–96 (2012)). If so, we then consider whether the elements of each claim, both individually and as an ordered combination, transform the nature of the claim into a patent-eligible application to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the ineligible concept itself.
Claims 1-7 and 11-12 are directed to a machine (i.e., device/system claims).
Claims 13 is directed to a process (i.e., method claims).
Claims 15 is directed to a manufacture (i.e., machine-readable medium claims).
Step 2A: The claims are directed to an abstract idea.
Prong One
The present claims are directed towards generating pricing information in the form purchase price index using company internal spend data, company proprietary price index, and public available price index. The concept comprises storing purchasing transaction data for an organization, one or more portfolio components associated with the purchasing transaction data, and one or more external indices, selecting one or more of the portfolio components for form a candidate portfolio, performing anomaly detection and cleaning on purchasing transactions associated with the candidate portfolio, determining a reference quantity and a reference spend associated with the candidate portfolio, generating a monthly adjusted portfolio spend, normalizing the monthly adjusted portfolio spend to form an internal index, storing the internal index, and outputting comparative data between the internal index and a corresponding external index. The concept is clearly related to generating company transaction data to manage company purchase activities, thus the present claims fall within the Certain Method of Organizing Human Activity grouping. The performance of the claim limitations using generic computer components (i.e., a processing circuitry and a memory and an interface) does not preclude the claim limitation from being in the certain methods of organizing human activity grouping. Accordingly, the present claims recite an abstract idea.
Prong Two
Independent claims 1, 13, and 15 recite a processing circuitry and a memory and an interface as additional elements. Applicant’s specification states that the claimed invention can be implemented “in hardware, software, firmware or any combination thereof” (see paragraph 0076). The claimed invention clearly does not require any particular hardware or any hardware at all. Therefore, the additional elements are considered generic computer components. The additional elements are claimed to perform basic computer functions, such as storing data, selecting portfolio components, determining a reference quantity and a reference spend, generating a monthly adjusted portfolio spend (i.e., processing data and performing calculations), normalizing adjusted portfolio spend (i.e., processing data and performing calculations), storing data, and outputting data. The recitation of the computer elements amounts to mere instruction to implement an abstract concept on computers. The present claims do not solve a problem specifically arising in the realm of computer networks. The present claims do not recite limitation that improve the functioning of computer, effect a physical transformation, or apply the abstract concept in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the abstract concept to a particular technological environment. As such, the present claims fail to integrate into a practical application.
Step 2B: The claims do not recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the abstract idea.
As discussed earlier, Independent claims 1, 13, and 15 recite a processing circuitry and a memory and an interface as additional elements. Applicant’s specification states that the claimed invention can be implemented “in hardware, software, firmware or any combination thereof” (see paragraph 0076). The claimed invention clearly does not require any particular hardware or any hardware at all. Therefore, the additional elements are considered generic computer components. The additional elements are claimed to perform basic computer functions, such as storing data, selecting portfolio components, determining a reference quantity and a reference spend, generating a monthly adjusted portfolio spend (i.e., processing data and performing calculations), normalizing adjusted portfolio spend (i.e., processing data and performing calculations), storing data, and outputting data. According to MPEP 2106.05(d), “performing repetitive calculations”, “receiving, processing, and storing data”, “electronically scanning or extracting data from a physical document”, “electronic recordkeeping”, “storing and retrieving information in memory”, and “receiving or transmitting data over a network, e.g., using the Internet to gather data” are considered well-understood, routine, and conventional functions of computer. The present claims do not improve the functioning of computer. Simply implementing the abstract idea on a generic computer or using a computer as a tool to perform an abstract idea cannot integrate a judicial exception into a practical application at Step 2A or provide an inventive concept in Step 2B. Therefore, the present claims are ineligible for patent.
Response to Remarks
In the response filed on 04/28/2026, Applicant amended independent claim 1 by adding the following limitations – “setting a lookback window to an initial value;
identifying material identifiers from the purchasing transaction data that have
associated spend in each year within the lookback window; for each iteration, determining whether the identified material identifiers collectively satisfy (i) a threshold percentage of a trailing twelve-month spend for a segment of the organization and (ii) a minimum count of material identifiers; responsive to the identified material identifiers satisfying both conditions (i) and (ii), returning the identified material identifiers as the candidate portfolio; responsive to the identified material identifiers failing to satisfy at least one of conditions (i) and (ii), decrementing the lookback window by one year and repeating the identifying and determining; perform anomaly detection and cleansing on purchasing transactions associated with the candidate portfolio, the anomaly detection and cleansing comprising: for each material identifier in the candidate portfolio, computing a log-quantity-distance metric as an absolute value of a difference between a log-transformed transaction quantity and a log-transformed median quantity, and computing a log-price-distance metric as an absolute value of a difference between a log-transformed unit price and a log-transformed median unit price; applying two-cluster K-means clustering to the purchasing transactions for each material identifier in a two-dimensional plane defined by the log-quantity-distance metric and the log-price-distance metric to identify a standard transaction cluster having a centroid nearer to a zero point on the two-dimensional plane and a nonstandard transaction cluster having a centroid
farther from the zero point; and excluding transactions assigned to the nonstandard transaction cluster from further index calculations responsive to a separation between centroids of the standard transaction cluster and the nonstandard transaction cluster exceeding a threshold” and “generate a monthly adjusted portfolio spend for the candidate portfolio based on the reference quantity and quantity-weighted average unit prices computed on a per-month basis for each material identifier in the candidate portfolio”. Independent claim 13 and 15 are amended with similar limitations.
Rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101
Applicant's arguments filed on 04/28/2026 with regards to rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Examiner points out that the amended limitations describe a series of data processing and calculations for forming a candidate portfolio, performing anomaly detection and cleansing on purchasing transaction associated with the candidate portfolio. These limitations are mathematical data processing and can be performed by off-the-shelf computers. These limitations do not improve computer function or render the claims less abstract. Even with the added limitations, claim 1 as a whole is still directed to a process of obtaining transaction data, analyzing data, and providing result of the analysis (i.e., generating a monthly adjusted portfolio spend, normalizing the monthly adjusted portfolio spend to form an internal index, and outputting comparative data between the internal index and a corresponding external index). The recitation of the computer elements amounts to mere instruction to implement an abstract concept on computers. The present claims do not solve a problem specifically arising in the realm of computer networks. The present claims do not recite limitation that improve the functioning of computer, effect a physical transformation, or apply the abstract concept in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the abstract concept to a particular technological environment.
Applicant argued that the amended claims recite a multi-stage computational pipeline that improves the underly data processing in three ways – 1) an iterative lookback window algorithm with dual-condition threshold testing and conditional decrementing that reduces unnecessary computation. Examiner points out that this process merely filters out transaction data which do not satisfy predefined conditions. It is not a novel idea and it is not directed to solve a problem rooted in computer technology.
2) anomaly detection and cleansing mechanism that computes log-quantity-distance and log-price-distance metrics through log transformation, median deviation, and absolute value conversion, applies constrained two-cluster K-means clustering to identify and remove anomalous transactions. Examiner points out that these techniques are well-known statistic techniques or machine learning algorithms. Implementing these techniques in data processing does not improve computer function.
3) a pipeline architecture with defined inter-stage data dependencies in which each successive stage operates on a progressively refined and reduced dataset. The amended claims do not recite any particular data architecture. The claim only recites a series of data processing/calculation steps. Performing repetitive calculation is a basic computer function according MPEP 2106.05(d). As such, the recitation of calculation pipeline does not improve computer function.
Simply implementing the abstract idea on a generic computer or using a computer as a tool to perform an abstract idea cannot integrate a judicial exception into a practical application at Step 2A or provide an inventive concept in Step 2B. Therefore, the present claims are ineligible for patent. Examiner maintains the ground of rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101.
Rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103
Applicant’s arguments with respect to rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been fully considered and are persuasive. Examiner agrees that the cited prior arts, Blank et al. (Patent No.: US 8,666,847) and LIFOPro, do not teach the amended limitations. Examiner has conducted an updated prior art, but cannot find prior art to address every amended limitation. Therefore, the claim rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103 has been withdrawn.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
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/HAO FU/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3695
MAY-2026
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