The OHIM is pleased to publish the result of the first quarter of the Service Charter for 2014. Its performance is presented in an entirely reviewed format integrating the timeline used for other purposes on the website. This change has been introduced to provide a much more visible presentation of the steps showing timeliness and level of quality.
For this purpose, the target needed for 99% of the Community trademarks and Registered Community designs cases treated is displayed and thanks to the new interface, it can be measured if OHIM falls in the “Excellent” objective, “Compliance” level or “Actions needed” level, where the Office needs to take actions to get back on track. We also display the target times in days, weeks or months for each step in order to give an estimation of the time that should be expected for the service. This classification was mentioned last year in our Work Programme, as commitment from the different areas of the office.
This new format is linked to OHIM’s ISO 9001:2008 certification, where one of the requested improvements was to present to the users a more comprehensible approach of the results, in terms of time, quality and accessibility. In addition, for the indicators for which the commitment was not achieved, explanations are provided and the actions taken to correct the deviations are also described.
In terms of results and despite the problems encountered by the website Go Live, the CTM filing numbers are increasing comparing to the previous years. RCD filings were more affected over January, but overall the first period was higher than last year as well.
Correspondently the e-filing rates have all improved, being nowadays at a higher level comparing to the period previous to the new OHIM website, reaching in eoppositions almost 60%, comparing to below 50% at the end of 2013.
Despite these increasing volumes, timeliness results show a high performance and a strong improving trend in most of the “core” activities of the Office. For instance in the case of regular registrations of CTMs, OHIM takes a maximum of 22 weeks and 20 weeks in average. In other words, it takes slightly over 5 months to register a CTM including the 3 months required for the opposition period.
In case of opposition, the admissibility decisions are now given in 24 days, reaching the Compliance level for first time. The final decisions on oppositions are notified in a maximum of 24 weeks and 7 weeks on average: less than two months.
Regarding Appeals decisions (both ex-parte and inter-parte) the trend is clearly improving as well.
Other indicators show that the Excellence level has already been achieved over the first quarter in some areas such as cancellation decisions.
Since the second quarter of 2013, quality checks have been introduced, clearly improving the quality of the cases. In addition the time to reach a decision has also improved decreasing from 39 weeks to 11 weeks over the first quarter of 2014.
The timing for contacting International Registration applicants in case of deficiencies has also improved considerably going from 117 days to 29 and reaching the Excellence level.
The time to notify the RCD invalidity decision has also reached the Excellence level, being notified in 7 weeks over the first quarter.
Source: OHIM
