Xerox Corporation Research Articles

George Edward Pake

George Edward Pake, a distinguished condensed matter physicist and past president of the American Physical Society (APS), died on 4 March 2004 in Tucson, Arizona, from multiple system failure. He also was founder of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (now the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC) and of the Institute for Research on Learning, both in Palo Alto, California.George was born on 1 April 1924 in Jeffersonville, Ohio. He received a BS and an MS in physics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945 and his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1948. George was the second thesis student of Edward Purcell. He undertook a study of the proton resonance of water of hydration in a single crystal of gypsum. To his surprise, he found that the absorption line was a doublet rather than the narrow single lines of liquids.It was not long before George showed that the doublet arose because each proton in the water molecule experienced not only the magnetic field of the laboratory magnet, but a magnetic field arising from the other hydrogen atom in the molecule. Because the proton has a spin-1/2, its orientations are quantized into two directions, up or down, in the external laboratory magnetic field. Thus the field of the neighbor either aided or opposed the laboratory field. George further showed that he could use nuclear magnetic resonance to measure the relative positions of the two protons (hence the spatial orientation of the water molecule) and the distance between the protons. That work attracted the interest of Herbert Gutowsky, a chemistry graduate student at Harvard, to learn NMR. The two men collaborated to characterize NMR absorption line shapes of singles, pairs, and triples of protons and to show that, at some temperatures, NMR revealed the presence of molecular rotations in the solid phase. Their research launched Gutowsky’s career in NMR. Between 1948 and 1956, George served in the physics department of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1956, he was lured to Stanford University to replace Nobel laureate Willis Lamb, who had just left for Oxford University. During his time at Washington and Stanford, George wrote several important books, including Notes on the Quantum Theory of Angular Momentum (Stanford U. Press, 1953) with coauthor Eugene Feenberg; Paramagnetic Resonance (W. A. Benjamin, 1962); and, with Thomas Estle, The Physical Principles of Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (W. A. Benjamin, 1973). He began service as executive vice chancellor and provost, and professor of physics at Washington University in 1967. In 1969, the university named him Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of Physics.From 1965 to 1969, George was a member of the US president’s scientific advisory committee under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. He was active on panels of the National Academy of Sciences and NSF. As the chairman of the physics survey committee, which produced the so-called Pake Report, he directed the first of the NAS studies on the status of fields of science. In 1976, George was elected vice president and, in 1977, became president of APS. In 1983, APS established the George E. Pake Prize, an award that recognizes and encourages outstanding work by physicists who have combined accomplishments in original research and leadership in managing research or development in industry.George is perhaps best known for leading PARC from its inception in 1970 until 1978 and for overseeing Xerox corporate research from 1978 to 1986. Under his leadership, PARC gave birth to such innovations as laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, client–server architecture, object-oriented programming, bit-mapped displays, and many other ideas that define modern computing. Under George’s leadership, PARC became a major architect of the information age.After retiring from Xerox in 1986, George founded the Institute for Research on Learning. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Science.George was a great person as well as a great scientist. In the words of one PARC technologist, Gary Stark-weather, “Getting to know George Pake was one of the great experiences of my life…. PARC, as well as I, would not have been successful were it not for George’s capable leadership and guidance. I always admired his friendly and gentlemanly manner and will always remember him fondly.” George will be remembered as much for who he was as for what he did.George Edward PakeBRIAN TRAMONTANAPPT|High resolution© 2004 American Institute of Physics.

Community Knowledge Sharing in Practice: The Eureka Story

An organization’s most valuable knowledge—its essential intellectual capital—is not limited to the information in ofŽcial document repositories and databases, such as scientiŽc formulae, ‘‘hard’’ research data, computer codes, codiŽed procedures, Žnancial Žgures, customer records, and the like. It also includes the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members (see, for example, Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Stewart, 1997; Davenport and Prusak, 1997; Senge et al., 1999). This informal (often tacit) knowledge is deeply rooted in individuals’ experiences and the culture of their work communities. It commonly originates as practical solutions— through everyday inventions and discoveries—to the problems they must solve and thus serves as the critical resource for ordinary work practice (see, especially, Brown and Duguid, 1991, 2000). Much of this knowledge often remains embedded in practice. Small circles of colleagues and work groups commonly share crucial steps in a new practice and fresh solutions to recalcitrant problems through conversations and stories, with members Ž lling in the background and gaps from their own experience. These groups and communities use the local vernacular to express these instructions and stories. Organizations face the challenge of somehow converting this valuable but mainly local knowledge into forms that other members of the organization can understand and, perhaps most important, act on. Here we present a detailed account of one organization’s effort to encourage inventiveness, capture new ideas, and use technology to then share the best of this knowledge beyond a local work group. Our account is based on our experiences during seven years with the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of the Eureka system at Xerox Corporation. Xerox uses Eureka to support the customer service engineers (CSEs) who repair the copiers and printers installed at customer sites. In four iterations, the system went from an experiment that researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) designed to measure the value of codiŽed Želd experience to a system deployed to 20,000 CSEs worldwide. By focusing on communities and how they share knowledge in ordinary practice, we developed a set of questions and a methodology that we hope will enable others to build similar community knowledge-sharing systems. However, deploying any knowledge system involves pushing changes within a corporate culture; understanding the Eureka experience and the problems facing all knowledge systems to be deployed in the real world requires equal focus on these challenges. Our narrative covers the history of this project, carefully detailing the fundamental interrelationships between the social and the technical.We include a framework for building these kinds of community systems (see the sidebar) and our reections on the barriers to organizational change that their proponents confront.

The governance and performance of Xerox’s technology spin-off companies

Companies that conduct internal research cannot fully specify the output from that research in advance. Inevitably, spillovers may result. A company might choose to create a technology spin-off company to realize value from such research spillovers. But how is such a spin-off to be governed? Effective spin-off governance structures in a highly uncertain environment must promote experimentation and adaptation, in order to unlock the latent value in a technology. These can conflict with structures intended to manage coordination with the parent firm’s complementary assets. This paper analyses 35 spin-off organizations that arose from the Xerox Corporation. Xerox’s own initial equity position is negatively correlated with the subsequent performance of its spin-offs, but this is due not to their equity per se, but Xerox’s practices in managing its spin-offs. Spin-offs with a higher percentage of venture capital investors on their Boards were associated with higher financial performance, while spin-offs with a Xerox insider as CEO were associated with lower financial performance. Qualitative interview data suggest that Xerox’s practices caused its spin-offs to search locally near Xerox’s own business, while spin-offs governed by outside investors’ practices searched a broader space for commercializing their technologies.

Integrating knowledge management applications in the enterprise—the Xerox Knowledge Portal project

AbstractIn this paper we describe the design and deployment of an Enterprise Knowledge Portal in the Brazilian subsidiary of the Xerox Corporation. The first unique feature of this project is the use of the Object Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) as a tool to design a portal, which is seen as an instance of a Web‐based Knowledge Management application. The second unique feature is the use of a customized business game devised to trigger changes in corporate culture that lead to the adoption of the portal as a tool to support everyday activities. We describe the technical specification of the portal as a Web application, and discuss the business game and its deployment, reporting on the experience gathered from the whole project. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The role of the business model in capturing value from innovation: evidence from Xerox Corporation's technology spin-off companies

This paper explores the role of the business model in capturing value from early stage technology. A successful business model creates a heuristic logic that connects technical potential with the realization of economic value. The business model unlocks latent value from a technology, but its logic constrains the subsequent search for new, alternative models for other technologies later on—an implicit cognitive dimension overlooked in most discourse on the topic. We explore the intellectual roots of the concept, offer a working definition and show how the Xerox Corporation arose by employing an effective business model to commercialize a technology rejected by other leading companies of the day. We then show the long shadow that this model cast upon Xerox’s later management of selected spin-off companies from Xerox PARC. Xerox evaluated the technical potential of these spin-offs through its own business model, while those spin-offs that became successful did so through evolving business models that came to differ substantially from that of Xerox. The search and learning for an effective business model in failed ventures, by contrast, were quite limited.

The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies

Companies that conduct internal research cannot fully specify the output from that research in advance. Inevitably, spillovers may result. A company might choose to create a technology spin-off company to realize value from such research spillovers. But how is such a spin-off to be governed? Effective spin-off governance structures in a highly uncertain environment must promote experimentation and adaptation, in order to unlock the latent value in a technology. These can conflict with structures intended to manage coordination with the parent firm's complementary assets. This paper analyses 35 spin-off organizations that arose from the Xerox Corporation. Xerox's own initial equity position is negatively correlated with the subsequent performance of its spin-offs, but this is due not to their equity per se, but to Xerox's practices in managing its spin-offs. Spin-offs with a higher percentage of venture capital investors on their Boards were associated with higher financial performance, while spin-offs with a Xerox insider as CEO were associated with lower financial performance. Qualitative interview data suggest that Xerox's practices caused its spin-offs to search locally near Xerox's own business, while spin-offs governed by outside investors' practices searched a broader space for commercializing their technologies.

Graceful Exits and Missed Opportunities: Xerox's Management of its Technology Spin-off Organizations

The Xerox Corporation has devised several strategies for managing the numerous spin-off firms that independently commercialized many of its technologies. From 1979 to 1998, thirty-five technology-based organizations emerged from Xerox's research centers. Contradicting the common perception that Xerox “fumbled the future” by letting its technology walk out the door, in fact the company set in motion a series of deliberate initiatives to manage its spin-off organizations. After initially adopting a laissez-faire approach, the company soon turned to ad hoc methods, which evolved into a formal internal venture capital structure and culminated in a triage process, with the result that only companies perceived by Xerox as fitting into its overall corporate strategy were retained. By using spin-offs to withdraw gracefully from areas it considered to be marginal, Xerox for feited the potential to realize value from their research. Some, but not all, of the spin-offs obtained venture capital financing from outside sources and thus prospered independently. Their success demonstrated the opportunity that Xerox missed in managing its spin-offs.

The Association of Health Risks With Workers??? Compensation Costs

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between health risks and workers' compensation (WC) costs. The 4-year study used Health Risk Appraisal data and focused on 1996-to-1999 WC costs among Xerox Corporation's long-term employees. High WC costs were related to individual health risks, especially Health Age Index (a measure of controllable risks), smoking, poor physical health, physical inactivity, and life dissatisfaction. WC costs increased with increasing health risk status (low-risk to medium-risk to high-risk). Low-risk employees had the lowest costs. In this population, 85% of WC costs could be attributed to excess risks (medium- or high-risk) or non-participation. Among those with claims, a savings of $1238 per person per year was associated with Health Risk Appraisal participation. Addressing WC costs by focusing on employee health status provides an important additional strategy for health promotion programs.

ICCST Retrospective

The ICCST conference series had its origin sometime during 1969 or 1970, in a phone call from Professor Yoshiyuki Okamoto of New York University that I received at my Xerox Corporation laboratory. He had heard that 1 was engaged in editing a book on selenium chemistry[1]. In the course of the discussion, it also became apparent that we had acommon interest in selenium polymers. Okamoto then made the suggestion that we might jointly organize a symposium on the matter. As venue he suggested New York City where he had good contacts at the New York Academy of Sciences. My co-editor Dan Klayman and I had already assembled much of the necessary scientific contacts via the book project. Also, we (actually the publisher, Wiley Interscience) had received a $10,000 grant for the book from the Selenium and Tellurium Development Association (STDA). We again contacted that organization for a grant to defray some expenses. I can't remember details but, in exchange for half a promise of receiving financial consideration, we acquired a third co-chairman in the person of Eugene M. Elkin of Canadian Copper refineries, who would represent the interests of the STDA.

The Social Life of Information (review)

This is essentially a series of pleasantly ruminative essays grouped around the topic of the complex nature of information interchange in corporate life. They are intended as a corrective to a world that the authors imply is too "data driven" (meaning computer data) and that needs to understand better the multi-faceted organizational role played by such forms as paper communications, face-to-face contacts, and informal networking among communities of interest. Co-author John Seely Brown was, until recently, Director of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid is a research specialist in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, also with ties to Xerox PARC. This connection is evident when they remind us of the virtues of paper copy, but there are also some interesting pages of honest criticism of Xerox's policies and operations with regard to its internal information use.

Why an Original can be Better than a Copy: Intellectual Property, the Antitrust Refusal to Deal, and ISO Antitrust Litigation

In re Independent Service Organization Antitrust Litigation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the Xerox corporation's refusal to sell or license its patented parts, copyrighted manuals, and patented and copyrighted software to independent service organizations did not violate the antitrust laws. Plaintiffs have filed a writ of certiorari based on the claim that the Federal Circuit's holding is in direct conflict with the Ninth Circuit's antitrust holdings in Image Technical Services v. Kodak. this paper, we argue that this conflict is largely illusory. The decision in the Xerox case is exactly the result contemplated when the Federal Circuit was created - the recognition and uniform treatment of the patent holder's rights under the statutory patent grant. The Xerox decision does not go beyond this, and a comparison of these two decisions does not present a compelling case for the Court to unify their outcomes by reversing Xerox.

Why an Original Can Be Better Than a Copy: Intellectual Property, the Antitrust Refusal to Deal, and ISO Antitrust Litigation

In In re Independent Service Organization Antitrust Litigation ("Xerox"), the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the Xerox corporation's refusal to sell or license its patented parts, copyrighted manuals, and patented and copyrighted software to independent service organizations did not violate the antitrust laws. Plaintiffs have filed a writ of certiorari based on the claim that the Federal Circuit's holding is in direct conflict with the Ninth Circuit's antitrust holdings in Image Technical Services v. Kodak ("Kodak"). This paper argues that the purported conflict is largely illusory. The decision in Xerox is exactly the result contemplated when the Federal Circuit was created-the recognition and uniform treatment of the patent holder's rights under the statutory patent grant. Xerox does not go beyond this, and a comparison of these two decisions does not present a compelling case for the Court to unify their outcomes by reversing Xerox.

Recollections on the founding of Spectra Diode Labs, Inc. (SDL, Inc.)

Spectra Diode Labs, Inc. (now named SDL, Inc.) was officially established on April 1, 1983, as a joint venture by Spectra-Physics, Inc., and Xerox Corporation. It was the first significant commercial supplier of quality high-power semiconductor diode lasers for governmental and commercial applications. Accordingly, it helped pave the way for the revolution that has taken place in the laser industry in the use of high-power semiconductor diode lasers and the attendant derivative systems, diode-pumped solid-state lasers that are rapidly replacing traditional gas and flashlamp-pumped solid-state lasers for many applications. Additionally the company has helped lead the burgeoning telecommunications market with, among other offerings, diode lasers that pump erbium-doped fiber amplifiers that form the heart of the WDM telecom systems. As one measure of its success an offer was made on July 10, 2000, to acquire SDL, Inc., for $41 B which represents the largest high-technology takeover ever. Briefly reviewed here is the early history of SDL, Inc.

The need for speed in new millennium leadership styles

Employment Relations TodayVolume 27, Issue 1 p. 61-71 Feature The need for speed in new millennium leadership styles David Cottrell, David Cottrell David Cottrell: , president and CEO of CornerStone Leadership Institute, Dallas, Texas, is an internationally known leadership consultant, seminar leader, and speaker. His business experience includes senior management positions with Xerox Corporation and FedEx. Cottrell is the author of Birdies, Pars, & Bogies: Leadership Lessons from the Links (1997), Leadersship… Biblically Speaking: The Power of Principle-based Leadership (1998), and Listen Up Leader! Pay Attention, Improve and Guide (1999). (All were published by Corner Stone Leadership Institute.) The Cornerstone Leadership lnstitute Web site is www.comerstoneleadership.com. He may be reached via E-mail at: d1cottrell@aol.com.Search for more papers by this author David Cottrell, David Cottrell David Cottrell: , president and CEO of CornerStone Leadership Institute, Dallas, Texas, is an internationally known leadership consultant, seminar leader, and speaker. His business experience includes senior management positions with Xerox Corporation and FedEx. Cottrell is the author of Birdies, Pars, & Bogies: Leadership Lessons from the Links (1997), Leadersship… Biblically Speaking: The Power of Principle-based Leadership (1998), and Listen Up Leader! Pay Attention, Improve and Guide (1999). (All were published by Corner Stone Leadership Institute.) The Cornerstone Leadership lnstitute Web site is www.comerstoneleadership.com. He may be reached via E-mail at: d1cottrell@aol.com.Search for more papers by this author First published: 08 February 2007 https://doi.org/10.1002/ert.3910270106Citations: 2 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume27, Issue1Spring 2000Pages 61-71 RelatedInformation

Quality Cost Management at Xerox Corporation

Quality Cost Management at Xerox Corporation

Ten knowledge domains: model of a knowledge-driven company?

Knowledge and Process ManagementVolume 6, Issue 1 p. 3-8 Case Study Ten knowledge domains: model of a knowledge-driven company? Dan Holtshouse, Corresponding Author Dan Holtshouse Director, Xerox Knowledge Initiative, Corporate Business Strategy, USAXerox Knowledge Initiative, Xerox Corporation, 800 Long Ridge Road, Stamford, CT 06904, USA.Search for more papers by this author Dan Holtshouse, Corresponding Author Dan Holtshouse Director, Xerox Knowledge Initiative, Corporate Business Strategy, USAXerox Knowledge Initiative, Xerox Corporation, 800 Long Ridge Road, Stamford, CT 06904, USA.Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 March 1999 https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1441(199903)6:1<3::AID-KPM45>3.0.CO;2-NCitations: 7AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume6, Issue1March 1999Pages 3-8 RelatedInformation

A Proper Mentality for Benchmarking

The public sector has come a long way in measuring performance and managing for results, but there is much still to do. Delving even modestly into the history of public management yields the discovery that performance measurement and related management initiatives have been encouraged for many years. In that respect, it has been a long haul. The seemingly slow pace, however, should not blind us to the progress that has been made. Consider changes that have occurred over the last 25 years in attitudes toward government performance or even the possibility of creditable performance by the public sector. In the 1970s a lot of people considered government productivity to be an oxymoron, about as illogical as word pairs like alone together, peace offensive, or fresh prunes. Some wisecracking pundits even likened government productivity to the Loch Ness monster. There were occasional sightings reported, they said, but nothing confirmed. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was difficult to generate much interest in performance of two or more government units. We are unique! government officials said of their organization and its environment. Our conditions are different; our service demands are different (usually meaning greater than the demands faced by any of our counterparts); comparison would be meaningless. As great as resistance was to intergovernmental performance comparison, there was even less interest in trying to adapt private sector practices. Impractical! proponents of adaptation were told. Naive! they were called. Notable Progress As the century draws to a close, optimism is evident among recent converts to the measure-monitor-and-improve school of public service as well as among veterans of that movement. More than 700 people from all levels of government gathered in Austin, Texas, in 1998 for the third in a series of conferences dedicated to celebrating the successes of results-oriented management in the public sector, even as they challenged each other to more. The Loch Ness comparisons have faded. The sightings of government productivity are more frequent--and they are confirmed. Government agencies have established performance standards, many of which are directed toward meeting the expectations of service recipients, and service has improved in documentable ways. Governments themselves are more receptive to performance comparisons, if they are done Reasons for this newfound receptivity are not certain, but two explanations are plausible. One possibility is that government officials eventually resigned themselves to the inevitability of cross-unit comparisons. News reporters love per capita expenditure comparisons--crude as such comparisons are and devoid as they are of any sensitivity to differences among governments in the scope or quality of services, much less any differences in cost-accounting systems. If comparisons are inevitable, some government officials may have said, let's see if we can them properly. By declaring their intention to do them properly, these officials announce their resolve to report differences in the quality of service among governments and rectify accounting disparities in calculating unit costs of service delivery. A second possibility is that government officials had their eyes opened by the corporate experience in benchmarking. Among the pioneers in the benchmarking movement were Motorola, IBM, ATT but none of these pioneers enjoys a more prominent role in that history than does the Xerox Corporation. In perhaps the most repeated story in benchmarking lore, Xerox confronted its own unsatisfactory performance in product warehousing and distribution. It did so not by employing the then-conventional methods of process revision or redesign, but instead by identifying the organization it considered to be the very at warehousing and distribution, in hopes that best practices could be adapted from the exemplar's model. …

Toxicological Studies of a Representative Xerox Reprographic Toner

Typical Xerox reprographic toners consist of a thermoplastic polymer as the major component, a colorant (carbon black or color pigment), and low quantities of additives such as charge control and/or lubricating agents. Another type of Xerox toner contains iron oxides and a polymer as the major components. Among all toners marketed by Xerox Corporation, the original 1075 toner (being discontinued and reformulated) was a major safety concern, because it contained approximately 2% cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) as a charge control agent. CPC by itself is very toxic and causes severe irritation to the eye and skin. Although CPC has been used in very low concentrations in consumer products such as mouthwash, it was unknown whether a 50-fold dilution of CPC in the toner formulation would represent any safety issue. Therefore, a series of toxicological testing on the original 1075 toner was conducted. The test results indicate that the original Xerox 1075 toner was practically nontoxic following acute oral, dermal, and inhalation exposures; nonirritating to the eye; nonir-ritating/nonsensitizing to the skin; nonmutagenic in a battery of short-term assays (Ames Salmnonella/microsome assay, mouse lym-phoma assay, in vitro sister chromatid exchange assay in Chinese hamster ovarian cells, and in vitro BALB/3T3 cell transformation assay); and nonteratogenic in rats when inhaling the toner dust up to 1.2 g/m3. In addition, no mutagenic responses were observed from testing the urine or feces (by Ames test) and bone marrow (by examining micronucleus formation) of rats exposed to the toner dust at 1.3 g/m3 at the end of a subchronic inhalation study. Because all Xerox toners are alike, the toxicology of the original Xerox 1075 toner was considered a “worst-case” situation, relative to health and safety. However, it did not appear to represent any health and safety issue. The results of this study, together with the fact that no evidence of carcinogenicity was found in the Xerox chronic inhalation study on toner, indicate that Xerox toners are not safety hazards, with respect to the end points indicated in this report.

Internet technology in support of the concept of “communities-of-practice”: the case of Xerox

Work practices usually differ fundamentally from the way that organizations describe their operations in manuals, training programs, etc. This paper focuses on the way that certain work practices are supported at Xerox, and the conclusions of this effort are related to complementary investigations on learning and innovation. Here we propose that the combination of work, learning and innovation should be reconsidered within the framework of informal “communities-of-practice.” Information Technology tends to be used in order to reinforce the old work and study paradigms. This paper suggests a different use of IT, a use especially well suited to intra- and internets, with the aim of supporting informal structures rather than formal procedures. The case of Xerox Corporation is used as an example.

Thinking Beyond Design Specifications: A March Towards Excellence in Customer Satisfaction

Modi Xerox, a member of the Rank Xerox group of companies (UK) and a leading copier manufacturer in the country, was faced with a chronic field failure problem of blurred patterns in one of their popular copier models. A field failure always leads to customer dissatisfaction. Customers expect a 100% fault-free reproduction from a copier machine on a continuous basis. Poor copy quality is always a source of irritation to customers. Customers feel dissatisfied when they observe a blurred pattern (skips) which cannot be read. The company observed this problem of blurred patterns at a rate of from one to 12 per 100 copies in their Model (X). Symptoms of this problem were first observed in August 1987. Thereafter, several efforts of a trial and error nature were made for resolving this problem, but none of them gave any satisfactory solution. Webster, part of the Xerox corporation, also confirmed the existence of the problem and that no solution was known worldwide. Thinking beyond the specification gave a solution to the problem. The new design has yielded a saving of 11.4 million rupees (US$380K) by reducing number of breakdown calls and in-house trouble shooting costs. Excellence in customer satisfaction was accomplished.