Solvay is an international chemicals and pharmaceuticals group with headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. It employs about 32,000 people in 50 countries. In 2000 its consolidated sales amounted to EUR 8.9 billion generated by its four activity sectors: chemicals, plastics, processing and pharmaceuticals. Solvay is listed in the Euronext 100 index of top European companies (www.solvay.com).

Philippe Jacques of Solvay's Technical Information Department comments: "In our opinion, the PatentOrder intranet solution is a very efficient and professional way of distributing patent specifications throughout our organization at low cost ..." "in order to speed up the innovation process, it is important for Solvay to have access very rapidly to patent information. Before the installation of PatentOrder, all patent specification orders were addressed to different internal libraries, holding limited internal patent collections. Normally, a requested patent specification was delivered within 2 or 3 days. PatentOrder now allows all Solvay's end-users to have access to the requested documents within a few minutes. PatentOrder also allows for very flexible management of archived documents and an easy electronic distribution of patent documents without having to send large PDF files. Moreover, PatentOrder is remarkably customisable. For example, its integration into an in-house database web interface was realised in a few hours. "Finally, the really excellent support offered by Minesoft has to be pointed out!"