Services: Competitive Intelligence

Business Challenge

The CI department of a prominent industrial products distributor, facing increased demands from executive management, needed to swiftly evolve and expand its offer.  It required expert advice on how to segue from a minor corporate player to a key strategic resource.  Specifically, the function needed to incorporate industry-best practices and receive guidance on CI process enhancements, needs definition, and overall program support.

Approach

Outward Insights immediately conducted a thorough intelligence needs analysis, intelligence capabilities diagnostic, and best-practices review of the clients CI program.  We interviewed their executive management team to pinpoint the intelligence necessary to minimize decision risk and evaluated their existing capabilities for intelligence collection and analysis.  The next step was to customize a set of best-practices to develop recommendations for immediate CI system improvements.  Finally we delivered a turn-key intelligence system upgrade plan, complete with process descriptions and templates, staffing recommendations, development opportunities, and production plans.

Results

The industrial products distributor is now routinely providing decision-relevant intelligence to users throughout the company from field sales reps to senior leadership.  The new CI team has re-focused its efforts on providing intelligence that is needs-relevant and directed at supporting executive decisions.  Furthermore, the CI effort is now benefiting from new processes Outward Insights designed and introduced to gather human-source intelligence, conduct strategic analysis, and deliver and communicate intelligence findings more effectively.