Summary
At SCIP IntelliCon in 2023, GE Gas Power held a fireside chat on how they have built a world-class competitive intelligence program, created in collaboration with Evalueserve.
General Electric Gas Power (GE) was conducting competitive intelligence (CI) within its various lines of business. However, the company needed a centralized platform for employees to easily access information to fuel their decision-making. CI practitioners within the organization were overloaded with requests, many of which were repetitive and created unnecessary work.
Evalueserve’s Insightsfirst platform provides detailed competitor profiles and daily newsletters and streamlines the CI process. Our experts help complete ad-hoc CI projects as needed and enable GE to conduct CI in languages they would otherwise be unable to.
The Challenge
GE’s CI efforts were scattered, with different business lines having go-to CI experts. While there was a CI program, it was reacting to incoming requests rather than proactively gathering information. Because there was no centralized CI platform or repository and no way for GE employees to see if they were creating duplicate work, a lot of repetitive work was being done.
GE wanted to take its CI program from a tactical level to a more strategic one. The company also hoped to anticipate more of their CI workload and have answers readily available as often as possible rather than scrambling to find them. Lastly, they wanted to centralize their CI information to remove knowledge silos and eliminate duplicate work.
Our Solution
Evalueserve implemented a custom version of Insightsfirst, our AI-powered CI platform, for GE.
Insightsfirst provides in-depth profiles of GE’s primary competitors. The profiles include a business overview and detail the company’s capabilities, recent trends, and key strategic objectives.
Employees using the SaaS platform can set up news alerts in areas they’re particularly interested in and create custom views to highlight the most relevant information. Users can subscribe to newsletters as well. Insightsfirst pushes out daily newsletters with important CI from the last 24 hours. The daily cadence of these newsletters keeps Insightsfirst users up-to-date on the latest in the market.
In addition to implementing Insightsfirst, Evalueserve’s experts provide ad-hoc support as needed, which has proven a valuable resource, especially when GE’s internal CI practitioners do not have the capacity to take on urgent projects.
As a global company, Evalueserve has CI practitioners all around the globe and, as such, has been able to provide CI support in some languages, such as Korean and Chinese dialects. These are languages that GE cannot easily analyze internally, making this a strong component of Evalueserve’s value-add.
Evalueserve’s experts also help collect webinar intelligence, which has been another advantage of having a global presence, as there’s always an analyst available in the time zone to tune in.
Business Impact
Thanks largely to the strength of our Insightsfirst solution, GE’s competitive intelligence team has become a critical part of decision-making in the organization, even at the executive level. Their recommendations and input are trusted and valued.
Insightsfirst has played a significant role in moving GE’s CI program from being reactive to being proactive and continual. Many GE employees from a number of teams, including senior leadership, engineering, and marketing, have adopted Insightsfirst, using it to learn about developments in CI and customer intelligence. With the daily newsletters, users are kept continually informed.
Insightsfirst has enabled GE’s internal team to think strategically about their CI program, next steps, and recommendations based on the data because the platform automated a lot of the data collection they would have otherwise done ad-hoc and in-house. As a result, the internal team is now free to achieve better outcomes.
