Competitive Intelligence: Your Window into the Marketplace
You might think that the term competitive intelligence is only applied in industry to describe the practice of defining, gathering, analyzing and distributing little known information about your competitors business to give you an edge in your marketplace.
If that’s your take on this universal best practice, then you would be greatly mistaken. Competitive intelligence is actually your window onto the marketplace that can open up your eyes to new savings and quality improvement opportunities that have passed you by over the years.
For instance, did you know that the best contract pricing we have seen is attributed to local, not regional or national contracts? That hospitals with the lowest supply chain cost buy more generic products, than brand name products? Or, that value analysis teams that employ the “functional approach” save 7x more than their peers.
These are just three examples of how having a window onto the marketplace can give you the competitive intelligence that is necessary to steer your supply chain ship in the right direction vs. guessing what direction you should be going. It will save you a lot of lost time and wasted effort by doing so!
This competitive intelligence won’t come to you out of the blue, you will need to search it out through surveys, benchmarking and good old snooping around. When I was a material manager and now as a consultant, I never miss the opportunity to visit a hospital and then get a tour of the entire facility while asking dozens of questions along the way. I would pick up so much competitive intelligence on these tours that it would take almost a whole notebook to document what I had discovered.
As my company’s Chief Value Strategist I avidly collect, analyze and then disseminate competitive intelligence to our clients every day, since it’s the lifeblood of our software, training and advisory practice.
This should be your goal too, if you want to keep ahead of your competition or at least stay in step or you could risk falling years behind the intelligence/information curve at your peril!
Filed Under: Best Practices • savingsblog
