Intelligence operations in international companies across industries and size classes have developed into dynamic business support functions that integrate increasingly well with business processes. This was the key message in three different case presentations at Novintel’s breakfast seminar, held in Helsinki on November 17, 2005. Fortum Service, VTI Technologies, and Ciba Specialty Chemicals each have their specific focus areas in their intelligence activities, such as sales, R&D, scenario work, marketing, and strategic planning.
(PRWEB) December 6, 2005 -- Intelligence operations in international companies across industries and size classes have developed into dynamic business support functions that integrate increasingly well with business processes. This was the key message in three different case presentations at Novintel’s breakfast seminar, held in Helsinki on November 17, 2005. Fortum Service, VTI Technologies, and Ciba Specialty Chemicals each have their specific focus areas in their intelligence activities, such as sales, R&D, scenario work, marketing, and strategic planning. The target-oriented approach in their intelligence operations has resulted in these companies now concentrating on identifying and processing concrete sales leads, detecting highly influential trends from the development of sophisticated technologies, regularly building scenarios based on weak business signals, and constructing strategic plans on systematically collected and processed information.
Intelligence operations support direct sales
Says Anne Muilu, Business Intelligence Manager at Fortum Service: ”We are constantly on the lookout for new sales leads from the market environment, and we typically take them through a phased process, where some get to the actual screening phase. Obviously, only a proportion of the initial leads eventually become sales cases, so we will have to have a wide array of subject areas under our radar screen. Novintel is helping us with collecting the signals into the initial phase, and they have also been a good partner for us in challenging our approaches and bringing up useful ideas for identifying weak signals and emerging issues.”
Screened business information serves as the basis for strategic scenario work
Ulf Meriheinä, Business Development Director at VTI Technologies continues: ”To put it simply, we are lazy when it comes to systematically and continuously collecting market information that truly is relevant to our organization, so we wanted to outsource that part of the process. At the same time, making conclusions based on the collected information has been time-consuming: Our analytical brainstorming and scenario exercises constantly require a lot of effort in-house, and for the exact reason it is essential that we have a partner that can help us with the initial screening phase. So it is important for us that, for a competitive price, we don’t need to spend any significant amount of time on either managing the partnership or on worrying about whether we get all the information that is relevant from our perspective. We can concentrate on further developing our growing business.”
A centralized intelligence operation helps control information costs
Jaakko Paatero, Head of Intellectual Property Finland at Ciba Specialty Chemicals in his turn throws in the cost optimization point of view: ”At Ciba, we are looking to remove duplications and redundancies in the business information process. In a truly global organization, such challenges tend to exist, i.e. the same information may be purchased several times by different people in different divisions, without these people knowing about each others’ purchases. Through Novintel’s service, we are striving to optimize both the costs and the service level by bringing all relevant business information into one system that can serve each individual user based on their individual needs.”
For additional information, please contact:
Markko Vaarnas, Chief Executive Officer
tel. +358 (0)424 956 200
Please also visit our website at www.novintel.com.
About Novintel
Novintel (www.novintel.com) is a leading international provider of Market and Competitive Intelligence services with offices in Helsinki, London, and Toronto. Through its partnership program and comprehensive CI offerings, in process consulting, education, research services and CI technology applications, Novintel helps its clients build and maintain systematic market and competitive intelligence activities that serve the needs of both strategic and operational decision-makers.
###
|
