Summary
At CiMi.CON Evolution in 2022, Thermo Fisher Scientific discussed its competitive intelligence (CI) program, created in collaboration with Evalueserve. Later that same day, Thermo Fisher was named the 2022 CiMi.CON Winner for Best Intelligence Technology based on the strength of that CI program.
Before enlisting Evalueserve, Thermo Fisher’s CI was ad-hoc and had no centralized knowledge base, making it difficult for employees to find the information they wanted. They asked Evalueserve to implement Insightsfirst, an AI-powered CI platform, to create a 360-degree overview of their competition. The Insightsfirst platform helped reduce knowledge silos, achieve better business outcomes, and improve the onboarding experience for new employees.
The Challenge
Thermo Fisher, a multinational healthcare giant, wanted to improve its CI efforts in the diagnostics space. There are several challenges for CI efforts in the diagnostics sector:
- Publicly available information is limited, making it more difficult to gather information.
- There are long timelines due to regulations and approval processes.
- It’s a rapidly evolving industry, which also makes CI even more critical.
An existing ad-hoc CI program gathered information and sporadically sent it out in different formats, from plain-text emails to PowerPoints and PDFs. There was no central knowledge base, creating knowledge silos and making it difficult for interested employees to find relevant information when they needed it. Thermo Fisher received competitors’ news from numerous regions and departments, so another difficulty they had was ironing out cultural and language differences in their CI inputs.
Our Solution
Evalueserve implemented a customized version of Insightsfirst, our AI-powered CI platform, for Thermo Fisher. Insightsfirst brought together the existing ad-hoc, decentralized CI into one centralized platform. It served as a single source of truth for competitors’ activities and provided analyst-curated analytics and company profiles.
Thermo Fisher’s Insightsfirst platform employed AI-powered search engines to make it easy to search and access relevant information. The AI also summarized short and long form documents, making it easy to quickly understand recent news. Furthermore, Insightsfirst AI tagged documents based on prescribed rulesets provided by domain experts. The platform also provides trend dashboards and regularly sends curated email newsletters to alert stakeholders of key happenings.
Every Insightsfirst user has the power to personalize their experience by subscribing to competitors or themes of interest, such as product launches, digital initiatives, financials, pipeline updates, mergers & acquisitions, deals, and licensing partnerships. This self-service feature empowers local affiliates to add alerts and articles and share them with the entire community.
Every quarter, Evalueserve’s experts create deep-dive, strategic company profiles of major competitors and provide digests for the leadership team.
Business Impact
Insightsfirst’s comprehensive nature enabled Thermo Fisher to make strategic decisions around product, promotion, and distribution strategies, as well as R&D, investments, and the company’s portfolios. Decision-makers now have the information they need readily available in a centralized, easy-to-use platform.
Insightsfirst transformed Thermo Fisher’s CI efforts, making them proactive rather than reactive. Thermo Fisher’s stakeholders discovered competitors’ initiatives they otherwise would not have known about, providing an accelerant to their own initiatives in similar areas.
Thanks to their custom Insightsfirst platform, Thermo Fisher realized benefits such as:
- Faster strategic decision-making through valuable insights,
- Support in strategizing customer meetings,
- Improved onboarding experience for new employees,
- Reduced knowledge silos,
- Improved collaboration,
- Increased efficiency, and
- Better business outcomes.