Frost & Sullivan Uncovers How One Person Can Build a Companywide Intelligence Network

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- New research from Frost & Sullivan demonstrates how a single employee can develop an intelligence network that captures the insights of all of a company's employees. Frost & Sullivan's Growth Team Membership's (GTM's) new best practice guidebook entitled: Building a Sustainable Companywide Intelligence Network features Cintas, a global business services company, and the process it used to develop a companywide intelligence network that optimizes limited resources, harnesses employees' competitive intelligence (CI) insights, and supports the sales force. 

"Many CI professionals struggle to demonstrate the impact of their function, while dealing with stagnant budgets and chronic understaffing. In Frost & Sullivan's Annual Competitive Intelligence and Market Research Priorities Survey, CI executives revealed that 'capturing the competitive information held by their employees,' 'incorporating CI into the company's revenue-generating activities,' and 'creating a portal to centralize CI-related information' were among their top challenges," said Keith O'Brien, vice president of research for Frost & Sullivan's Growth Team Membership. "The examination of Cintas' approach to building a CI network addresses all three of these challenges, which can be adopted by any organization interested in improving its CI capabilities — regardless of business model or industry." 

Building a Sustainable Companywide Intelligence Network is a detailed best practice guidebook that illustrates how Cintas:  

• Developed a companywide intelligence network that captured explicit and tacit employee knowledge
• Created intelligence deliverables that balanced CI program resources with stakeholder needs
• Drove network usage of a customized intelligence portal

This approach allowed Cintas to shorten its competitive response rate by 250 percent, increase contributions by employees to an intelligence portal by 67 percent, and greatly enhance its sales efficiency.  

Attend
A complimentary Ask the Thought Leader webcast will be co-hosted by Frost & Sullivan's GTM and Cintas on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. EST. This event will feature Cintas' development of their intelligence network in greater detail. During the webcast, Troy Pfeffer, intelligence director at Cintas, will participate in a live question-and-answer session.  

The Building a Sustainable Companywide Intelligence Network best practice guidebook and the complimentary Ask the Thought Leader webcast are part of Frost & Sullivan's Growth Team Membership™ (GTM) program, which provides case-based best practices, toolkits, and events to address the internal challenges individual executives face within their respective functions. GTM (www.gtm.frost.com) is a part of the Growth Partnership Services, an annual subscription program that provides unlimited access to research, services, and events addressing the most pressing external and internal growth challenges faced by executives today.

The Growth Team Membership research team follows a rigorous methodology to define and identify best practices, profiling only those companies whose approaches:

• Are uncommon and creative
• Solve a critical growth challenge
• Demonstrate repeatable and measurable results
• Could be implemented at another organization (i.e. are not unique to one company's circumstances)

About Frost & Sullivan

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Mireya Espinoza
Corporate Communications – North America
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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan