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December 2002 NewsletterHampton Road Section 1114 MOTTO: BACK TO BASICS Mission Statement _____________________________________________________________________ December Meeting Announcement Scheduling conflicts forced us to move the November Dinner Meeting to December. Our guest was kind enough to reschedule to accommodate us. Here is a refresher of the meeting particulars from the last newsletter: The December meeting will provide a summary of the new ISO standard changes as well as transition hints. Our guest speaker will be Kathy Roberts. Kathy Roberts is the President of Sunrise Consulting Inc., a management consulting and training company specializing in quality system implementation and ISO 9000. She is an active member of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to Technical Committee 176. This group is instrumental in all aspects of developing, reviewing and approving ISO quality standards. Roberts is also the past vice chair of the ANSI Z1 Committee, which is responsible for all actions relating to national quality standards. She is a past ASQ Section Chair, a past ASQ Region Quality Management Division Councilor, a past examiner for the North Carolina Performance Excellence Process and an ASQ Certified Quality Auditor (CQA). Roberts has published many articles and given numerous presentations on ISO 9001:2000 and co-wrote the international best-selling books ISO 9000:2000 In a Nutshell - Second Edition, and ISO 9001:2000 Management Responsibility In a Nutshell. So come out and take advantage of Kathy’s expertise on this topic. The meeting is Thursday, December 5, 2002. The
meeting particulars include: Call or e-mail now to make your reservation and Bring a Friend! For a reservation, please contact Jean M. Tolley, 722-5565 (x3141), or email her at jean.tolley@zeltech.com Directions to Carmella’s Pasta Cafe: From Newport News/Williamsburg area: _____________________________________________________________________ Message from the Chair We also want to thank everyone who participated in our needs assessment survey sponsored by the marketing students of CNU. Their presentation to us is December 9. Part of the presentation will be an enhanced database that will allow us to do more efficient searches for information. Regarding your information, the executive board does everything possible to protect the member’s privacy. No member information is passed on to commercial activities without the member’s consent. To minimize any interruptions in service, we recommend that you go to www.asqnet.org and verify your member information. Again, thanks for being a member in an organization that is constantly looking to improve. Without your support, the “gospel of quality” would not reach as many people as it does. Scott _____________________________________________________________________ Competitive Intelligence and ASQ Regional Director for Region 11 Part I: Competitive Intelligence methods are used by organizations to achieve a competitive advantage over its competitors. The ability to work with unformatted data, to understand process methods and the ability to validate data are several aspects of competitive intelligence that overlap with the skills of quality professionals. The example below provides an example of trusting data that has not been validated. Recently, you have been tracking a competitor’s product announcements because your company has a similar product and product release timing is critical. However, when they release product information, it is inconsistent with previous press releases. After a while you realize that the web site you are tracking does not provide accurate information. It appears that it is intentional because you can never tell what they are going to do and determining when their product will be released is impossible. While we live in the information age, you are thinking this is all false and that propaganda is still a threat. In both global and domestic settings, competitive intelligence is the systematic collection, evaluation, and organization of information. The desired outcome of this intelligence system is an accurate analysis of the business environment for strategy formation. Generally, the goal of a competitive intelligence system is to provide reliable information to those analyzing their business environment in order to achieve a competitive advantage in their business environment. At the same time, it is essential to prevent competitor analysis of your firm. This requires accurate data for information collection, information processing and appropriate information analysis. To do this properly the data provided to the competitive intelligence system must be reliable, it must be able to accept good information, and reject invalid information. The quality professional should be included in competitive intelligence analysis since they generally have knowledge and experience in several aspects of competitive intelligence systems and processes including raw data formatting and knowledge of processes. It has been said that competitive analysis is constructed information from unformatted data and often, the data comes from many sources and it is unformatted. An example of how quality professionals deal with this type of data is the Pareto chart. To complete a Pareto chart, one must accumulate the data, possibly from several sources and structure it in descending order of the Pareto chart. Consequently, the quality professional has skills that are useful in the verification of competitive intelligence. This is significant in that inside many companies, the competitive intelligence functions often are not well formed or utilized. In a time of increased global competition and smaller profit margins, the contributions of the quality professional, in competitive intelligence systems, should not be overlooked. Part II: The previous article described the competitive intelligence (CI) process and indicated the usefulness of the complementary abilities of both the CI professional and the quality professional. In this article, we see an increased need for competitive intelligence, which includes use of the Internet and the role of the quality professional. In the third article, we will explore sources of competitive intelligence data and suggested actions for the quality professional. In a Business Week article, Lavelle writes about the ability of some firms to see what other organizations are doing. He writes, "Visibility in the business world is so low right now," says Mark R. Little, director of strategy analysis for GlaxoSmithKline PLC. "If you don't have competitive intelligence, you're going to be in trouble." According to executives, maintaining an advantage over your competitors is crucial in the efforts to stay ahead of the trends and technology that competitors may use. Competitive intelligence helps companies avoid unnecessary costs and shorten the product time to market. With an increased need for strategic advantage, many companies spend more than $1 million each year to analyze the business environment and to watch their competitors. Competitive intelligence is a critical resource for organizations. It provides a means to manage effectively the operations and to balance the uncertainty encountered with large distances, differences in cultures, and different languages and it allows the firm to realize its comparative advantage or strategic superiority. While organizations work to maintain a comparative advantage, the demand for CI professionals is rapidly increasing. In a Business Week article, Leonard M. Fuld indicates, "The ranks of legitimate spies have risen dramatically, by over 220% in the past decade, so that more than 5,000 corporate spies are now actively engaged in intelligence activities" (Lavelle). In addition, many large U.S. companies spend more than $1 million a year tracking their competitors and nine out of 10 large companies have employees dedicated solely to the competitive-intelligence function. According to their web page, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) provides a definition for competitive intelligence. The SCIP defines competitive intelligence as "the legal collection and analysis of information regarding the capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions of business competitors, conducted by using information databases and other open sources and through ethical inquiry." The Internet provides numerous data and information databases for competitive intelligence and much of the information is from public resources. With the large number of databases on the Internet, one can legally find almost any needed information and many databases include regulatory, legal, and proprietary information, from both private, and government sources. With Internet access, a competitor can easily view the public resources, fee-based business databases, and they can access the web site for your firm and review the information it contains. In addition to obtaining technical patent information, one can legally request their competitor trade secret information, from government agencies, to obtain trade secrets from competitors. In addition, every organization should presume that outside agents are evaluating them. Most CI professionals have sufficient experience to protect trade secrets and limit the firm’s exposure to outside agents. In addition, many CI professionals have experience and training in market research, strategic analysis, or science or technology, which they use when analyzing competitors and the business environment. In contrast, the knowledge and required skills of the quality professional illustrates experience and training with technology, process development, process validation, and data analysis. It appears that the two professions have related backgrounds and training and they tend to complement each other. This is helpful when there are resource issues. Most companies do not have resource issues with competitive intelligence but some do. While most companies have resources to collect, organize, interpret and present strategic information to decision-makers, not all companies have these resources. Although many business leaders indicate that their success depends on looking forward and moving faster than the competition, there are still many businesses operating without dedicated and specialized competitive intelligence operations. Based on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the quality professional and some additional training, the quality professional could provide at least a basic level of competitive intelligence in cases where there was no competitive intelligence professional present. Biographical information for Clay Hodges _____________________________________________________________________
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