Winning Intelligence Wins the World - Enterprise Competitive Intelligence Management

Author: Daixiang Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: McDonald's Competitive Intelligence Work
In 1990, McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Shenzhen, and now the fast-food giant has over 560 stores across China. As a major player in the fast-food industry, how does McDonald's control and manage its vast empire? The competitive intelligence system plays a crucial role in this. For the fast-food giant McDonald's, 2002 was an unfortunate year. Due to rapid expansion, it suffered its first loss in 37 years. As soon as the fourth-quarter financial report was released on December 2, the stock price plummeted to $15.39. Leveraging the competitive intelligence it had at its disposal, McDonald's immediately closed over 170 stores, nearly withdrawing from the South American market with weaker consumer spending, and focused its development efforts on rapidly growing economies like China. After a year of strategic adjustments, by December 2, 2003, McDonald's stock price hit a new high of $26.35.
In the past, before specialized information systems were available, McDonald's actively used various methods to collect market-related information, such as positive or negative media coverage of McDonald's from global media, information about its competitor KFC, relevant policies and regulations in the restaurant and fast-food industries, as well as updates from regulatory bodies and dynamics involving partners like Coca-Cola and Nestlé Coffee. This work laid the foundation for McDonald's to make sound business decisions. At the same time, to gather such a vast amount of effective information, McDonald's market staff had to frequently browse different websites, repeat hundreds of searches daily, and constantly read newspapers, purchase clippings from clipping services, buy investigative intelligence from research firms, and gather industry policies and regulations. This work was not only tedious and mechanical but also failed to leverage human initiative. Moreover, the purchased materials were expensive, and information acquisition was scattered, slow, and incomplete. Outdated information often lost its value.
McDonald's actively monitored market changes and technological innovations. In the early 2000s, Zhang Xiangning, the former CEO of Netconcepts, China's largest domain name and virtual hosting service provider, discovered the huge business potential in the competitive intelligence field. He pioneered the establishment of the 365Agent Competitive Intelligence Center and developed an internet-based competitive intelligence monitoring system to provide professional competitive intelligence services to companies both domestically and internationally. Upon its launch, McDonald's quickly responded by becoming one of the first to adopt 365Agent's system monitoring services, improving the efficiency of its intelligence collection and enhancing the quality of the intelligence. At the same time, it freed its intelligence staff from the tedious work of manual information gathering, increasing personnel utilization efficiency.
Using the 365Agent Competitive Intelligence Monitoring System, McDonald's market staff customized keywords based on the company's needs to monitor various aspects. The 365Agent system then (real-time) information from over 8,000 Chinese and English portals, news websites, media websites (such as TV and newspapers), government, information centers, and databases. After system analysis and matching, the information was promptly sent to the users' email inboxes. They could also log in to the 365Agent system at any time to view their customized information in real time.