Business takes place in a very competitive, unpredictable environment, so it is important to understand the competition.
Large manufacturing companies seeking to increase their profitability often turn to value chain management to find ways to increase their revenue, reduce costs, gain efficiencies, and alike. A critical pre-requisite for optimizing value chain management involves analyzing the materials, processes and capabilities of key suppliers. Gaining an in depth understanding of your suppliers' business strategies, decision making processes and competitors allows you to evaluate their potential impact on your profitability and develop strategies and relationships to achieve financial success.
PEST analysis is the acronym for "Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis" and illustrates a framework of macro-environmental aspects used in environmental sensing. Economic surroundings affect how easy or how difficult it is to be successful and profitable at a certain time because they influence both capital availability and cost, and demand.
There are different ways to analyze data. You can choose the processes that make the most sense to your company and objectives, or simply use a combination of methods.
Analyzing the date you gather is a crucial step. However, without the proper organization and a clear objective, you won’t gain much from the process. If you started collecting information without a clear objective, you may have a difficult time making sense of it. That is why with competitive intelligence, you need to master all the steps in order to be able to use the information to your advantage.
