How a Global Water Technology Leader Eliminated Research Waste, Automated Hand-Picked Intelligence Delivery, and Built an Intuitive Hub for Market Awareness.
COMPANY: Grundfos
TYPE: Manufacturing & Water Technology Industry, B2B.
In high-stakes, global industries, maintaining an updated, comprehensive view of the competitive landscape is critical. For Grundfos, a global leader in advanced pump solutions and water technology, the primary challenge surrounding market and competitive intelligence was not a lack of information, but the sheer volume of time required to find, aggregate, and verify it.
By leveraging Comintelli Intelligence2day® as both an intuitive software platform and a tailored content provider, Grundfos successfully optimized its intelligence gathering. The solution functions as a central “one-stop-shop” for the Group Strategy team, driving operational efficiency, saving valuable corporate time, and delivering highly curated weekly updates across the organization.
Prior to establishing a streamlined workflow with Comintelli, the primary friction point for the team centered around information access and resource management.
Key challenges included:
1. The Time Sink of Manual Sourcing
The team faced a constant operational tax on their time. Tracking competitive movements and market fluctuations required continuous manual effort, pulling strategic resources away from deeper analysis.
2. Lack of Centralized Customization:
Gathering relevant data across fractured external sources made it difficult to maintain a reliably updated, hyper-customized view of the market.
3. Information Inefficiency:
Because “time is money,” the manual hours spent tracking down reliable data created underlying operational inefficiencies that impacted the bottom line.
When Christine Francis joined Oerlikon’s intelligence efforts, she quickly recognized a recurring problem. Valuable market insights existed throughout the organization, but they remained trapped in regional teams and disconnected business units. Leadership lacked a consistent way to turn local observations into global intelligence.
Oerlikon needed a way to eliminate fragmented intelligence, reduce reliance on lengthy email chains, and provide global teams with a single source of truth for market and competitive insights.
While evaluating different approaches, the team found that generic collaboration and AI tools could help surface information but lacked the structured workflows needed to collect, analyze, share, and preserve intelligence at scale.
Comintelli stood out by providing:
Ultimately, Oerlikon chose Comintelli because it combined intelligence gathering, analysis, collaboration, and publishing in one platform, helping the organization make faster, more informed decisions while ensuring its 2030 strategic plans were grounded in real market realities.
Grundfos expanded its relationship with Comintelli, shifting from using Intelligence2day® purely for visual distribution to utilizing it as a comprehensive content provider.
Key elements of the implementation include:
The One-Stop-Shop Architecture
The platform was configured to serve as a single, centralized workspace where the Group Strategy team can access a continually refreshed repository of competitor tracking and market developments without checking multiple external channels.
Consultative, Needs-Driven Setup
Rather than deploying a rigid, off-the-shelf software package, Comintelli worked closely with the Grundfos team through a structured pilot process. This collaborative approach ensured the system’s content ingestion rules were perfectly calibrated around Grundfos’s exact corporate priorities and industry segment needs.
Hand-Picked Weekly Alerts
The platform serves as both an information source and a seamless corporate sharing tool. The Group Strategy team leverages the platform to curate, package, and distribute weekly intelligence alerts featuring hand-picked news, pushing critical, clutter-free updates to broader internal stakeholders.
“In my eyes, a platform like Intelligence2day® is a one-stop-shop to stay updated and informed about what happens on the market… As part of Group Strategy, I am using the platform almost daily and colleagues find useful the weekly alerts sent out with hand-picked news.”
Significant Gains in Operational Efficiency
By drastically reducing the hours required to collect, vet, and organize market information, the platform directly tackled the team’s greatest bottleneck: time. Automating the ingestion of high-value data transformed manual research hours into pure operational cost savings.
High Cross-Functional Value and Utility
The strategic outputs generated by the platform have been widely embraced across the enterprise. Internal colleagues and cross-functional teams consistently find the curated weekly alerts highly useful, establishing a reliable rhythm of shared market awareness across the organization.
Exceptional User Adoption via Intuitive Design
A core requirement for the platform was ensuring a reliable, simple, and friction-free user experience. Intelligence2day® stood out by providing a highly intuitive interface that allows members of the Group Strategy team to interact with the platform almost daily, maximizing internal tool utility without requiring extensive software training.
By partnering with a vendor that acted as a true strategic advisor rather than a pushy salesperson, Grundfos secured a dependable, long-term foundation for its intelligence ecosystem. The platform provides a baseline of verified market realities that keeps the strategy team consistently informed, agile, and aligned.
"It allows you to align the strategies and ambitions your company is working toward. By shedding light on future market trends and what is currently happening in the industry, it helps you organize, focus, and forecast so you can build informed business plans."
Christine Francis, Head of Market Intelligence (Strategy Department), Oerlikon
Grundfos is the largest pump manufacturer in the world, based in Denmark, with more than 19,000 employees globally.
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