Find out how Christine Francis, Head of Market Intelligence (Strategy Department), broke down regional silos, automated market monitoring across the automotive and aerospace sectors, and leveraged AI to transform research into strategic published insights.
COMPANY: Oerlikon
TYPE: Technology, B2B.
Operating on a global scale requires complete visibility into rapidly shifting market dynamics. For Oerlikon, a major multinational manufacturing corporation serving highly complex sectors like automotive and aerospace, valuable competitive insights were historically trapped within localized teams.
By implementing Comintelli Intelligence2day®, Christine Francis, representing the competitive intelligence function, replaced isolated regional knowledge with a centralized global hub. This transformation has allowed international teams from Japan to Brazil to aggregate field intelligence, automate market tracking, and leverage advanced AI tools to ground Oerlikon’s long-term 2030 corporate strategies in real-time market data.
“Before Comintelli, valuable intelligence often stayed within local teams. Today, a competitive insight discovered in Japan can immediately benefit colleagues in Europe or the Americas.”
Christine Francis, Head of Market Intelligence, Oerlikon
Prior to Christine Francis partnering with Comintelli, Oerlikon’s primary hurdle was the fragmentation of intelligence across its vast international footprint.
Key challenges included:
1. Localized Knowledge Silos
Different departments, business units, and product lines were independently collecting competitive intelligence and market trends. As Christine noted, valuable insights known by a regional manager in one part of the world were completely inaccessible to teams in other countries.
2. Inefficient Communication Channels
Teams relied heavily on long, messy email chains to distribute updates, making it incredibly difficult to track historical data or reference past competitive movements.
3. Information Overload
The company lacked a structured mechanism to automatically collect, filter, and organize macro-level industry trends without overwhelming employees with manual research.
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.
To resolve these inefficiencies, Christine Francis deployed Comintelli’s Intelligence2day® to establish a unified global repository and optimize Oerlikon’s strategic workflows.
The implementation focuses on three core pillars:
Centralized Global Knowledge Aggregation
The platform acts as a single destination where Oerlikon employees anywhere in the world can submit field intelligence. Regional insights such as a competitor’s movement discovered in one market are instantly aggregated and made accessible to global teams who can apply those lessons to their own local strategies.
Automated Industry Filtering and Archiving
Christine structured the workspace by specific industries and sectors. Outside market data is now automatically pulled into the platform and filtered by relevance, saving massive amounts of research time. Furthermore, every insight and newsletter distributed since 2024 is automatically archived, creating an easily searchable library of historical intelligence.
AI-Driven Insight Generation (“Ask Ollie”)
A standout feature of the deployment managed by Christine is the integration of Comintelli’s AI assistant, known internally as “Ask Ollie.” The assistant elevates the platform beyond a standard search engine by allowing users to apply complex strategic frameworks, like Porter’s Five Forces, directly to collected data.
Unlike general enterprise tools like Microsoft Copilot, “Ask Ollie” features a specialized workflow that guides users through prompts and questions, refines the findings into a polished report, and allows them to instantly publish the research as an official article on the platform.
To resolve these inefficiencies, Christine Francis deployed Comintelli’s Intelligence2day® to establish a unified global repository and optimize Oerlikon’s strategic workflows.
The implementation focuses on three core pillars:
Elimination of Disorganized Data Searches
The frantic search for old emails and missing documents has been entirely eliminated. Because every monthly update and competitor mention is systematically cataloged within the platform’s newsletter library, Oerlikon employees can instantly run a quick search to retrieve historical context on any market threat or opportunity.
Grounding Long-Term Strategy in Market Realities
Today, Oerlikon uses Comintelli as a foundation for its market intelligence operations. By combining global knowledge sharing, automated monitoring, and AI-supported analysis, the organization is better equipped to make informed decisions and align long-term investments with evolving market realities. As Oerlikon progresses toward its 2030 ambitions, intelligence has become an increasingly important component of strategic planning.
"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
Oerlikon is a global leader in surface technologies, dedicated to making products stronger, more efficient, and longer lasting. With a unique portfolio in surface engineering, advanced materials, coating equipment, and components, we help industries overcome tough engineering challenges every day. From applying ultra-thin coatings that reduce wear on engine parts to producing advanced metal powders for 3D printing, our innovations improve efficiency, durability, and sustainability across a wide range of sectors including aerospace, automotive, energy, luxury, medical, semiconductors, and tooling.
The world’s top organizations have long trusted our platform and continue to rely on it to drive their future.
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