Early Warning Detection and Monitoring

Stay Ahead of Your Competition. Gauge Your Competitive Landscape.

Think of all the ways your company manages its internal information – sales forecasts, ERP systems etc. Now, think about the resources spent tracking external events. If your company is like most, it is spending a fraction of its time and effort on the external as it is on the internal. Yet, the greatest source of strategic surprise is found in the events and conditions that occur outside your organization. That is why you need an early warning detection system for your business and market.

Surprise acts as a risk-multiplier. It’s bad enough for companies to be confronted with external developments that complicate their strategy, but that they saw coming. When such developments happen by surprise, the company’s ability to act in a thoughtful and meaningful way is compromised.

Building the Department of Surprise Avoidance

By failing to systematically monitor and assess external circumstances and developments, companies raise the likelihood of being surprised by new developments. And surprise has its costs. Companies get blindsided all the time, often severely impacting core businesses and products, eroding shareholder value, and consuming valuable management time and attention.

Companies require a means to anticipate future external threats and opportunities combined with improved peripheral vision to see competitor moves coming. By engaging in strategic early warning monitoring that joins identification of plausible scenarios with effective information gathering and analysis.

A strategic early warning program can help mitigate the impact of external disruptions and minimize strategic surprise. At Fuld & Company, we start by partnering with our client to define leading indicators for monitoring. Early warning indicators may include:

• Technology Disruption
• Competitive Shifts
• Regulatory Changes
• Environmental Factors
• Consumer or Social Changes
• Economic Conditions and Political Influences

Using the indicators to focus our information gathering, we manage data collection and integration from public and subscription sources. We analyze the results to help you visualize relevant and impactful future developments that require a reconsideration of your strategy and execution tactics.

Surprise is part of life. But, it doesn’t have to disrupt your business. A scenario-based early warning program can minimize the business impact and surprise.

For more information on how you can implement a scenario-based early warning detection and monitoring system, download the toolkit.