Our Stories

Turning Raw Data into Revenue: Building a Custom Competitive Intelligence Engine

We developed a custom web application that automated the tedious process of cross-referencing product parts with key competitors. This tool provided strategic pricing insights and significantly improved team efficiency.

CLIENT

MISUMI

INDUSTRY

Manufacturing & Industrial Supply

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The Challenge

Overcoming Manual Inefficiency

The client’s teams regularly needed to find equivalent parts in their catalog based on customer references to major competitors. This manual process presented several significant business challenges:

Operational Bottleneck: Employees were dedicating hours to the repetitive task of searching for and matching part numbers, diverting resources from more valuable activities.
Lack of Strategic Insight: There was no system in place to track historical pricing data, preventing the client from analyzing competitor pricing trends and strategies over time.
Inefficient Collaboration: Without a central tool, managing work distribution among teams was challenging, leading to duplicated efforts and a lack of visibility.

The client required a solution to move beyond manual work, aiming to automate the process while also transforming raw data into a strategic asset.

The Solution

The Cross Tool

In line with our mission as business builders, we collaborated to create a solution tailored to the client’s unique needs. We developed a robust web application that serves as a central hub for competitive intelligence.
Our approach was built on three of our core pillars:

Custom Development: The application was built from the ground up, ensuring every feature directly addressed the client’s pain points. The tool allows for both single-part lookups and bulk pasting of entire product lists from spreadsheets, easily integrating with existing workflows.
Data & AI: The solution includes a powerful, automated web-scraping module that visits the competitor's website, retrieves specific product data—such as pricing and minimum order quantities—and stores it in a structured database. This creates a historical record, turning static data points into actionable business intelligence.
Technology Advisory: We worked closely with the client’s team to define key architectural and design assumptions, ensuring the final product was powerful, scalable, and secure, ready for deployment on their infrastructure.

Key features of the delivered solution include:

Automated Data Scraping: The tool automatically pulls part information from both the client’s database and competitors websites, keeping the data fresh and reliable.
Advanced Price Tracking: It records price changes over time, allowing users to visualize competitor pricing behavior with detailed historical logs.
Intelligent Pricing Logic: The system calculates one-piece pricing from bulk packages and adjusts the client’s comparative pricing based on the competitor's minimum order quantity, ensuring accurate price comparisons.
Comprehensive Management Modules: Dedicated modules for managing projects, teams, and part relationships facilitate clear work distribution and enhanced collaboration.

The Results

Driving Efficiency and Strategic Advantage

Delivered in just three months, the Cross Tool transformed the client’s operational efficiency and strategic capabilities.

By automating the most tedious aspects of their workflow, the tool freed up the client’s team to focus on their core function: serving customers.

It significantly reduced research time, eliminating a substantial operational bottleneck. More importantly, the application provided the client with a new capability: the ability to analyze competitor pricing behaviour over time.

This data-driven insight empowers sales teams to make more informed strategic decisions, stay competitive, and better assist customers seeking alternative products.

This project perfectly embodies our approach: leading with a solution, not just technology, to solve real-world business challenges and drive growth.