Coemergence Inc.

Occidental Petroleum De Beers ConocoPhillips Gold Fields Newmont Mining

De Beers SA, the diamond company -- like most global enterprises, whether they know it or not -- has spies everywhere. They're called employees.

Unlike most big companies, De Beers is systematically tapping into the intelligence its employees gather about what competitors are doing and where opportunities or threats are likely to emerge. And it's doing this with the help of Canadian-developed software.

The ACIS software package from Halifax-based Coemergence Inc. works like an automated spymaster. It helps De Beers catalogue and make sense of even seemingly insignificant tidbits concerning industry developments.

'The important thing is that [ACIS] allows us to capture and store this data in a structured manner, ' says De Beers' Johannesburg-based business information manager Helius Guimaraes. 'And that allows the analysts to find patterns and catch early warning signals in the information.'

Experts in the often-overlooked business discipline of competitive intelligence (CI) have hailed ACIS as a breakthrough.

'It's one of the first [software products] that can actually provide an analytical backbone for competitive intelligence, ' says Craig Fleisher, research chair in the Odette School of Business at the University of Windsor and author of several books on CI.

Coemergence, a company with 18 employees, began seriously marketing ACIS earlier this year. It has eight customers so far, most of them large mining and resource companies.

One of its great strengths, Dr. Fleisher says, is that ACIS lets companies capture not just publicly available data from news sources and on-line databases, but also the 'human intelligence' that employees pick up at the golf course, around the water cooler or at conferences. Too often employees assume, wrongly, that decision makers already know what they know, or that the information is of no interest. Or they don't know who to tell.

Coemergence chairman and chief executive officer Michael Chender helped develop the prototype for ACIS four years ago, while doing consulting work on early warning systems at another mining company. His team's fundamental insight was that, in most situations where advanced intelligence is vital -- when tendering on big projects, for example, or tracking mergers and acquisitions, or operating in unstable foreign markets -- clear patterns of tell-tale signs often emerge before high-impact events.

For instance, if anybody at company Z had remembered that competitor X had raised millions of dollars for a project that fell through, and that the vice-president of finance at competitor Y had recently left for no apparent reason, they might guess that Y was in financial trouble and see the likelihood of X, with cash to burn, acquiring Y. Instead, nobody connects the dots and Z gets blindsided.

'You can't predict the future, ' Mr. Chender says, 'but there are patterns to how things develop. There is usually a predictable set of indicators.'

ACIS allows companies to set up a database to capture those indicators. It includes categories such as competitors, projects and countries.

Database fields in a competitor's record might include publicly available information such as financials and projects worked on, but there could also be fields for items such as employee movements, reported sales initiatives or rumoured new product introductions.

Most companies know about the wealth of uncaptured intelligence in employees' heads, Mr. Chender says. One problem is getting them to share it. Another is putting it in context and bringing it to the attention of the right decision makers and analysts.

'Through our design, we've addressed these challenges, ' he says.

The software makes it very easy for employees to input the data they gather. And it lets analysts and decision makers set up 'highly granular and accurate searches' of the data that can generate pop-up alerts on their computers as soon as search conditions are met.

'It's not a shrink-wrapped solution, though, ' Mr. Chender cautions. 'We have to work with the [customer's] business processes and ways of thinking. It has to be designed so people really want to use it.'

It's not cheap either. Mr. Chender estimates the cost of deployment, including customization and software licences, in 'the low several-hundred-thousands [of dollars] range.' The system is really aimed at big, growth-oriented and globally dispersed companies, he says.

De Beers expects to see a measurable return on its investment in ACIS next year, Mr. Guimaraes says, and the initial payback will come simply from eliminating duplication of effort. The company will no longer have to invest resources gathering and logging intelligence in multiple offices around the world, because ACIS provides a centralized system that's accessible from anywhere.

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7030-ADP Software, D307-Automated Information System Design and Integration Services