One of Intecolor Corp's products was being 'outflanked by overwhelming competitors'. The Exec. VP wanted to get a group consensus among his managers to 'cut bait and limit our losses'. He says that, "Because of Business Insight we stopped spending resources on a product that did not have a high probability of success."

Joe Romasco is the Executive vice president of a $20,000,000 manufacturer of industrial monitors and workstations. When asked why he purchased Business Insight he says, "We probably would have hired a consultant if we knew one who was well versed in our market niche. There weren't any we trusted. Business Insight seemed to have the breadth of analyses needed."

In 1983, when the PC appeared, we recognized that survival was a virtue. Our proprietary, unique color graphic terminals were clearly going to be replaced by open architecture products and systems. The key was to survive, maintain profitability and convert to a viable product in the markets we knew. Because of limited R&D dollars we had to anticipate what technologies would be big enough to give some growth, but not big enough to attract big company competitors.

About five years ago we chose the X-terminal product space as an ideal segment. We defined a product that would provide X-terminal functionality with full server capability and began development. Unfortunately we underestimated development time and by two years ago, HP, DEC and IBM began to release similar products. The whole organization had a blind spot and refused to accept the fact that although our intentions were noble we were being outflanked by overwhelming competitors. The challenge in a small company was to get group consensus to 'cut bait and limit our losses.' This is when I introduced Business Insight to the process.

To facilitate the data collection process I gathered the Product Manager, VP of R&D, the two lead development engineers and the director of sales together and we jointly answered the Business Insight questions. The product showed that while we wanted initially to be the 'price leader', by the time we began to ship we were the 'high priced' provider and then we had to assure profitability so our price strategy had to be 'skimming'. It became clear that our competitors would and subsequently did absorb losses by discounting products with new technology to build market share.

Using Business Insight, we went through three iterations with slightly different and gradually less plausible assumptions until it became the group consensus that we should drop the product. The resulting benefits were;

We stopped spending resources on a product that did not have a high probability of success.

We made the decision as a group with minimal hurt feelings.

We focused our R&D on one of the offshoots of the project that had a much better future... a very high performance industrial monitor. This product has been very successful.

Finally, we have become aware as a team of a common set of analyses tools and terminology that continues to communicate better on new projects.

When asked, why should others use Business Insight?, Romasco said, "For all of the above reasons. It is amazingly general, but easily customizable to almost any product."