Corporate Ink's unique combination of strategic thinking and thoughtful execution ensures that we're consistently positioned as the leader, giving us major advantage over our competition.
Jim Lawton
vice president and general manager
Open Ratings, a D&B com
A Seat at the Board
Open Ratings, a D&B company, today is recognized as the leading authority on proactive supply risk management. Its early warnings help leading automotive, aerospace & defense, industrial and electronics manufacturers avoid the devastating impact of supply disruptions, by predicting supplier performance woes long before they occur – giving customers precious time to get back-up supply lines in place.
Assuring continuous supply of materials and components is an elusive art in many global supply chain strategies. And as Katrina revealed, it has become a boardroom issue in the past year.
Challenge
Transition Open Ratings from being a provider of reliable data about suppliers, to addressing a major source of pain – supply risk – and target a more strategic buying audience.
Strategy and Tactics
Our mandate was to single-handedly create and own a new market for supply risk management solutions. Until recently, most companies’ risk mitigation efforts were focused on SOX or catastrophic events. Meanwhile, manufacturers were just waking up to the reality that their outsourcing and ‘lean’ initiatives had left them extremely vulnerable to disruptions.
As the first move in educating the market, we invested in relationships, briefing a handful of editors, reporters and industry analysts. When appropriate, we used ‘bad news’ to make the story crushingly real to the media and convey the dimensions of the issue.
A targeted media outreach program resulted in industry-defining trend stories, where Open Ratings was a key player. A single story in InformationWeek, showcasing an Open Ratings customer, defined ‘best practice’ and quickly led to several calls from Fortune 1000 companies.
We made our key company spokesman the voice of risk management, giving presentations at three of the biggest supply chain events – where initiatives for the coming year are set, and vendors almost never appear.
Results
Out in the field, we consistently hear that competitors are being dogged by our coverage, with prospects consistently pulling out articles and news releases, asking these companies what they were doing to get ahead of this critical sector.
Demand for risk mitigation solutions has skyrocketed. The intensifying heat in this sector led to Open Ratings being acquired by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) in March 2006. Open Ratings’ solutions became a competitive differentiator for D&B’s business insight offerings. In a clear departure from its own established policy, the D&B team continued to work with Corporate Ink, long after the acquisition was completed.