Our framework empowers executives to make decisions with unprecedented speed and confidence to achieve their revenue growth goals. Although we’ve automated the most difficult parts of generating high quality competitive research, we understand that one size does not fit all. Organizations that look the same on the outside can have significant divergence in how they structure, operate and compete to win customers.
At wRatings, our goal is to accelerate the time-to-value of your implementation to grow revenue and cut costs now. Our system allows for maximum creativity when discovering new sources of value, all while maintaining speed and precision. We selected just a few of our case usage studies from our 400+ implementations all over the world. If you’d like to learn more about how the wRatings System can benefit your organization, schedule a Live Demo.
Allied Waste
Leapfrog All Your Competitors
During the 2000s in the waste disposal industry, second-largest player Allied Waste was in a slugfest against Waste Management and Republic Services. Consolidation was underway as large providers bought smaller independent-owned trash collectors to gain market share. In a vicious competitive cycle, the three largest providers were being forced to lower prices just to keep up with the remaining independents.
Allied Waste decided to leapfrog all of its competitors — large & small — by challenging the industry’s focus on price. By discovering new sources of value, the executive team created an industry inflection point that generated customer pricing power and allowed them to capture superior return-on-invested capital (ROIC) while growing revenue.
Using research from wRatings, the executive team analyzed a variety of business frameworks to pursue. One popular choice was for the company to become the Wal-Mart of waste disposal, relentlessly focusing on cost controls to be a highly efficient, discount-based company. But the wRatings research showed only a small percentage of customers bought based primarily on price. Instead, most customers placed substantial weight in areas such as assurance, professionalism and seamless cooperation.
With the wRatings profiles in hand, Allied Waste eliminated several internal programs that were adding little to no value for customers. This freed up millions of dollars that was reinvested to fund much higher priority items to customers.
Allied Waste was able to raise prices 12 quarters in a row and added $700M in sales to reach $6.1B in sales before merging with Republic Services (a company 33% owned by Bill Gates).
FM Facility Maintenance
Transforming from Price- to Value-Oriented
How do you transform a highly competitive, service-driven industry focused on costs into a tech-oriented one with durable economic advantages? You change the way the world sees your industry.
In the 2010s, FM Facility Maintenance was aggressively competing in the facility services industry. Customers in this industry are primarily company offices as well as retail, restaurant, grocery, and convenience stores that outsource their needs for cleaning, electrical, HVAC and janitorial/trash removal.
By studying the wRatings research across both its suppliers (technicians) and its customers, the executive team determined that both stakeholder groups wanted similar sets of value. While costs were a critical driver of success, consistency and optimization were higher emotional drivers to selecting facilities service provider. A new business framework was born to use technology to look at facility assets and ensure they stay operational.
In 2016, FM Facility Maintenance merged with technology firm First Service Networks to form Vixxo. During the first year, FM/Vixxo landed on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. Later that year, Vixxo said they had:
- More than 1.1 million revenue-generating assets for many Fortune 500 clients.
- Clients include international brands such as Starbucks, 7-Eleven and Michaels.
- A national network of 150,000 service provider technicians and services more than 65,000 client locations.
Based on financial analyst projections, Vixxo increased sales 4X within five years.
Coors Brewing Company
Reengineer a 100-Year-Old Industry
The Beer industry has been around for a very long time. The Adolph Coors Company was founded in 1873 and in the late 1990s, Coors was the third largest beer brewer in the United States behind Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing. Import beers such as Heineken and Corona were gaining share quickly on Coors, potentially leaving them behind.
While new product launches typically require several years of R&D and testing, Coors needed to find ways to grow their revenue and stay profitable. The executive team designed the wRatings research to target key accounts within their on-premise community (consume beer at the location) and off-premise community (consume beer at a separate location). Several key areas of performance were not being met, especially in terms of planning and category management.
Based on the wRatings analytics, Coors reengineered its sales force to form national teams of category managers that focused exclusively on winning new accounts. In 2000, several publications recognized Coors with awards as the top Category Manager in the industry.
Through 2000-Q4, Coors posted 12 straight quarters in a row of profits, which was a record for the company at that time. Coors also grew its revenue 2X as fast as Budweiser.
Finning Caterpillar
Unlocking Digital Knowledge for More Productivity
Heavy Equipment is one of the most cyclical industries that moves hand in hand with the development of the global economies.
Good times favor infrastructure spending and private enterprise expansion, whereas slowdowns cause demand to shift to design and cost savings. This creates a difficult cycle of boom or bust for all the companies throughout the delivery chain.
Based out of western Canada, Finning is the world’s largest Caterpillar dealer. They sell, rent and provide parts & services for a diverse set of customers in the mining, construction, petroleum, forestry, and power industries.
Using analytics from the wRatings research, the executive team found customers shifting their priorities to add (not replace) site knowledge to their needs for equipment support. Future productivity gains in the workforce were going to require a superior understanding of what’s happening in the field. Executives embarked on a multi-year effort to build a data center that codified field knowledge and combined it with other data sources such as GPS, smartphones, wearables and drones. Within two years, the company doubled their market value by creating new sources of revenue, all while delighting their customers.
