FOS

FOS advises facilities management and construction businesses on growth, acquisition, bid strategy and pricing. Understanding what competitors are doing, across a specific set of companies that matter to them, is core to that advice rather than background colour.

Before the tool existed, that intelligence was gathered by hand: staff searching the internet for updates, company by company. It worked, but it spent expensive senior time on gathering rather than on judgement.

The work started with source selection: deciding which archives and news sites actually carry signal about the companies on the list, rather than pointing a crawler at the whole web and hoping something useful came back.

Some of what mattered was reachable through an API. A lot of it was not, so we built scrapers to gather the rest, and normalised everything into one shape the monthly reporting could rely on. Getting that collection layer right is most of the work in a tool like this, and it is the part that quietly decides whether the output is trustworthy.

The watchlist is theirs, not ours: FOS identifies which companies matter and the tool tracks them, turning what it gathers into a monthly update on their activity. We have hosted and supported it for the two years since, and for a UK client working with a New Zealand team the overnight gap has sometimes worked in their favour, a question asked in the evening answered by morning.

The research runs automatically, so decisions get made on the data rather than on whoever had time to go looking. Senior people spend their time on the value decisions instead of the gathering.

It also changed what FOS can bring to their own clients. They prioritise which future customers to pursue and advise existing customers on how their competition is performing, backed by data rather than impression, which has strengthened their standing as a source of genuine business insight.