Competitor News Aggregation

Challenges Competitor News Aggregation addresses

Done by hand, competitive analysis means gathering watch list, working through 2 separate passes over the same material, then producing by competitor and the weekly read. None of it is difficult and all of it is exacting, which is the combination people are worst at holding. The errors that matter are the ones a tired reader does not notice, and they surface later — in a reconciliation, or in somebody’s reply. It comes round again every monday at 08:00, whether or not anyone has the time. As volume grows the work does not get harder, only longer, and the first thing to go is the checking.

Competitor News Aggregation runs that same sequence end to end and returns the result as structured artefacts. What it cannot settle it hands over rather than guesses at, and your correction is kept: it asks “Did this tell you anything you did not know?” after every run, and those answers become the set it is measured against. Nothing that moves money, alters a contract or reaches a customer executes without human approval, and every action is written to an audit log. The gain is in the volume that no longer has to be read, not in removing the judgement.

How it works

Step 1: Sweeping each competitor

First of 2. It works from watch list and feeds the step after it.

Key Tasks:

• Working from the extracted values: Figures come from watch list rather than from a re-keyed copy, which removes the transcription step where arithmetic errors usually originate.
• Applying your rules: Bands, rates and rounding are configuration. The same inputs produce the same figures on every run.
• Keeping the components: Each total is returned with the parts that produced it, so a figure that looks wrong can be traced rather than recomputed.

Outcome:

• Figures that reconcile: Figures that reconcile to their own components — the totals shown and the lines above them agree, which is the property that makes a number safe to quote onward.

Step 2: Writing the weekly read

Last of 2. It takes what step 1 produced and produces by competitor and the weekly read.

Key Tasks:

• Locating the material: It works from what step 1 produced, so nothing has to be forwarded, re-keyed or renamed first.
• Handling the format it arrives in: Scanned pages, native documents, spreadsheets and message bodies are all read the same way, including layouts where the relevant figure sits inside a table rather than a labelled field.
• Pulling the fields that matter: Only the fields the rest of the run needs are extracted. What cannot be read confidently is recorded as unread rather than filled in with a best guess.

Outcome:

• Fields extracted: The fields are available to the steps that follow, with anything unreadable listed rather than silently defaulted — which is what stops a bad extraction becoming a confident wrong answer three steps later.

Step 3: Your review, and what it changes

The run ends with a person, not with a result being filed.

Key Tasks:

• Asking a specific question: It asks “Did this tell you anything you did not know?” rather than for a rating. A question about this run is answerable; a score out of five is not.
• Keeping the correction: What you change is recorded against the case that produced it, so the disagreement is retrievable rather than absorbed.
• Building the evaluation set: Those cases become what the agent is measured on. It is scored against your judgement rather than against a general benchmark.

Outcome:

• A measured agent, not an assumed one: The cases Competitor News Aggregation handles well and the cases it does not are both visible, and the second list is the one that decides what changes. Nothing is retrained silently on the back of a single correction.

Why use Competitor News Aggregation?

• A batch is one run, not a hundred: It works the whole set in a single pass and returns a row per item with its verdict, so the volume that needs no attention never has to be opened.
• Runs without being remembered: It starts every monday at 08:00, on its own. The work stops depending on whoever used to carry it in their calendar.
• Corrected by the people using it: After each run it asks “Did this tell you anything you did not know?”. Those answers become the evaluation set, which means it is measured against your judgement rather than ours.
• Reads and reports, does not act: It returns a result for review rather than writing changes back on its own. Anything that moves money, alters a contract or reaches a customer needs human approval first.
• Structured results, not prose: All 2 artefacts are structured — by competitor and the weekly read — so a result can be scanned, sorted and acted on instead of read end to end.