Corporate Immunology protects your company by effectively giving it an immune system.

Corporate Immunology is Onley Group's groundbreaking organisational setup. It is a department consisting of a specific configuration of employees with a certain mix of skills, organised in a certain way, with one main focus: to protect your company.

Processes:

• Routine competitor analysis
• Pattern recognition in competitors
• Routine market data pooling
• Market trend pattern recognition
• Monthly survey of new relevant legislation & parliamentary bills
• Testing new strategy against legislation
• Routine comparison of company departments' actual performance with expected performance
• Information leak control
• Network security
• Access control of websites

Corporate Immunology departments are designed to constantly monitor your competitors and your target markets and identify threats very early on as soon as certain tell-tale signs emerge. They are an early warning system giving your company time to react.

Corporate Immunology also looks inside your own company to identify departments and employees that are a little off-track or off-target so you can help there before problems grow. It also looks at the legal landscape identifying changes and potential conflicts to ensure your company is as safe as possible from litigation.

It is an "afferent arm" of your company. The department's role is to identify problems and flag up potential difficulties. This information is passed on to the people in the company that deal with strategy (such as your CEO) to react accordingly. This way the Corporate Immunology department can focus on detecting problems quickly without getting tied up in contingency planning.

Corporate Immunology has been designed to be scalable. It requires just a few employees to do the job properly for a medium sized company, and a few dozen for a large company. As circumstances differ between companies, guidance from Onley Group consultants is required to set appropriately configured Corporate Immunology departments up.

If you think your business can benefit from Corporate Immunology, contact us to get things started.

Example scenarios of how Corporate Immunology can work for you:

Internet Service Provider and the Digital Economy Bill:

An internet service provider (ISP) had the majority of its customers in the 18-30 year old bracket. The ISP is aware that a significant number of these regularly engage in peer-to-peer file sharing. The ISPs policy was to act purely as a data conduit and is not responsible for how users use their internet connection.

Two years before the Digital Economy Bill reaches the press, the "Digital Britain" report was in consultation. Early versions of the report were picked up by the ISPs Corporate Immunology department, and further details were clarified via a Freedom of Information request placed by the department. The department identified the suggestion that a bill would be passed where customers suspected of illegal file sharing could have their internet connection cut off by court order without fair trial. The department identified that this could potentially result in the loss of 5-12 per cent of long-term customers.

The information was passed to the ISPs strategists. They identified that by offering customers some form of insulation against disconnection orders they could potentially capture more of the market - should the bill be passed - by building consumer confidence. The ISP examined the legislation and announced that it would only disconnect customers where the level of proof stated in the court order was sufficient to satisfy the bill clauses, significantly increasing the time required for cases to be built against their customers. The resultant press interest gave the company much free PR when the Digital Economy Bill was eventually passed.


Restaurant chain and plateau sales:

A restaurant chain was undergoing a programme of expansion opening new chains in new towns. Despite increasing chain size by a quarter, revenues remained flat. Most of the new outlets boasted good early customer numbers, therefore the flat revenues were not due to the new outlets.

During routine market data pooling The Corporate Immunology department picked up an early-warning market-trend pattern: the amount of revenue per customer was beginning to decrease in some of the outlets. Further examination of these outlets revealed that they all were in areas with similar demographics: predominantly young person towns, student towns and C2DE economic areas. The cause was the knock-on effect of the early UK recession, reducing disposable income.

The information was passed to the company's CEO along with a list of at-risk outlets. The outlets at risk of most significant decline were closed and resources redistributed to new outlets. Some of the planned outlets in towns with a similar demographic to the affected outlets, were postponed. A new menu with additional lower-priced items was developed to support customer numbers for outlets where customer numbers were forecast to fall during the recession but pick up again afterwards. Overall revenues began to increase.


Advertising design firm and the spin-off employee:

A successful advertising campaign and graphic design firm had a large list of regular clients. A number of the firm's employees had gained a reputation for leading particularly successful and creative campaigns and clients were beginning to preferentially ask for these employees.

The Corporate Immunology department identified a new competitor in the market through routine competitor analysis. This competitor was based primarily online. WHOIS analysis identified that the new competitor business belonged to one of the successful graphic designer employees.

The Corporate Immunology department identified a shift in pattern of the clients the employee was choosing to do work for: he had begun selecting young but fast growing companies who were first-time advertising design clients. The Corporate Immunology department became suspicious that the employee was trying to build links with clients most likely to follow the employee over to his competing graphic design business with the plan to resign and take the clients with him. Similar patterns were observed in two other employees who worked in the same office.

The Corporate Immunology department analysed the three employees' existing contracts. There was an absence of no-compete clauses. The contracts stated that the employees were employed "at will". All the information was passed to the CEO who called a meeting with the employees concerned. The CEO offered the employees a fixed term contract on increased pay with a no-compete clause on existing clients to prevent the employees from taking clients away from the company. Two accepted. The employee who owned the competing business did not accept and his contract was terminated with the company, protecting the company against further client loss.

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