Methods for Competitor’s Analysis

Abstract

To have knowledge about products manufactured by competitors at the market could gain competitive advantages for a company and is important for product development as well as marketing and sales. Methods for competitor’s analysis are proposed by this work for a large company in the dental implant industry. The methods include; surface characterization by AES, SEM, EDX and IM, material characterization by study of hardness and grain sizes, analysis of mechanical properties by looking at insertion and failure torques, evaluation of user friendliness by study of surgical manuals and packaging, and study of the marketing of the implants. 13 commercially available dental implants, from established manufacturers like Straumann and Biomet 3i and low-cost manufacturers like Adin and Southern Implants, were selected for testing to be able to evaluate these analysis methods and to gain information about the implants. It was also studied whether there were any differences, e.g. in quality, between established and low-cost manufacturers. By the use of the above mentioned methods it was possible to obtain a lot of information about the different implants and also to distinguish between them. The most interesting result was the clear quality difference between the established and the low-cost manufacturers in terms of amount of contamination and debris detected at the implant surface, where the low-cost implants were shown to have the highest amount of both. Some of the implants from the large brands also got marks such as very low failure torque or failure mode compromising the extraction of the implant in case of failure. However, even though these competitor’s methods performed well it would be interesting to extend this study to also include for example fatigue testing and evaluation of clinical studies available. The discussion in chapter 5 contains an interesting evaluation of each method and implant in this study with comparisons made between the implants. To complete this work, the results should also be compared against the implants manufactured by the company.