Commission filings are a goldmine of competitive intelligence. When a competitor wins a contract, it shows up in testimony. When a regulator pushes back on their approach, it's on the public record. When a utility compares vendors in an RFP response, your competitor's name appears right there in the document. With Halcyon, you can track all of it automatically.
Setting Up Your Alert
Select the commissions where your competitors are active. If you know a competitor is strong in certain states, prioritize those commissions. If you're less sure of their footprint, start broad — you may be surprised where their name surfaces.
In the Search keyword field select ANY OF and enter each competitor's primary name along with any subsidiaries, affiliates, or product names they're known by. A company that recently went through an acquisition may appear under its old name in older filings and its new name in recent ones — include both.
For cadence, a weekly alert tends to work well for competitive monitoring. There's usually enough volume to make each digest worthwhile, without the noise of daily updates. Run a one-week lookback test first to get a sense of how frequently your competitors appear, then adjust from there.
Writing Your Query
The goal with competitive monitoring isn't just to know that a competitor was mentioned — it's to understand the context. Were they cited favorably in a commission order? Did a utility reference them as an incumbent vendor? Did a regulator raise concerns about their approach? Well-written queries can surface all of that:
From these documents, summarize when {competitor name} is mentioned in any filings. {Competitor name} may also be referenced as {insert affiliate names or names of products}. Extract the jurisdiction, the date filed, the entity that filed, and a brief excerpt showing how {competitor name} was referenced. Note whether the mention appears in the context of a procurement decision, a rate case, a compliance matter, or another type of proceeding.
Once you have initial results, you can go deeper. Click into any cited docket to read the full filing in context. If a utility has already selected a competitor as a vendor, use a docket filter on that proceeding to trace the full history — when the contract was approved, what the commission required, and how the relationship has evolved. That's your roadmap for the next procurement conversation.
Conclusion
Your competitors are making moves in commission proceedings every week — new contracts, new testimony, new regulatory scrutiny. Halcyon turns that public record into a structured, timely intelligence feed so you always know where they're winning, where they're struggling, and where the next opportunity for you might be.
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