Digital information gives companies space to expand

Every business can use intelligence to improve its operations. What tends to differ from organisation to organisation, however, is the kind of information being processed by the business. One form of information is common to all of them, however: spatial information.

Indeed, the impact of place on business is enormous. After all, every business is located in place, as are its customers, its staff and its suppliers.

Eamonn Doyle, chief technology officer at Esri Ireland, said that, typically, spatial information was seen as the domain of large organisations, but that this need not be the case.

“Esri Ireland is best known for implementing its ArcGIS Systems at large organisations such as utilities, government departments and local authorities, but in fact, we also have a range of products that are aimed at SMEs who wish to use geography to better understand their business,” he said.

Doyle said that when he visits organisations, he often notices that they will have a map on the wall with pins in and areas outlined in red marker.

This is typical, because in fact nearly every organisation has a certain ‘geography’ to its operations. This could be, for example, what its distribution area is, where its outlets are, where its staff or customers are. All these are important factors in optimising operations and gaining efficiencies.

This is an obvious area where intelligent processing can be brought to bear.

“Usually, however, companies are using the paper map on the wall to visualise these factors and maybe an Excel spreadsheet or two to record customer addresses, for example. After all, what company doesn’t use Excel,” Doyle said.

Esri Ireland works to move businesses from this ad hoc approach to one that reveals patterns, thereby unlocking value.

“So, we are all about digitalising that information. Putting the wall map in your browser or mobile phone as an interactive, slippy map that is clickable to interrogate your company information or, for example, taking the customer addresses from the spreadsheet and putting them as pins on the map.

“Think about having a Google map – but with your own stuff on it,” he said.

Once this is done, a company can have a new insight into their information; a geographical insight whereby they can relate customers, prospects, staff, routes, sales areas, retail outlets and so on to each other in space through the medium of the map.

And there is more, said Doyle.

“And once you do that, then you can start to look at: are there clusters of customers that we should move from one sales territory to another or from one retail outlet to another? Are our retail outlets actually in the right place? Are our sales territories rightsized for our sales team?”

Esri Ireland can layer in more information to reveal even deeper patterns, including census, demographic, lifestyle and economic information allowing businesses to see what their local market is like in terms of target customers or disposable income.

“And for logistical operations – what’s the most efficient way for a salesperson to visit a given set of customers or prospects, what route should they follow and in what sequence? And the same for jobs: how can we get our operatives to our scheduled jobs in the most efficient way possible,” Doyle said.

This does not require learning new and complex applications, he said, noting that all of these questions can be answered and reported on in familiar Microsoft tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, PowerBI, SharePoint and Dynamics.

Indeed, Esri has engineered a series of ‘plug-ins’ for these products in collaboration with Microsoft.

“This means that for SMEs who are probably using these products or have an Office365 subscription, they can access a certain level of ArcGIS functionality for free or if they want to go further with our technology, they can upgrade to our SaaS which will give them even more functionality,” Doyle said.

“This is a compelling opportunity for those who want to dip their toe in geographical information systems and digital mapping, but who don’t necessarily have the budget for the ‘big iron’ system that we supply to larger organisations,” he said.