GIS and Location-based Business Intelligence Solutions
Business intelligence and market analysis data are fundamentally geographic in nature
Location is a unifying theme in business. Location can be an address, a service boundary, a sales territory, or a delivery route. All these things can be visualized and interactively managed and analyzed in a GIS. Spatial relationships, patterns and trends reveal invaluable business intelligence and bring easy-to-understand visualization to business applications. Use GIS to answer basic or sophisticated question on how to improve businesses workflow, management, and ROI.
Executive Summary
Problem
CRM, ERP, SCM, and FSM are acronyms for Business Intelligence solutions designed to extract and analyze information from data warehouses and allow decision-makers to perform at a higher level of efficiency. But data on it's own has no value. Without simple visual ways to integrate, display and analyze, you end up with massive amounts of data but no information.
Solution
Business Intelligence data and analysis typically remains a high-level tool for executives and financial managers who can comb tabular data and understand numeric statistical analysis. However much of BI analysis is based around location and can hence be displayed and analyzed visually throughout an organization - from executives to line-of-business managers, to call-centers, to support desk workers.
Location awareness can be incorporated into front & back office applications, field operations, supply-chains, and online customer service. GIS and location technologies can be used in sales and marketing, transportation and logistics, inventory management and procurement, customer relationship management, retailing, manufacturing, claims and risk management, health care, real estate and more.
Like Business Intelligence, Enterprise GIS systems are business process driven, integrating with ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications.
Examples Applications of GIS in Traditional Business
Extracting the maximum value from a GIS requires more than just publishing map layers to a web-mapping site. GIS delivers real value when integrated with an enterprise's traditional line-of-business data and applications. Farallon's systems integration solutions include:
- Targeted Marketing and Market Analysis
- A GIS integrated with your existing CRM lets you visually identify your most valuable customers, visualize demographic correlates with sales, and then target where new customers with similar demographic characteristics are located. This can be used to predict sales, design sales territories, choose store location, and tailor marketing campaigns and sales techniques in a region with better allocation of resources.
- Routing and Logistics
- GIS network analysis lets businesses track vehicles and inventory, analyze delivery patterns, generate best-routing maps, predict and adjust for road volumes, project station resources based on pick-up density and activity, and manage transportation fleets & logistics.
- Commercial Real Estate Feasibility & Planning
- GIS lets you quickly determine the best locations for services centers, stores, warehouses, or corporate offices, based on proximity to customers, transportation infrastructure, demographics, location of competitors, environmental risk factors, etc.
- Customer Service Infrastructure
- Location information is critical for customer service. It answer basic questions like how long will it take to deliver a product or is there a store nearby. You can also use it to monitor and adjust customer-service levels by region. Or call center staff can deliver location and map data to the field workforce.