Why Would We Need A Geospatial Strategy Anyway?

Location has been at the center of important business decisions for a century. Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, famously had a pilot’s license, and he used to spend Saturday afternoons flying over towns where he wanted to open new stores, with a colleague in the co-pilot’s seat, scouting for good Wal-Mart sites by watching traffic flows and shopping patterns from the air.

Location has been quietly slipping into our daily digital lives for a decade — Uber and Lyft only exist because of location analytics, along with DoorDash, Map-My-Run, and real-time weather alerts.

What internet networking firms and other geographically minded companies are seeing is a leap — the leap every company will ultimately need to take. It’s taking a geographic approach toward decision-making at every level — who are our customers? How do we find them, how do we serve them, what do we serve them? How can we be more efficient in how we use energy, while assessing climate-related risks to our global operations? How do we trace every step in the product lifecycle to meet quality, transparency, sustainability, and social responsibility standards—both to save our own resources and to limit our impact on the environment?

The leap involves thinking of geography not as a spot on a map, not as a single attribute, but as a framework.

You don’t simply put dots on a map – your assets, your distribution centers, your clusters of customers – you use geography to ask questions about your whole business. You use geography, in fact, to operate your business.

Eighty-five percent of global internet traffic runs through the equipment provided by one Fortune 500 company specializing in cloud networking and cybersecurity. It has customers in 138 countries, with 20 million physical locations connected to the internet.

No one wants their online access interrupted, even for a few moments, and internet access is so essential to this firm’s customers, they offer guaranteed 2-hour and 4-hour service restoration contracts — if something goes wrong, customers receive the replacement equipment and the service technician on-site to get reconnected within 2 hours, or 4 hours.

To do that, this industry leader relies on a global network of 1,400 warehouses, filled with $12 billion in spare parts and equipment, and 3,000 field technicians.

The question is: How do you organize the warehouses, the parts, the delivery drivers, and the service techs, to jump into action for any one of those customers, whether it’s New York City at one in the afternoon, or Jakarta at four in the morning?

As it turns out, this company relies on a system that pulls in information from a dozen different databases and sources and that keeps track of everything: Where the customers are. What equipment they have. What replacement equipment they might need. Where the service techs are. Even what the real-time traffic and weather are like — to help route parts and technicians, because traffic delays can be critical in meeting a two-hour service guarantee in the world’s traffic-clogged metro areas.

At the root of the system is a technology that is 2,000 years old and also at the cutting edge of the most innovative tools available today: A map. Geography. The whole system — a major networking provider’s ability to fulfill a powerful promise to its customers at internet speed, its ability to know what parts it has, where its techs are, what customers to service from which depots — relies on a single starting point: Location. The location of everything.

Foundational to this corporation’s exemplary premium service delivery is a modern geographic information system (GIS). In an era of ever-multiplying digital tools, GIS is the opposite: It’s a way of fusing – magnetizing, actually – the power of all the other tools together. GIS is a framework for pulling all kinds of data – from sources as diverse as spreadsheets, drones, and satellite photos – into a single visual dashboard, and then asking questions and making decisions. Not, where are my spare parts? But rather, do I have what it takes to service this critical customer in Austin, Texas — and if I don’t, what are the gaps? How can I fill them?

GIS can also help businesses answer questions critical to profits and growth.

The third largest fast-food chain in the U.S. by sales, behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks, is legendary for three things: its sandwiches, the devotion of its customers, and the length of the drive-through lines those two things combine to create. This famous restaurant’s drive-through queues often wrap around its parking lots and spill onto adjacent streets, with dozens of cars waiting 20 minutes or more.

You also see cars weaving around the drive-through line to park and go inside. You see delivery trucks trying to pull in and unload. And you see all the rest of a town’s traffic — cars, trucks, buses that have nothing to do with the chain itself – trying to navigate around its popularity.

A GIS-trained market research analyst with the chain started visiting locations in person, and what he saw was the jangle of wild success: customers, staff, the supply chain, logistics, all bumping up against each other. He knew everything about each of those categories, but in separate divisions of the company. What was so clear on the ground at a given restaurant was that they needed to be seen together — as a single portrait of a store or region.

The only way to do that: Geography.

When was each store busiest? How did that fit with traffic patterns on adjacent roads? What arrangement of drive-through lanes and windows worked best? How do you keep parking lots accessible? How do you put staff in drive-through lanes with iPads to take orders before customers arrive at the service window? How do you get sandwiches and chicken nuggets resupplied to each store without wasting time or fuel?

You can even use overhead imagery to see when you’re driving customers away — what times of day are so busy that customers roll up, find the parking lot full or the drive-through line too long, and drive off.

What a GIS system does is allow you to integrate oceans of data to answer those kinds of questions with a few mouse clicks, rather than days of poring over screens of computer data from different systems, in different formats.

It’s the difference between the old-fashioned filmstrips of 1970s middle-school and streaming video on Netflix.

Initially, there was just a single GIS division at the famed franchise, with 9 people, using it. Today, they’ve created 36 different custom apps for staff, and hundreds of people across 43 different divisions of the company use GIS, the way they use any other enterprise-wide system. On their laptops, in the office, and on their phones, in the field. They are now trying to stay out in front of their own success.

Five years ago, the company had $8 billion in sales. Last year, it had $17 billion.

Average sales at a typical freestanding restaurant are $7.1 million a year. That’s not just more than any other fast-food franchise, it’s 40% more than the typical U.S. McDonald’s (No. 2, at $5 million per restaurant), more than triple the typical Chipotle ($2.2 million). A lot of things feed into that popularity, but as the lines at grand-openings for new restaurants suggest, location intelligence is key.

A global internet network and fast food drive-throughs seem like they could not be more different. One helps manage terabytes of digital traffic circling the whole world with customers in 138 countries, at 20 million buildings—offering guaranteed service and equipment replacement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The other produces a famous sandwich from its 2,700 restaurants every 16 seconds.

What they share is geography.

All the digital advances, all our digital tools, aside — most every part of a business connects somewhere in the physical world; the more each understands the interconnections of place, the better they’ll understand their business, their customers, their opportunity.