When one link in a supply chain breaks unexpectedly, executives with visibility into the entire network excel at launching backup plans to minimise disruption and protect sales. For those without supply chain visibility, desperation can set in quickly.

That happened this summer when one business seeking a new supplier of refined sunflower oil emailed a Georgia farm, as reported by Civil Eats. The business requested 50,000 metric tons per month, but the farm’s average output fell a bit short: 34 metric tons a year.

Until recently, Ukraine had been a go-to exporter of sunflower oil, which is used as cooking oil and in packaged foods and cosmetics. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent companies scrambling for alternate supplies.

When the unexpected occurs—whether it’s a war, a natural disaster, or a pandemic—manufacturers, distributors, and retailers must pivot with remarkable speed. Today’s supply chain executives have discovered they need more than inventory management solutions geared toward stocking warehouse shelves.

Those who stay ahead of supply chain disruptions use geographic information system (GIS) technology to see where materials and finished goods are in the supply chain, and test trade-offs between factors such as suppliers, costs, speed to market, and net-zero goals.

Mapping Every Step toward Supply Chain Visibility

Supply chain visibility has been key to overcoming recent disruptions. But a logistics strategy grounded in visibility isn’t just about navigating extreme moments; it also helps executives deliver products to market under calmer circumstances.

Speaking at a recent supply chain industry conference, one pharmaceuticals executive stressed the importance of mapping all phases of a company’s supply chain, from planning to procurement, manufacturing to distribution.

Only when executives have a clear picture of each supply link can they effectively manage their network, according to McKinsey. The consulting firm says three practices are key to avoiding supply chain disruptions: visibility, scenario planning, and comprehensive, reliable data.

Global leaders in manufacturing, distribution, and retail use GIS technology for all three.

A Complex Picture, Simplified

GIS acts as a single source of truth for locations throughout the supply chain—showing shipping routes, distribution centers, and supplier facilities across every stage of production. GIS treats each as an information layer that executives can toggle on or off on smart maps, creating the visibility needed to understand complex global relationships.

When unexpected events occur—or even before they do—planners use the technology to run what-if scenarios, weighing the outcomes of changing a route, a supplier, or a strategy. The data science behind those GIS simulations is called GeoAI–or geospatial artificial intelligence. As Esri’s Wendy Keyes explained in a recent WhereNext Think Tank:

GeoAI can be used in tandem with another GIS technique that displays complex supply chain relationships in intuitive knowledge trees. Such visuals help business leaders understand how an event’s effect on one supply tier will ripple to others. Seeing that information in a geographic context can illuminate key dependencies among suppliers and strengthen contingency plans.

No matter how the next disruption develops, companies that manage supply chain data in GIS will be prepared. With that foundation, executives can visualise critical links and plan effectively by modeling scenarios before taking decisive action.

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

In his book The Raging 2020s, author Alec Ross posed a question that hints at the current state of global business: Does every company now need its own state department? Global 2000 business leaders are confronting a complex international landscape in which risks—and opportunities—can come from any direction, with little or no preamble.

It was a wake-up call like no other: Ask a global supply chain executive or COO what types of scenarios keep them up at night, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear about the 2011 floods in Thailand.

Awareness to Mitigate Losses

A McKinsey study found that firms that plan ahead for climate-related incidents can limit revenue losses to 5 percent, versus losses of 35 percent for unprepared players.

GIS technology provides business decision-makers with situational awareness through location intelligence, weaving layers of information into one view. Real-time data on weather threats, the status of facilities, and patterns of past storms act like an intelligent nervous system that helps C-suite leaders understand the impacts and know how to respond effectively and quickly.

GIS-based smart maps can even forecast weather impacts on a specific product component or raw material, allowing organizations to issue warnings or shift production to secondary suppliers. Companies including AT&T and one of the world’s largest retailers rely on GIS analysis to understand weather-related threats across networks of stores or cell towers.

Seeing the Threat Matrix in the Global Supply Chain

By toggling data layers on or off, an executive can study threats posed to specific geographic areas or particular tiers of the supply chain.

If flooding is threatening the east coast of Asia, an executive can focus on that region and consult infographics alongside the map to see how many plants and suppliers will be affected. By tracking the goods and components produced by each facility in the supply chain, a GIS dashboard reveals how downtime at a plant producing fasteners or seat levers will affect the flow of finished goods at a factory thousands of miles away.

With GIS technology, decision-makers can also turn on data like COVID infection rates to understand other risks to the business.

Each piece of supply chain data is useful on its own, but data becomes more valuable when viewed in the context of geography and broader impact. GIS dashboards create that comprehensive view, pulling together multiple data sources and yielding the insight that businesses need to build resilient supply chains that are as agile as they are efficient.

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

Consumer behaviours and interests are changing too fast for historic “set it and forget it” market analysis to keep up. Companies stay relevant during changing times by excelling at sensing trends and creating new products and services to answer emerging needs.

Whatever the industry, spotting trends and responding effectively to those signals requires the right mix of data, analysis, and business agility. Location intelligence generated by geographic information system (GIS) technology adds an important dimension to that practice, enriching an organization’s decisions with a broad scope of consumer data and the ability to reassess market conditions wherever, whenever.

Imagine antennae smart enough to capture how customer needs and preferences are evolving from week to week or from month to month. Then, picture decision-makers enhancing experiences and product lines in response to those signals. Unlocking that potential starts when organizations design the right blueprint for change.

Customer Understanding Must Be Current and Local

Some innovative companies already zero in on consumer signals to predict demand for new businesses and service lines. Consider Airbnb, which added monthly stays to its offerings when the pandemic fuelled interest in lodging for workcations and other creative alternatives to the monotony of home confinement. DoorDash grew its provider base by launching a white-label delivery solution geared to small, local restaurants—a response to the growing demand for take-out food options. Both companies listened to the changing needs of customers and suppliers, then adapted quickly.

Other businesses are using location intelligence generated by GIS to reveal changing customer interests in certain locations. A GIS analyst can cull data on foot traffic patterns, for instance, to discern the demographics and psychographics of people who frequent the area. Product- or service-based businesses have used that insight to establish new locations, plan store merchandise, and dynamically shift pickup and delivery options. Now industry leaders are using it to develop entirely new offerings at a pace that matches the market.

Wherever a company falls on the digital spectrum, layering location intelligence into an iterative approach to business growth provides a new way to understand consumers.

Digital-First Companies Seek New Data Sources to Spot New Business Opportunities

The digital enterprise is inherently grounded in data. From their founding, these organisations have maintained connections with customers via websites, apps, social media, email, and other channels. Through those touchpoints, digital-first companies sense trends even as they’re taking shape. They see when customers gravitate to a new style of eyeglasses on an augmented reality app, for example, or when social media chatter indicates growing interest in a new type of service. Even so, that system is only as good as the data feeding it. Listening to additional information channels can help digital enterprises further personalise products and services.

That ability counts for a lot. While 93 percent of companies rely on survey-based metrics to measure customer experience, only 6 percent of leaders are confident their system is actually enabling strategic and tactical decision-making. For some digital organisations, the answer may be to rely on not just information gathered through existing connections, but also a wider range of data, on a more frequent basis. Additional capabilities like location intelligence help reveal nuances in customer preferences that can lead to valuable business opportunities.

Through GIS technology, companies can capture and analyse data to evaluate where their consumers are coming from and what their interests are. By mining online searches or social media feeds, for example, the founders of an upcycled apparel brand might identify hidden demand for fair-trade beauty products in certain geographies and develop a line of skin care products to complement their apparel business.

A GIS analyst can create smart maps of emerging demand patterns, buyer preferences, demographics, and psychographics to assess any market—not just during a company’s initial foray into the market, but on an ongoing basis. By reading those geographic signals on a more frequent basis, a company can stop being reactive and start adapting based on what’s likely to happen next, deepening connections with customers and prospects.

The ability to sense the market direction helps even the most digital enterprise continue creating customer experiences that strengthen engagement, engender loyalty, and differentiate brands.

With location-based insight, businesses can tailor service and product offerings to emerging interests in specific markets.

Brick-and-Mortar Operations Tap into New Levels of Understanding

The days of assessing a trade area or addressable market before moving in, then putting that analysis on the shelf, are long gone. Effective selling now requires an understanding of where customers are best engaged as well as how and when to interact with them in meaningful ways.

Brick-and-mortar or omnichannel companies that rely on traditional market analysis now have access to new sources of data around human movement, location intelligence, and consumer transaction trends—as well as the technology to assess that data seamlessly.

This doesn’t mean businesses must unlearn everything they know. Instead, companies can build on a foundation of demographic and psychographic data by incorporating more digital capabilities that round out customer understanding through location intelligence. When a store uses GIS to analyse and visualise information, it can in turn offer more tailored experiences that deliver exactly what people want, exactly where they can derive the highest value from it.

During the pandemic, executives at a company that provides vehicle services may have sensed customers’ reluctance to visit repair shops. With the help of location intelligence and an agile team, the executives could launch a mobile business delivering at-home services like oil changes or minor repairs. The analytical capabilities of GIS allow innovative companies to plan service and delivery networks so that employees travel efficiently through the workday and reach customers when they’re expected.

The GIS team at a beauty supply chain might analyse recent foot traffic data and discover that store customers often visit a salon before or after their shopping. To capitalise on that demand, the company might pilot in-store salons in geographic markets where the trend is most pronounced.

GIS-backed location intelligence shows brands where customers are located along with what people in those areas value, how they prefer to shop, and how preferences change across months or years.

Meeting Consumers on Their Journey Begins with Better Data

For digital leaders, reliance on data from direct customer interactions—whether a sales transaction history, in-app behaviour, or human movement—is giving way to a more holistic approach.

Well-rounded, recurring market analysis allows organisations to grow faster than market average by continually adding more tailored products and services that capture the interests of new and existing customers. Wherever a company falls on the digital spectrum, its analysts and decision-makers can respond better to customer interests and innovate offerings by incorporating a location-specific customer understanding into their business planning.

This article was originally published on the global edition of Wherenext

If a fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, the saying goes double when it comes to data. Any CIO footing the bill for enterprise technology is keenly aware of how much it costs, but do they know the value of the data on which those systems run? Generally, no. For truly data-centric organizations, this may soon become an essential practice.

Though just 16 percent of business assets are tangible nowadays, few firms have been able to successfully value the data that represents one of their greatest intangible assets. The traditional business balance sheet is partly to blame. There, physical assets like buildings and vehicle fleets are valued explicitly, while data assets tend to be valued implicitly. But that scheme gives short shrift to the primary asset of the digital age. If data assets are in disrepair, a company might not give them due attention because their value isn’t obvious, and doesn’t carry a clear balance sheet consequence like a failing HVAC unit or an underperforming store would.

To bring valuation practices in line with the times, some executives are trying to put a value on their data. A pioneer in this movement is a government-owned company in the UK, and its early work on establishing the monetary value of data should make business leaders take notice.

Talking to the Business about Data  

Highways England is the UK’s governmental organization charged with operating, maintaining, and improving England’s 4,300 miles of motorways and major A roads, which carry over two thirds of all freight. Its mission is to connect the country and increase the safety and reliability of these major highways.

Leaders of the organization have cut a new trail by bringing together different groups to understand and assign a monetary value to data, and arrive at a common business language to justify data investments. Don’t be surprised if business leaders in the private sector end up following this lead.

Highways England has assessed over 60 datasets that create value for internal and external stakeholders, including any group that depends on road transit—logistics providers, retailers, manufacturers, major transport hubs, commuters, local authorities, and data consumers.

During the evaluation process, its analysts discovered that the geospatial data about its road network was a particularly high-value dataset, covering everything from real estate to bridges to work trucks to the places where weather events occurred and the actual roads in the network. But it took a bit of a maverick to set the organization on a path to measuring that data’s monetary value.

“What we wanted to do is make data a bit more visible to the organization and to our people, our suppliers—from a perspective that they understand, which tended to be finance,” says Davin Crowley-Sweet, the agency’s chief data officer.

Investments in Location Data Multiply Value

Crowley-Sweet joined the agency two years ago after a long stint in the railway sector, where he became interested in the concept of generating value from data by treating it as an asset. Once at Highways England, he decided to do an experiment to uncover the types of data stakeholders prioritized, as well as the financial value of that data.

By gaining a common understanding of data’s value, he reasoned, the organization could better structure its investments in protecting, maintaining, and building this critical asset.

During the first stage of the assessment, Highways England pegged the value of its physical road infrastructure at £115 billion, and the intangible value it delivered to the country at £200 billion, according to Crowley-Sweet. Then they faced an even more difficult question: what proportion of that intangible value was derived from data?

“If our accounting rules were written in a digital era, would we still see data as something that isn’t valued on our balance sheet? My view is no, you wouldn’t. Data would probably be front and center,” he says.

To establish the data’s value, Crowley-Sweet and his deputy Victoria Williams began by calling representatives from every stakeholder group—59 interviews in all. The team talked to local authorities, major transport hubs, and data consumers, and identified the datasets that most supported their activities.

The team supplemented its phone interviews with online surveys to ensure the process was statistically robust. Roughly 300 people weighed in during the nine-month process.

“We asked those stakeholders to rank the Highways England initiatives they valued the most—things like maintaining the road surface and providing traffic flow data,” says Williams, head of data and information governance. The results yielded a measurable preference for each initiative, which the team then used to gauge data dependency, identify enabling datasets, and calculate the economic value created for each stakeholder group.

The value of organizational data came out to just under £40 billion for the top six stakeholders, and approximately £60 billion for all groups combined. The value comes in the form of time saved via traffic notices and roadwork alerts, as well as safety improvements and even reductions in emissions and noise. Crowley-Sweet and the team weren’t sure how members of the organization would react, considering it was the first time anyone had heard a number assigned to the data. People were more accepting than he expected.

He and the team then posed a question to their colleagues: “Our governance structures are geared around managing physical assets, but did you know that our virtual assets are one-third of the value of our physical assets?” The inescapable conclusion: the organization was not paying enough attention to its data assets.

If you find a company that has really good quality data, that's just a mirror image for all of their processes, be it safety, performance, finance, operations. Companies that care about data, they tend to care about everything.

Davin Crowley-Sweet, Highways England

Comparing Physical Apples to Digital Apples

The insight that followed—embedded in these questions posed by the team—couldn’t help but capture the attention of senior leaders:

• Did you know our data is worth four times the value of the technology that houses the data?
• Are we investing in the right proportions to protect and grow that value?
• Or are we just in the business of buying new hardware and software?

One notable revelation: the data that was key to helping the organization reduce operating costs was not the same data that drove customer value. For instance, the organization had traditionally focused on data related to road infrastructure—such as how much it cost to build and maintain new roads. But the data most valuable to stakeholders was information related to traffic flow, traffic speed, and weather events.

“We’ve been able to have a much more customer-focused lens on what datasets we need to focus on and why, which has brought an external dimension to how we view things,” Crowley-Sweet says of the findings.

For example, a lot of road maintenance work is done overnight on the assumption that that’s when traffic is lightest. But in fact, the logistics sector is busy making deliveries at night so that shops have fresh goods in the morning. This insight allowed Highways England to adjust the timing of maintenance tasks.

“Doing this work has also got us to understand much more around what our stakeholders need from us rather than us thinking we’re creating the value,” Williams says.

Highways England plans to repeat its data-valuation exercise every six months or so. For Crowley-Sweet, the effort to assign financial value to data and raise its profile pays off by increasing not just the return on data assets, but in the safety and well-being of stakeholders.

“We want to be sure that when you work with us, you get home to your families and loved ones safely,” he says. “If we’re sending people out to dig holes, I want them to know where the buried cables are. I want them to know where the ditches are, where the tripping hazards are.”

Like much of the organization’s important data, that information is housed in a geographic information system (GIS) that serves it up on smart maps.

The beauty of spatial data is if you ever want to improve your data quality, run a program that puts in a GIS system.

Crowley-Sweet, Highways England

Location Data: The Most Valuable Player

Through their work, Crowley-Sweet and Williams established that on average, a £1 investment in data by Highways England produces £2.7 in economic value for the logistics companies, commuters, transport hubs, and other groups that depend on its roads.

Based on that assessment, they found that of the organization’s 60 data types, geospatial data describing the location of the roads within the network was the most valuable, coming in at a value of £3.2 billion. This dataset is critical for effectively managing traffic, incidents, network capacity, safety, and the environment. Highways England manages it all in GIS.

The next most valuable dataset involved traffic flow, at around £2.3 billion. Road information (accident alerts and other information pushed out to consumers) came to about £2.2 billion. For each type of location data, its intrinsic value grows when stakeholders—commuters, freight drivers, and others—make better decisions and improve efficiency and safety because of it.

Geospatial Data Gold

The valuation exercise helped Highways England spot what many businesses are eager to find—opportunities to bring datasets together and multiply their value.

Whereas a siloed business organization might ask questions like, “Are we on budget?” and “Was the work done on time?” Highways England now aims for higher-level insight such as how much it costs to run the M25. In short, bringing data together enables decision-makers to answer questions about value instead of questions around cost.

“Location gives them a common reference point,” Crowley-Sweet says. “But it’s more than just being able to put things on a map—it’s the ability to link different parts of the organization together to create the type of value that we’re trying to create.”

In Highways England’s case, that means linking the world of assets with the world of finance. Any transaction—for instance, a road repair—incurs a certain cost at a certain location. “So you can start configuring your financial systems to contain elements of spatial data to act as a common denominator,” Crowley-Sweet says. Then, rather than focusing on the cost of discrete transactions in a financial system, the organization can determine the cost to operate a service from location A to location B.

By seeking those patterns across datasets and anchoring financial data to location, “we can start to show a return on our data investments just like you can show return on other investments,” Williams says.

Viewing data as an asset supports our path toward data maturity and enables data-driven investment decisions.

Victoria Williams. Highways England

Changing the Language of Value

In addition to promoting data sharing, the project established a common language for discussing data and its value. “It was about being able to give people the right lexicon—standard terms the business would use to put together a business case for a new investment—so they could have a meaningful conversation and create shared [understanding] around what data means to them,” Crowley-Sweet explains.

Valuing data within Highways England has had the effect of sharpening management’s focus on the stakeholders that are its customers. “We discovered that quite often, what we think is beneficial to the customer is actually not necessarily of true benefit to the customer,” Williams says. Every such revelation has its origins in data, which helps establish and reinforce the data’s value.

Understanding what is happening on the roadways is of immense value to Highways England’s stakeholders, whether that means facilitating the delivery of food and perishable goods, or knowing which roads are open and what condition they’re in. That insight, Crowley-Sweet says, “can really mean some profound consequences to villages and communities being able to survive.”

This article was originally published in the global edition of Wherenext

In the fall of 2018, Bill Kennedy was logging 25,000 to 30,000 steps per day on his Fitbit. That’s an impressive tally under any circumstances, but Kennedy was walking most of those miles on a mountain. The director of land development at Vail Ski Resort in Colorado had spent nearly four decades planning chairlifts, trails, and restaurants at North America’s most popular ski resort, but he had never encountered a project of the scope and urgency he was now facing.

“For [this] size project, a lot of us were skeptical, including myself,” Kennedy says.

The challenge was an epic snowmaking expansion—reportedly the largest in the ski industry. If it had any hope of success, Kennedy and others at Vail would need strong legs, cutting-edge technology, and a close partnership with a mapmaking colleague. But at the outset, no one was sure that would be enough.

The Business Challenge of Nature’s Whims

By skiing standards, Vail is massive. It’s the second-largest single-mountain operation in the United States, spanning more than 5,300 acres. (For comparison, the Northeast’s largest resort covers 1,500 acres.) Vail boasts nearly 200 trails, and its 32 lifts can move 63,000 people every hour.

Much like Vail Mountain itself, the international business behind it is a vast operation. Vail Resorts owns more ski destinations than any company in the world, and its network includes coveted retreats like Colorado’s Breckenridge, Utah’s Park City, British Columbia’s Whistler, and Vermont’s Okemo. Holders of the company’s Epic Pass can resort-hop their way through winter.

Vail’s Rocky Mountain location is a snowy oasis averaging 350 inches a year. Unfortunately, businesses don’t run on averages, and at Vail as at most ski resorts, accumulations can vary widely year to year. During the 2018–19 winter, the mountain saw 281 inches of natural snow. Two years earlier it received just 171. The season’s first flakes might fall in October, November, or even December.

Executives in any business can appreciate the downside to that variability. For ski resorts that operate only part of the year, a predictable and early opening to the season has direct impacts on the bottom line. Resorts that can open four or five weeks before natural conditions would normally allow it can extend their season by 25 percent or more and gain a commensurate revenue boost.

In 2018, Vail’s management decided to fund a snowmaking expansion to improve their odds of delivering the early-season openings guests crave. Kennedy calls it “one of the largest single-year expansions that any ski area has taken on in the world,” an assessment he heard from the vendors who installed the equipment. On order: 19 miles of pipes for air and water, 25 transformers, 421 snow guns, and more. The timeline: have the new snowmaking operational before the 2019 ski season.

Recalling the schedule, Kennedy admits, “We were probably a little bit late getting into the game in the fall of 2018.”

When executives announced the project, the man who had been quietly mapping Vail’s infrastructure was ready.

An Unexpected Path to the Slopes

Mike Krois never dreamed of working on a mountain. He spent his childhood in flip-flops in the desert near Sedona, Arizona, and whenever he imagined his future, it looked sunny and warm. But after graduating from Arizona State University with a degree in economics and not much of a plan, he moved to Vail, a town of fewer than 6,000 residents that attracts more than a million visitors each year.

There, Krois launched a career in the aviation industry, eventually working in locations around the world as a dispatcher for a charter airline. Wherever he went, maps piqued his attention. He collected ski trail renderings and spent countless hours in planes, puzzling over the terrain below.

In 2015, he channeled that interest into a master’s degree in geographic information system (GIS) technology from the University of Denver. Soon after, he took a job at Vail Ski Resort, and found that the concept of location meant different things to different people on the mountain.

“[Ski] patrol has their own terminology, grooming has their own words, snowmaking [too],” he explains.

Ski patrollers would tell Krois over the radio that they were standing near 2903. His response was always the same. “‘You’ve got to tell me what chairlift you’re by, because I don’t know where 2903 is. It’s the old phone that used to be there 20 years ago.’”

To Krois, the situation was clear. Like many businesses that manage physical facilities, Vail’s teams were hamstrung by location folklore, a charming but inefficient way of communicating where assets are and where employees need to be. What they needed was location intelligence. Krois set out to create a common language, and put Vail on a new kind of map.

The ski industry has only just begun to see the value in GIS. People just don’t know what they don’t know. But once you show them what can be done, it can open doors.

Mike Krois, Vail GIS analyst

Creating the Mountain’s Digital Twin

Beginning in 2016, Krois’s challenge was to map the mountain—in essence, to create a digital twin that operational teams and executives could rally around. In part, that meant capturing the knowledge of mountain veterans like Kennedy, who knew the history hidden beneath the snow.

Skiers, snowboarders, and mountain bikers rarely think about the hardware buried safely under their feet. But that infrastructure—including the electrical, water, and air lines that power chairlifts and snow guns—is the circulatory system of the business. Historically, it hadn’t been well documented.

“Decades ago, it was never a thing to track what we did,” Krois explains. “You’d just bury that pipe and move on. A lot of my job was, ‘Go talk to the old operator who did that 25 years ago. He probably has an idea of what happened, and we need to document it and map it.’”

Working with veterans like Kennedy, Krois created the beginnings of the mountain’s digital twin, capturing asset locations in a database and leveraging the ability of GIS technology to create replicas of both natural and built environments. He then used GIS to generate smart maps for employees. Kate Schifani, who runs Vail’s snowmaking operation, says the maps—and the common language they created—have been a boon to her team.

“It really helps with our learning curve for brand-new snowmakers,” she says, “because you can send them out there, and they’ve got the map on their phone, and we can say, ‘Go down this line.’”

“It sounds simple,” Krois adds, “but it goes back to efficiencies. It gets these people up to speed really fast.”

As Krois’s digital-twin work progressed in the back half of 2018, Vail executives approved the massive snowmaking expansion that they hoped would deliver consistent early openings and longer seasons. It was a major investment, and management wanted it done in record time. With hard work and location intelligence to guide them, Kennedy, Krois, and Schifani had a shot at success.

A Business Investment in Predictable Openings

Unlike ski resorts in the eastern US that must make snow all winter, Vail’s snowmaking season starts early and ends by mid-January, when natural snowfall and cold temperatures take over.

The aim is to open the resort in November—often before Thanksgiving. To make that happen, Schifani’s team operates in two 12-hour shifts from October to January. “Without snowmaking, we would still have a great ski season,” she says. “But this year, for example, we would have a great ski season five weeks later than we had thought we would.”

In 2018, Vail’s snowmaking capacity was concentrated near the mountain’s midsection, on trails that were subject to sun exposure and lacked beginner runs. Vail executives focused the snowmaking expansion at the top of the mountain—around 11,000 feet, where temperatures can be 8 to 10 degrees colder, holding snow through the winter. (Counterintuitively, the higher elevations also host beginner trails, which meant Vail could accommodate a broader range of guests earlier in the season.)

That August, Krois huddled with Vail’s planning and operations teams to map the massive expansion in GIS. With digital maps projected on big screens, they plotted where pipes would run and where snow guns would sit along the trails—creating a system that would return at least 75 percent of the water it used to the local watershed. Kennedy describes the weekly meetings as “20 people talking about what was going on and making adjustments on the fly, with Mike sitting there and making those changes.” Kennedy adds, “I’m not a real technology guy, but when it does the things that I saw it doing, I become a believer.”

With the digital plan in place, it was time for a reality check.

Walking the Mountain as the Clock Winds Down

“As much as I try to make it a science to plot out where we put these fans,” Krois says, “it’s equal parts art, because . . . the winds at one area may blow out of the northwest, and then 100 feet up they may blow out of the southwest.”

Determined to blend those subtleties with science, the GIS analyst and the Vail veteran walked the mountain together. Krois used a handheld GPS device to identify the snow gun locations they had planned in the office, and Kennedy used his decades of experience to make tweaks that would ensure skier safety and give Schifani’s team the best chance of making the most snow.

Soon after Krois and Kennedy finished the updates, winter buried Vail Mountain in its splendor. When spring 2019 dawned, the pair began walking the hill again, this time consulting the project’s GIS-based digital twin. Along the way, they drove stakes into the ground to indicate where each new piece of infrastructure should go.

By late spring, all that was left to do was install 19 miles of hardware in the ground, capture every piece’s coordinates in GIS, and open the new-and-improved Vail six months later.

That phase of the project drew on a trusted slate of outside companies—engineers, construction teams, power specialists, and more. As the contractors poured in that spring and summer, digging trenches, burying hardware, and connecting systems, they were guided by the location intelligence Krois had captured in the project plan. Kennedy says the digital tools made a difference.

“The time that we’re saving is immense with the technology,” he says.

As summer 2019 turned into fall, the fickle Colorado skies dealt Krois and the team one final test. Krois was on the mountain with the contractors, capturing GIS data.

“We’re literally installing the last pump house,” Krois recalls, “and it is dumping snow. [We’re] down to the wire getting the system put together.”

With management on edge and thousands of skiers looking forward to opening day, the stakes were high.

“Everyone was holding their breath that we’re going to do this,” Krois says. “And we did.”

When the new system came to life, Kennedy felt a surge of excitement. “This was really a big step for the company and for Vail Mountain,” he says.

Our goal is to use all this technology and make it ultimately easier for us when we're building [the snowmaking system], but [also] easier for the operator to run and operate and visualize and maintain all this equipment long term.

Bill Kennedy, Vail director of land development

Leave the Snowcat, Take the Shovel

The project paid off handsomely that season, and even more so the next. As November 2020 approached, Vail’s executives and operations managers faced a pandemic and a drought. The expanded snowmaking capacity helped them address both.

Through the work of Schifani and her team, Vail opened in November with 200 acres of terrain—more than double its previous early-season capacity. The extra territory was timed well for the era of social distancing, allowing skiers and riders to spread out.

“None of that would have happened on natural snowfall this year,” she explains.

The mountain’s digital twin has also made everyday operations much more efficient for Schifani’s team. During the first week of January, snowmakers realized air wasn’t reaching a set of snow guns. The team needed to manually open a valve housed inside a vault buried underground beneath six feet of snow.

“None of us knew exactly where that vault was,” Schifani says. “If we didn’t have that [mapping] technology, our options basically would have been to get a snowcat and doze out a 30-by-30-foot section of this run.” Then they would have had to painstakingly probe 900 square feet of earth until they struck the vault.

Instead, they used GIS data to identify the vault’s exact location, and quickly accessed it without disrupting the adjacent trail or wasting hours. “It’s way easier to go, “Oh, it’s right here, get the shovel.’” Schifani explains. “Our technology saved us there.”

Schifani’s take on location intelligence: “We use it every day. I don't want to think about having to do this job without it.”

Kate Schifani, Vail snowmaking manager

Hard Work and Technology Drive Success

Everyone involved in Vail’s snowmaking expansion knew the scope and urgency of the challenge, and worked tirelessly to achieve it. Even so, those closest to the project, including Krois, Kennedy, and Schifani, seem convinced that their effort alone wouldn’t have been enough, if not for the location technology supporting them.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine asking a contractor to install equipment somewhere near a phone that no longer exists. Communicating through maps informed by a digital twin of the mountain helped the Vail team and its partners meet a major business milestone with unprecedented speed.

“We wouldn’t have been able to make that plan without the map that basically showed us this is what you need to do,” Schifani says. “But we did, which is great. Because it was an awesome opening.”

This article was originally published in the global edition of Wherenext

The global real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield recently released one of the more comprehensive studies about the impact of COVID-19 on commercial real estate. The report sounded a note of measured optimism about the potential for a full recovery within the decade, while suggesting that some changes are here to stay. With the pandemic unsettling long-held certainties, corporate leaders today must anticipate how present trends like the rise of remote work and office dedensification may play out.

Based on surveys of some of the world’s largest companies as well as analysis of cyclical and structural patterns in the economy, the study found that by 2025, commercial real estate should stabilize to levels of vacancy established before the onset of the coronavirus. But in the short term, negative net absorption—or a net decrease in demand for commercial office space—in the US, Canada, and Europe could reach over 200 million square feet.

The report also contains important clues about how business leaders should respond to geographic and region-specific trends, underscoring the imperative for global companies to incorporate new employment patterns into their work space strategy.

Location intelligence will be instrumental for businesses making decisions both in the short-term, such as how to redesign offices to accommodate returning workers, and in the long-term, like how much of a workforce should remain remote full-time or shift to hybrid models. Understanding the spatial dimensions of these fast-evolving cultural and economic changes can help companies seize opportunities in the market, attract the best talent in the post-COVID-19 world, and maintain staff safety.

A New Strategy for Commercial Real Estate

The Cushman & Wakefield study makes two things clear. In the short term, vacancies will hit all-time highs, increasing downward pressure on rents. But in the long-term, employment growth and a greater concentration of workers in office environments will power a full recovery for the commercial real estate market in five or so years. In addition, the report shows that the location and region where a business operates will have a strong bearing on what its leaders should expect to see in the coming months.

For example, the share of people working from home in the US will permanently rise to roughly 10–11 percent after the pandemic, from around 5–6 percent prior to the onset of the coronavirus. In China, however, the work from home (WFH) trend is far less pronounced and less common in corporate culture: only 0.6 percent of the workforce was WFH before the pandemic, and even if that number were to double following the peak of the virus, the report’s authors expect it would reduce tenant demand only by 2.9 percent.

Business leaders will need to tailor responses according to location data. Companies with office locations in China should, according to the study, expect job office creation to actually accelerate while rents drop through 2021. That insight could lead an executive of a growing company to pursue an aggressive acquisition strategy to capitalize on higher inventory.

In the US, meanwhile, Google is already planning on incorporating hybrid work models and redesigning office space to allow greater flexibility for employees alternating between WFH and working in the office. Other companies inside and outside the tech world are charting a similar course.

Through anonymized data on human movement patterns, indoor location intelligence can guide decision-making about office layout—including the concentration of small, private rooms versus shared, cooperative work spaces, or the best placement of air filters and sanitation stations. Office design will also need to respond to the sudden reversal of the decades-long trend of densification, in which businesses allocated less office space per employee. As social distancing pushes things in the opposite direction, managers will need to recalculate how to accommodate a workforce that is gradually returning to offices.

Some have suggested that another form of dedensification could occur—companies deemphasizing large urban offices and taking leases on suburban satellite locations. But data on that possible trend remains incomplete.

Finding Fertile Ground to Grow

In rethinking location strategies, business decision-makers must consider how the post-COVID-19 office market will intersect with larger movements in demographics and the labour force. Incorporating the findings of a report like Cushman & Wakefield’s into a GIS dashboard—enhanced by historical data on population growth and the regional concentration of industries–could yield important insight for a business looking to either expand or contract.

According to the study, Canada has typically seen most of its office job growth in the resource, financial, and energy sectors. Now, the technology, advertising, media, and information (TAMI) sector is coming to dominate demand. A smart map loaded with data trends in occupancy and labour costs can point an enterprising tech startup—or perhaps a coffee chain or workout studio favoured by technology types—to certain cities with burgeoning tech scenes like Edmonton or the Toronto-Waterloo Corridor.

The Cushman & Wakefield study highlights how nearly every business decision has a location aspect. For executives choosing the right office location and design in a world reshaped by a pandemic, location intelligence illuminates the deeper spatial dynamics at play in decisions about everything from hiring to site selection.

This article was originally published in the global edition of the Wherenext

When the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, expect to see the boss a little less around the office.

That’s one of the findings of a recent global survey tracking how business leaders and influencers are dealing with the pandemic—and what they plan to change in the workplace once the health threat has run its course.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned dashboards and surveys tracking everything from the prospects of second-wave infections to economic consequences of the virus. Now, a global survey of more than 2,000 high net worth individuals and business executives offers rare insight into the mindset of business leaders, including details of their mental well-being, their plans for employees and workplaces, and even how they’ll address their carbon footprints post-pandemic.

Breaking the Grip of Uncertainty

The primary aim of healthcare provider Bupa Global’s “Executive Wellbeing Index” was to take stock of leaders’ mental states across the US, the UK, France, Egypt, the UAE, China, and Hong Kong. In the process, the study revealed much more, creating a fascinating mosaic of executive outlooks. And—not surprisingly when it comes to business attitudes—geography matters.

Take the economic impact of COVID-19. While survey respondents in all countries believe in what you might call a home-court advantage, the size of such favouritism varied widely by location. In the US, 27 percent of executives were optimistic about the domestic economy, while just 22 percent were upbeat about the global economy. In France, 40 percent were hopeful about the domestic economy, while just half as many were optimistic about global prospects. And in Egypt, 57 percent felt good about the country’s prospects, but just 18 percent had faith in the worldwide economy.

Despite having higher hopes for their home economies, executives did not report a general optimism, and their skepticism is likely rooted in pandemic-related uncertainty. To combat the lack of information, some forward-looking business leaders have turned to location technology for local and multinational data during the pandemic.

For example, this gallery of COVID-related smart maps provides location-specific data on everything from pharmaceutical companies working on a vaccine, to virus patterns in Europe, to a business status dashboard for various counties across the US.

Executive Wellbeing: Working on the Work-Life Balance

In the area of wellness, the survey found that work-life balance would likely change for high net worth individuals and business executives. On a personal level, 93 percent said they would strive to improve their balance post-pandemic, with nearly 30 percent planning to work from home most of the time.

By region, intentions varied widely. In Hong Kong, for instance, COVID-19 inspired a mere 35 percent of business leaders and influencers to re-evaluate their work-life balance; in China the number was 47 percent. In France and Egypt, 71 percent were taking stock.

Executives’ evolving personal habits are likely to influence their plans for employees. Here, too, a respondent’s location seemed to shape their plans. US executives were most likely to express interest in rethinking office space and infrastructure plans—suggesting that some employees might end up working from home permanently or on a semi-permanent basis. That inclination was much less common in the UK (28 percent) and Egypt (29 percent).

Building on their personal experiences, many business leaders are finding that the location technology responsible for delivering clarity on COVID-19 conditions is also helping shape the new era of work. Geographic information systems (GIS) are helping office planners create safe seating plans and work schedules, empowering remote workers to check in via mobile devices, and enabling executives to see at a glance where stores are open and how employees are distributed across a network.

Forty-five percent of business executives and influencers vow to maintain a slower pace in their lives once the COVID-19 threat is resolved.

Drawing on lessons learned during the COVID-19 lockdown, Esri UK is adopting more flexible, customer-focused and sustainable ways of working for the future.

By Peter Wilkinson, Esri UK

After months of unprecedented disruption to our lives and businesses, lockdown is now beginning to ease in parts of the UK. Whether we are keenly anticipating the reopening of pubs and hairdressers, planning visits to family, or desperate to dispatch our kids back to school, we are all, one way or another, looking forward to getting back to some sort of normality.

At Esri UK, we are becoming increasingly aware that, as an organisation, we should not simply be aiming to go back to how things were before. Rather, we should be planning to go back to how things could have been before and adopting better ways of delivering services for our customers. Being forced into an unfamiliar situation where we all had to work from home, may have been unsettling at first, but it showed us that we could work remotely and that this approach to delivering services could have long term benefits for our employees, our customers and our planet.

With this is mind, Esri UK is developing a new ‘Remote-First’ approach to delivering Professional Services. We aim to take the lessons learnt over the last three months and introduce new ways of working that deliver value for our customers, our employees and our planet. And whilst there will still be plenty of occasions for face-to-face contact, we are finding a more flexible approach is helping both Esri UK and our customers to improve their ways of working, so that we can all realise benefits in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Becoming more responsive to customer needs

Our experience over recent months has shown us that we can continue to deliver Professional Services while working remotely and, at the same time, be more responsive to our customers’ requirements. Travel arrangements are now much simplified and our consultants can be available at shorter notice to work on a wider range of customer projects. For example, they can work on projects in Aberdeen one day and Plymouth the next, without the usual logistical challenges. We can also put together multi-skilled teams more easily and engage our experts in multiple projects in a far more flexible way than before. During the lockdown, Esri UK successfully delivered a wide range of exciting new projects for customers. The vast majority of these were originally planned as on-site customer engagements, but were delivered remotely using a wide range of collaborative tools.

Looking ahead, a Remote-First approach will open up options for Esri UK to introduce more flexible consultancy packages, for example giving customers the ability to draw on short bursts of our support when they need it, without having to wait until they ‘build up’ sufficient need to warrant a full day’s worth of consultancy. Like our on-site services, our remote consultancy services, will help our customers to innovate, improve their efficiency and deliver new services so that they can grow profitably and succeed in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

During the lockdown, Esri UK successfully delivered a wide range of projects for our customers. The vast majority of these were originally planned as on-site customer engagements, but were ultimately delivered remotely using a range of collaborative tools. For example, at Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) we were one week into their new Customer Advantage Programme when lockdown began. Our working location changed overnight, but we were able to respond by introducing new communication channels from the start, including video calls and instant messaging and ‘virtually’ joining the regular team meetings. Lockdown also changed priorities with a new focus on using ArcGIS Hub to provide information to keep vital services running for healthcare staff and other key workers. We were able to respond quickly and provide additional support whilst continuing to work collaboratively as a team. As the COVID situation evolved, we supported a range of other activities including a successful bid to the Emergency Active Travel Fund to support walking and cycling in the West Midlands.

“ESRI have continued to provide a superb service, despite the changing circumstances. It has been like having an extension of our existing team and I believe we have actually received greater output as a result of the more flexible working and a reduction in travel time” – Stuart Lester, Data Innovation Lead, Transport for West Midlands.

Enabling flexible working for employees

When the lockdown first came into effect, home working was a necessity not a choice, but over time many people have discovered that they enjoy the freedom from commuting, the peace and quiet of a home office and the potential of more flexible working hours. One recent survey, commissioned by Skillcast and conducted by YouGov (May 2020), suggested 68% of people who experienced home working for the first time during lockdown said they would like to carry on working from home after the COVID-19 crisis. 70% believed they could be as productive when working from home as in the office.

Where possible, Esri UK plans to give its Professional Services team the flexibility to be able to work remotely in the future. Lockdown has shown us that we already have all the technology we need to enable our employees to work effectively from home. At the height of the crisis, we were able to continue to deliver solutions for the vast majority of our customers with minimal disruption using a suite of collaboration tools from video calling, online chat and desktop sharing applications to project management, virtual whiteboarding and code sharing platforms. These tools ensured that our customers remained involved and were able to contribute throughout the entire journey. If necessary, consultants could also access customers’ ArcGIS environments in a secure way and implement GIS solutions directly into cloud platforms such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In the post-COVID-19 era, we anticipate that we will be working with a growing number of our customers to help them migrate their ArcGIS platforms to the cloud, so that they can also make it easier for their own employees to work remotely and work from home. The Environment Agency is one example of an organisation that had already migrated its on-premises ArcGIS platform to a cloud-based, managed service prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. As a result, all of the organisation’s 10,000 employees had access to vital flood and environmental data, from home and the field, enabling them to work productively throughout and beyond the lockdown.

Environment Agency employees can access ArcGIS from home and the field, Image ©Environment Agency

Supporting sustainable working practices

Two things that our customers care about increasingly are our ethical and sustainability credentials. More and more of our customers are implementing significant Corporate Social Responsibility programmes that are affecting real organisational change. At Esri UK we are taking a similar approach, and we also want to support our customers’ aspirations. Through our new Remote-First approach to delivering Professional Services, we can reduce our travel, cut our carbon footprint and help our customers to achieve more sustainable supply chains.

We are inspired in particular by the leadership shown by the global insurance company RSA, which has been an Esri UK customer for around 20 years. “How we do business is as important as what we do, and our customers, colleagues and partners rightly ask that we are conscious of this,” writes Stephen Hester, Group Chief Executive of RSA Insurance, in the forward to the organisation’s 2019 Corporate Responsibility Report. As part of RSA’s Confident Futures strategy, the organisation is building social and environmental criteria into its processes for selecting and managing suppliers and, in 2019, it assessed 80% of its suppliers against a range of environmental, social and corporate governance issues. We know that many organisations are taking a similar ethical approach to sourcing products and selecting service providers - and others will follow their lead. In our opinion, remote service delivery is one example of the right ethical thing to do, when travel isn’t absolutely necessary.

That said, we will not stop delivering on-site Professional Services all together. There will still be times when consultants will be able to deliver best value when working physically within a building and alongside an in-house team. However, we do plan to reset the balance between on-site and remote working. COVID-19 has shown us that we can deliver the same high quality consultancy and technical services from our homes that we do in our customers’ offices, while improving the health and wellbeing of our staff and reducing our carbon footprint. At the same time, many of our customers are learning that they can likewise use ArcGIS in the cloud to improve their employee wellbeing and corporate sustainability. So let’s no longer go back to the way things were before - let’s go back to the future instead.

Peter Wilkinson - Esri UK

Peter Wilkinson is Head of Professional Services at Esri UK. In this role, he leads a team of over 100 consultants, developers, architects and project managers who deliver projects to a wide range of customers across multiple sectors. Projects range from one or two days of advice and guidance, to significant programmes of work which run for many years. Pete has been with Esri UK for 20 years having started as a GIS consultant. He has worked in various parts of the business including Presales, Training and Support.

Respond effectively to COVID-19 using authoritative, up-to-date data you can trust with absolute certainty 

These are undeniably uncertain times. The emergence and rapid global spread of the COVID-19 virus has led to unprecedented social distancing measures, placed the healthcare and voluntary sector under immense pressure and forced businesses and emergency services to embrace entirely new ways of working. It is difficult to anticipate when the crisis will abate, how a gradual relaxation of the current restrictions will be implemented and when, or even if, life will return to the way it was before.   

Almost every day, changes are occurring that affect everyone and every organisation. When we tune in to the British Government’s 5pm daily briefing, we could discover that the circumstances we have planned for today will be entirely different tomorrow. In this constantly evolving situation, it is vitally important for all public sector bodies, private sector businesses and not-for-profit organisations to be able to respond and adapt quickly.   

Throughout the UK and the globe, organisations of all kinds are turning to geographic information systems (GIS) to help them make the rapid decisions they need to make in this ever-changing and unpredictable new world. Esri’s ArcGIS platform provides people with the dashboards, apps and tools they need to analyse, forecast and understand the ‘new normal’. Yet technology alone is not enough. Unless people also use appropriate, up-to-date data in their GIS systems, and select that data from authoritative sources, the decisions they make could be flawed.

This is why Esri UK has created a COVID-19 Data Hub that brings together, in one place, a wide range of incredibly useful data sets. This data can be integrated into existing ArcGIS systems or used to create a host of brand new rapid response GIS dashboards and mobile solutions, specifically designed for COVID-19 initiatives. County data can also be viewed online via the hub, in ready-prepared Local Authority Data Reports. 

Easy to use and entirely free of charge, the data hub makes it far easier for people to find the data they need and therefore launch new initiatives in response to COVID-19, more quickly. Most importantly, all of the data in the hub has been carefully curated to make sure that it is the best available data, from reputable sources. By drawing on the data resources in the hub, users can be confident that their data is both up-to-date and authoritative. They can therefore make important decisions with greater certainty.   

The Esri UK COVID-19 Data Hub presents data in five categories: 

• Coronavirus cases
  See where large clusters of cases are still occurring and monitor whether daily deaths are beginning to reach a peak. Use this information to evaluate whether local healthcare services have the capacity for expected patient numbers and to locate community-based services in the right places to meet demand.  
   
• Health 
  Allow users to identify their most vulnerable people, including people with health deprivation and disabilities, low-income households, homeless people and rough sleepers. Draw on this insight to direct the services of voluntary groups and local authorities to those who are most in need of support.
   
• Infrastructure
  Pinpoint the locations of sites where people may congregate such as supermarkets, pharmacies and parks to implement and enforce social distancing measures. See all UK ports and train stations to quickly build new supply chains and distribution networks for importing Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) and other goods to new destinations.
     
• Population
  Find out about average household sizes and UK living arrangements to identify elderly people living alone who may appreciate help with shopping or occasional telephone calls to reduce their feelings of loneliness.   

• Boundaries
  Use boundary data to see which agencies and local authorities are responsible for which groups of citizens and services. Apportion tasks to different voluntary organisations or groups in different locations to ensure that no one is overlooked. 

This COVID-19 Data Hub doesn’t just comprise of carefully curated Open Source data. Esri UK is working with its network of premium data providers, who are making their data freely available throughout this current crisis. For example, as a part of Esri UK’s Disaster Response Programme and Ordnance Survey’s Mapping for Emergencies Programme, Esri UK has been able to make OS MasterMap and VML Vector Basemap services available free of charge, through its Data Hub, for any organisation to use to support COVID-19 related activities until 30th September 2020.   

In addition, Esri UK has engaged with DTN, an industry leader in the provision of weather information, to make rich weather data and 10-day forecast services available through the COVID-19 Data Hub. ArcGIS users can use this data to anticipate the effect sunny weather might have on social distancing during the upcoming May Bank Holidays in our local parks and recreation areas. Critically, organisations will be able to monitor for any extreme weather events – like the flooding experienced earlier this year – that might coincide with the COVID-19 crisis. They can then take steps to help prevent our already stretched emergency services from becoming overwhelmed.  

It is amazing to witness the ingenuity of people who are already using GIS to help solve the problems that our society is facing. There are some great examples of this work in the Esri “Global COVID-19 Community Gallery” which people can draw upon for inspiration to support their own initiatives. However, all this creative work needs to be underpinned by fast access to trusted data, to ensure that GIS professionals spend time analysing and solving problems rather than sourcing and preparing data.   

We are continuing to evolve the data available in the Esri UK Covid-19 Hub, so if you have any suggestions or if the data you need is not already in there, get in touch and we will help you find what you need. Whether you are coordinating volunteers, delivering key services, sourcing vital supplies or just adapting to survive, we aim to provide friction-less access to the authoritative, up-to-date data you need to make decisions with certainty in these very uncertain times.   

James Harvey - Esri UK

James Harvey is Head of Content at Esri UK.  Having worked in GIS for over a decade, he understands the pivotal importance of quality, authoritative content and focuses on providing people with the data they need to solve all kinds of business, societal, environmental and healthcare problems.