In boardrooms around the world, a new reality is sinking in: Those organizations best able to marshal data to absorb, avoid, or reduce climate risk—and find opportunity in the tumultuous years ahead—will hold significant competitive advantage and better reflect society’s values.

In the wake of an unbroken series of extreme climate events that have disrupted supply lines, devastated communities and businesses, and dramatically altered markets, company leaders are digesting the news that a global temperature rise of 3.2°C could wipe out nearly a fifth of global GDP—$15 trillion in today’s dollars—by 2050.

With disruption and uncertainty the new normal, what’s clear is that the traditional list of factors in any major business decision—revenue, brand identity, market share—now has another strategic layer: sustainability. The urgency behind the sustainability imperative is not just born of charitable intentions and corporate social responsibility; it’s recognized as a matter of basic business continuity and survival.

Geography looms large for scientists in the fight against climate change—likewise, executives are taking a geographic approach backed by data science to understand where assets lie in relation to climate threats, like flooding or excessive heat, and to visualize how company actions affect the environment. Some of the world’s biggest and most powerful retailers, shippers, and manufacturers rely on a modern geographic information system, or GIS, to supply this unified perspective on operations, vulnerabilities, and impacts.

The spatial awareness provided by GIS, known as location intelligence, reveals patterns and connections that would be lost in a spreadsheet. Executives can visualize business metrics, weather predictions, and other key data that vary dramatically by location. For instance,

International businesses must also navigate climate-related regulations and legislation unique to each country. With GIS, executives can analyse these complex data streams in a familiar format—a map—and easily share findings with fellow executive stakeholders.

Location intelligence can transform decision-making in the many places where sustainability meshes with daily business operations and long-term planning (see sidebar “How GIS Contributes to Sustainable Business”). For executives overseeing site selection, supply chain management, field operations, and sales and marketing, spatial analysis guides them toward a better relationship with the environment and a healthier business future.

Resilience and Reduction: The Twin Engines of a Climate Sustainability Strategy

In a sign of how seriously CXOs are taking sustainability, decision-making power around climate issues now often resides with the chief risk officer or CFO. These executives have defined two primary sustainability strategies: resilience and reduction.

Resilience efforts are about defending an organization against climate impacts and withstanding such impacts when they are impossible to sidestep. It’s a concept that lies at the heart of modern business continuity. Reduction, on the other hand, describes actions that companies take to minimize harmful impacts on the environment. For many companies, reduction takes the form of eliminating or minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to a recent report, at least a fifth of the world’s biggest 2,000 public companies are currently committed to net-zero emission targets.

Resilience and reduction are two sides of the same coin: a company that optimizes transportation routes to reduce its carbon footprint, for instance, also creates a more streamlined network that may be less exposed to floods, storms, and other climate hazards. An organization that retools operations to use fewer natural resources also ensures a healthier supply of that resource in the future. Whether interrelated or taken apart, resilience and reduction strategies are best understood and implemented through the lens of location intelligence.

In the short term, GIS offers a “single pane of glass” through which decision-makers can anticipate weather events to ensure employee and customer safety, create location-specific mitigation strategies, and coordinate efforts to minimize disruptions and maintain continuity. In the long term, GIS-based modelling can flag the location of worsening climate conditions, prompting business leaders to harden or relocate assets and infrastructure that are needed to serve the next generation.

By modelling facilities or supply chains into a digital twin—complete with data from IoT sensors and satellite or drone imagery—executives gain a comprehensive view of business activity across land and sea. From this vantage point, they can analyse supply chain impacts, create more efficient routing, and ensure long-term responsible use of resources.

Thanks to the long reach of IoT data and location technology, companies can surface these insights without dispatching employees and vehicles to far-flung locations—another way for a business to meet net-zero and other reduction goals.

No Exit from a World of Climate Change

A host of motivations has forced climate onto the C-suite docket, and no industry or region has been spared. Business activity itself is slowed by worsening climate conditions: researchers have found that poor air quality reduces shopping activity, and rising heat cuts into worker productivity. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that in today’s globalized economy, knock-on effects can ricochet from loading docks in Vietnam to store shelves in Minneapolis within days and linger for months or longer.

Companies that rely on natural resources must guarantee that their source materials won’t be wiped out by rising temperatures, droughts, deteriorating biodiversity, or floods. Meanwhile, storms and cyclones have picked up in nearly every corner of the globe, wreaking havoc on assets and causing flooding that can shutter small businesses and restaurants. US flood insurance rates are set to increase for 77 percent of policyholders, according to a recent study.

Consumer sentiment is also changing dramatically, as younger generations leverage their wallets to reward organizations that practice holistic sustainability. On a recent WhereNext webcast, a snap poll revealed that competitive differentiation and brand leadership were the main drivers of sustainability efforts. Insurance firms are pushing companies to build climate risk analysis into asset evaluations, and Wall Street banks want to protect investments from long-term climate disruptions.

C-suite leaders are even feeling the effects of this turning tide on a personal level. A growing number of CEOs now find their bonuses tied to environmental goals. Meanwhile, activist investors are successfully pressuring some the world’s most powerful companies into taking the difficult steps necessary to cut carbon emissions.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, head of the world’s largest money manager, has been among the most vocal leaders in pushing companies to build sustainability into their business models, citing a “tectonic shift.” That shift and the urgency it reflects are written in the numbers: For the first time, banks are committing more financing to green bonds and loans than to fossil fuel, according to recent Bloomberg data.

GIS: An Organization’s Central Nervous System for Resilience and Reduction

For many C-suite leaders, resilience has been elevated to a top-line priority because weather events and other threats are affecting their ability to fulfil customer expectations day in and day out. Resiliency could roughly be described as a defensive posture—but as with any great defence, it contains elements of proactive offense.

GIS furnishes companies with a central digital nervous system that contextualises and analyses data. Leaders can use this system both to inform long-term resilience strategies and respond to near-term dangers triggered by weather or climate events. Location-savvy organisations—including one of the world’s largest retailers—rely on real-time, GIS-powered dashboards as the brain of emergency operations centres (EOC) and global security operations centres (GSOC).

As data on potential natural disasters flows to these centres of operational awareness, decision-makers can weigh complex factors and coordinate fast, precise responses.

By adopting a geographic approach, business leaders can see weather events developing and begin enacting location-specific mitigation strategies. Data layers showing climate patterns reveal where rainfall has historically led to river flooding, and how that might affect properties, employees, and communities. With advance knowledge of impending weather events, a tech company can warn employees not to commute into the office, a restaurant chain can stock up on shelf-stable goods, and a manufacturer can order components from an alternate supplier.

Location intelligence generated from GIS software empowers companies to not only improve their own resilience, but also strengthen the communities where they operate. The major retailer cited above orchestrates natural disaster responses with local and state governments and relief organizations. Dashboards can identify store parking lots where displaced families might gather, or where surpluses of critical supplies could be staged. During Hurricane Florence, the company’s spatial awareness enabled the emergency team to source and donate massive air conditioners, which were airlifted to a sweltering North Carolina shelter completely surrounded by water.

50- and 100-Year Business Continuity Planning

To ensure long-term resilience, companies are using cutting-edge tools like AI and machine learning in conjunction with GIS to map patterns in climate data decades into the future. By aligning investments with those predicted trends, a business can avoid pouring resources into areas with a high chance of being underwater in 30 years or wiped out by forest fire. Examples include:

• AT&T is carrying out advanced spatial analysis of climate risks that goes far beyond examining FEMA floodplain data. Through a partnership with the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the world’s largest telecom company has created forecasts showing how infrastructure like cell towers or base stations could be affected by 50-year storms. The granularity of this data allows AT&T to anticipate with 95 percent confidence that a given 200 square-meter plot of coastal land will see 15 feet of maximum flooding in the coming decades. By layering those models onto GIS-based smart maps, decision-makers can make the call about which assets to strengthen or relocate, which in turn helps keep internet access on in challenging conditions.
• The furniture giant IKEA uses 700 million cubic feet of wood a year. That reliance on a natural resource and commodity that can take 140 years to mature has made sustainable forestry a vital interest for the company. The investment arm of Ingka Group, which operates the majority of IKEA stores worldwide, owns swaths of forest in the US and Eastern Europe. It uses location intelligence to guide ecologically sound methods of timberland management. Based on data from field agents and satellite imagery, the company’s location analysts can identify which tracts contain tree species most vulnerable to threats like the invasive bark beetle. With this information, they can prioritize areas that need protective treatments, staving off costly losses. Because much of this data can be tracked through technology like remote imagery, Ingka minimizes its own environmental impact on the regions where it operates. The company relies on GIS to monitor biodiversity measures like the health and population levels of animal, plant, and insect species on its properties. This holistic understanding of woodlands and the ecosystems they maintain is integral to maintaining long-lived, productive forests.
• Taylor Shellfish Farms, the largest shellfish producer in the US, with farms extending across 10,000 acres of Pacific Northwest tidelands, knows that keeping a sustainable supply of food and drink on our dinner tables requires resource planning on the scale of decades, not months. Company leaders use pH sensors and GIS to track the acidity of ocean water and determine how well oysters respond. By comparing farms and identifying techniques that lead to improvement, they’ve been able to grow in spite of climate-related disruptions that have crippled other hatcheries.

Companies across the manufacturing sector—from pharmaceutical giants to soda makers—are turning to location intelligence to assess and reduce water use, concerned that unchecked consumption could create long-term scarcity at production facilities and in surrounding communities.

The Net-Zero Zeitgeist

As many of the most influential companies in the world sign on to net-zero commitments, it’s increasingly evident that achieving these goals could fundamentally shift how businesses source and ship goods and materials and alter the kinds of partners they work with. In September, 86 companies including Salesforce, Procter & Gamble, and HP joined an Amazon-led initiative to be carbon-free in their operations by 2040. The list of businesses that have taken the Climate Pledge now numbers over 200, collectively employing more than seven million people. To cut greenhouse gas emissions and reach these lofty goals, businesses will need visibility into their own operations and a precise view of where they can make the biggest cuts.

In 2019, almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions came from industrial production, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. With the effects of climate change already striking at the bottom line of many companies, executives can see that contributing to global warming will ultimately hinder their own success and viability. That’s made reduction a strategy for business survival.

By necessity, reduction strategies must extend beyond greenhouse gases to account for the natural world in all its complexity. Companies are becoming more mindful that diminished ecosystems lead to resource-poor environments and land that can’t recover from climate change. Farms and forests with strong biodiversity ratings are ultimately more resilient and productive. It’s yet another motivation for businesses to develop a detailed picture of how they use resources and impact the environment, and where efficiencies might escape the naked eye.

Reduction: When Less is more

Location intelligence supports reduction efforts on a number of fronts, helping executives stay accountable as their organizations lower greenhouse gas emissions. Dashboards allow executives to monitor offices, stores, and factories, along with their GHG metrics. GIS-based planning is essential in sourcing natural resources sustainably, and the technology also aids communication: web-based smart maps help companies share reduction results with customers, investors, and the public.

The example of a large European grocery chain shows how the positive benefits of reduction can ripple through an organization. Already ranked first in global sustainability studies, the grocer decided to use GIS to move toward holistic sustainability. Reducing the CO₂ emissions of its fleet of vehicles allowed the company to hone its competitive advantage both as a brand and an efficient operator. The company employed GIS to unite multiple data streams related to emissions—creating a big-picture visualization that empowered smart decision-making.

Using an algorithm that accounted for the effects of road slope, speed, load factor, and other parameters, company leaders were able to calculate the emissions for every engine type in its fleet, from diesel to electric, across all transportation routes. By feeding this information into smart maps, the company confidently predicted which engines would be most efficient for each route, identifying adjustments that would optimize fleet performance, eliminate carbon emissions, and reduce costs.

The Long Reach of Location Intelligence

Combining GIS with data from satellite imagery, drones, and IoT sensors gives decision-makers access to patterns that would have been invisible even a few years ago. By reducing the need for in-person visits to sites or assets in the field, companies gain accuracy and cost savings while reducing environmental impacts.

A recent investigation of deforestation in the Amazon shows the power of these technologies. An ecologist concerned about actions taken by a cacao company in the Peruvian rain forest relied on geospatial analysis and remote sensing to prove that old-growth forests had been illegally logged. A company could use the same tools to vet overseas partners or monitor the effects of its own operations.

Supply chains are attracting attention as a major source of carbon emissions and a place where route optimization could make a big impact on sustainability goals. According to analysis by the Boston Consulting Group, eight supply chains account for over 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions each year.

New location-aware tools are helping businesses visualize how their footprints extend across global shipping lanes. For instance, the Seaport Simulator, developed by design and engineering firm Atkins, uses overhead lidar imaging to plot a seaport down to the height of seawater at the docks. This digital twin also extends across oceans, revealing partner ports, shipment data, population data, maritime travel routes, and climate patterns—a comprehensive, GIS-based picture of materials en route in all directions. Location analysts have been testing how resilient supply routes will be to climate disruptions, but a similar process could be used to run simulations on which alternate shipping lanes best support reduction and decarbonization.

Seventh Generation Decision-Making

When the world moved at a slower pace, society and businesses thought in generational terms. In the days when wines took longer to age, the truism was that you drank from the cellar your grandfather acquired, and bought bottles that your children and their children would one day share.

The Haudenosaunee or Iroquois confederacy is famous for its “seven generation” form of decision-making, in which leaders consider how today’s choices will affect descendants seven generations from now.

As climate change’s threats reshape businesses, this long-term view is taking hold in the most influential offices in the world. Ensuring the future requires a clear view of today’s operations and tomorrow’s repercussions, making location intelligence an invaluable part of achieving holistic sustainability across all facets of business activity.

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

The electric vehicle revolution has arrived—Tesla’s Model 3 was Europe’s best-selling car in September. That’s the same month iconic British automobile company Rolls-Royce announced that it will shift to an all-electric line-up by 2030, joining Jaguar, Bentley, Cadillac, and others that have committed to electrification.

For an industry that once seemed to many like a fantasy, it’s an exciting moment for EV evangelists. Real change is on the near horizon, but the journey will demand curated sales strategies, made possible by insights born of location intelligence.

Given the undeniable momentum, buyers might expect electric vehicle (EV) sales to sweep the globe. But in reality, it’s less likely to be a tsunami of change than a staggered evolution. Car buyers in some neighbourhoods and regions will be first-movers, while others will be much slower to adapt. Retailers and brands will need to calibrate supply not just to demand but to local infrastructure that supports charging and repairs.

To date, US EV sales have been concentrated mainly on the coasts, often in higher-income neighbourhoods. As that picture develops, car sellers will need to customise EV offerings to specific markets and regions, plan production and distribution based on those market insights, and effectively advertise the new breed of low- or zero-emission vehicles to a complex and multifaceted group of drivers.

A Collaborative Approach to Market Change, EV Sales

Spatial business intelligence, also known as location intelligence, will be a vital tool to help EV leaders forge this path. Retailers can use geographic information system (GIS) technology to analyse and contextualise multiple forms of relevant data on a map—from income, age ranges, and sustainability attitudes, to areas of higher EV adoption and electric grid capacity. The patterns and connections that emerge from this geographic approach help decision-makers understand the complexions of markets, define target areas, and forecast EV sales.

Managing the EV transition profitably will require multiple stakeholders to work in tandem. GIS supports this collaborative approach, serving as a common visual operating picture for multiple parties.

For example, a spike in EV sales will be problematic if the charging infrastructure isn’t in place to keep cars running. That’s why an Los Angeles-based team at the design consultancy Arup developed a web-based site-suitability tool for EV charging stations. Named Charge4All, the GIS-based tool enables businesses, utilities, government offices, and communities to share input on the most suitable locations for EV chargers. Past plug installation efforts in Southern California missed important variables when major stakeholders weren’t invited to the table. That’s why GIS, which can contextualise data from multiple software platforms, will be integral to the EV effort.

Location Distinction with a Difference

Since widespread EV sales will require buy-in from multiple sectors of society, the Charge4All team ensured that lower-income and disadvantaged neighbourhoods were included in the suitability analysis. That spatial awareness illuminated key links between demographic information and EV use, underscoring the importance of analysing granular consumer data through a location lens.

For instance, the GIS lead on the Charge4All project found that the upscale, beachfront neighbourhoods of Santa Monica boasted high levels of EV adoption and usage. On the other hand, downtown LA showed more lower-income areas, lower rates of vehicle ownership, and less EV engagement.

This geographic differentiation holds true on a national level as well. According to data from the International Council on Clean Transportation, California accounted for slightly less than half of all EV sales in the country in 2019. The West Coast in general is a stronghold of EV use, with a pattern of high EV registration stretching from Seattle down to Phoenix. The Northeast and Rust Belt are also home to swathes of EV ownership. However, vast stretches of the South and the inland Northwest show virtually zero EV engagement.

Finding the EV Buyer Profile and Investing in the Right Markets

Understanding how geographic adoption trends shape the potential for EV sales will be key to the success of any retail strategy—including how to distribute cars to existing dealerships, where to invest in new ones, where to build charging infrastructure, and how to service customers’ vehicles. The approach in cities, where parking is scarce and residents cluster in apartment buildings, will differ from plans in the more dispersed suburbs.

To see the full picture, brand leaders need to synthesise data such as EV registration, inventory numbers, driving patterns, consumer demographics—even information about clean energy regulations. For example, some states offer incentives for zero-emission vehicles that can attract both buyers and sellers and provide clues on which markets to prioritise.

In states without EV incentives, higher-cost EVs might not sell as well. That fact alone creates a reason to marshal useful data and customise price points and products to the most EV-friendly customers in a market.

Columbus, Ohio, which has made a push to facilitate the shift to electric vehicles, found that those most likely to buys EVs tended to share certain demographic traits. Individuals with a bachelor’s or graduate degree who were between 30 and 44 years of age with an annual salary of $100,000 or more were ahead of the curve in making the jump to electric.

That’s the type of demographic and psychographic insight that GIS technology specialises in. Executives can view maps and dashboards of such insight to identify high-potential areas and facilitate collaboration with marketing and sales teams.

Location intelligence can help EV marketers see which types of customers live or shop within a 15-minute drive time of a store, as well as the sales performance of competitors in the area. The same capability can allow advertisers to target online ads to a particular slice of a market, like those who support green initiatives.

An Exciting Moment for EV Evangelists

When business analysts place all relevant data in front of decision-makers on a smart map, the unified picture catalyses creative solutions. For instance, workplaces that offer EV charging stations can be the deciding factor for buyers who are on the fence about an EV. A dealer could create a map of nearby office parks to scout potential partnerships that drive higher adoption rates. They could also share maps of EV chargers with potential customers, customised to their driving lifestyle.

Such targeted, location-based insights translate into higher EV sales—and less time and money wasted on uninterested customers.

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

Businesses around the world are doubling as laboratories in a great post-pandemic experiment to define what the future of work will look like.

Two-thirds of companies are considering physical redesigns that facilitate hybrid work, in which employees split time working in the office and at home, Microsoft says. Google is dedicating roughly 10 percent of its work space, totalling millions of square feet, to experiments in hybrid design that include modular pods, inflatable privacy walls, and paneled spaces in which the faces of videoconferencing employees are prominently displayed alongside in-person meeting attendees.

Old ideas are being overturned for approaches that would have seemed radical two years ago. Personal desks may be a thing of the past: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon speculated that the bank may need only 60 desks for every 100 employees. Open floor plans, once thought to facilitate collaboration, have been shown to decrease face-to-face interaction—and increase the spread of germs. Desk layouts or corporate cultures that stress presenteeism—showing up and being visible to a boss or manager, even when sick—could damage a company’s ability to keep its workforce intact.

The outcome of this ferment isn’t yet clear, but as employees return to office spaces, companies working with indoor location intelligence are already edging ahead in a global race for top talent and workplace safety.

Indoor Location Intelligence Illuminates Pathways to the Future of Work

Before rearranging workspaces and practices, some business leaders are using a form of smart building technology to gather data and study patterns of engagement.

For example, COOs, HR executives, and facilities managers can learn from a phenomenon known to urban planners as “desire paths.” It’s common to see such walkways pounded into the ground on university greens by students who ignore sidewalks, proving some plans that look good in a blueprint don’t match the needs of real life.

In a business setting, management can commit the same error by instituting post-pandemic measures that send the best talent fleeing to employers who offer more innovative workplace options. Indoor location intelligence produced by a geographic information system (GIS) can help identify the desire paths leading to the future of work. A tech-enabled view of indoor spaces reveals how teams operate spatially and what types of spaces employees gravitate to. It’s a relatively new application of GIS technology, which for decades has guided the planning of global supply chains, sustainability, and national retail networks. As COVID-19 disrupts indoor spaces, GIS is increasingly being adopted to unlock insights in smart building data.

One design and engineering firm with headquarters in London and nearly 100 global offices has been using GIS to plot a safe, organized return to the office and visualize the new ways in which workplaces might operate. Employees can access the indoor maps to book a desk, locate colleagues, and orient themselves in offices. Administrators use the maps to optimize cleaning schedules, ensure that safety protocols and regulations are met, and monitor the flow of people through spaces.

The data and trends surfaced by this type of system support C-suite decision-making in an uncertain time, helping business leaders anticipate how their office footprint might need to change and how to craft work from home policies that cater to the needs and abilities of each department.

By April 2021, the design firm’s indoor location intelligence program had racked up 20,000 internal bookings with 1,500 staffers actively using it.

“There is extra information that we’re now using to [analyse] how are people using these spaces, and actually, do we need to change how we’re using our spaces? That’s going to be a big thing,” says one of the company’s digital leads and GIS experts.

There are a lot of things, particularly if we had new [hires], which made people a bit apprehensive about going to the office. So this just allowed people to understand: What does that office look like? How am I going to plan my route?

Digital lead

Self-Testing Postpandemic Office Solutions

Known for its nonhierarchical structure and free-thinking approach to problem-solving, the firm had begun experimenting with a desk-booking system in January 2020 when a renovation at the Wales office scattered employees around the building. Since people weren’t at their typical desks, colleagues had to hunt around floors to find each other. A rudimentary desk-booking or hoteling system to help workers find each other became a prototype for the company’s indoor location intelligence program.

When COVID hit in full force, the firm, which often advises clients on smart building applications, saw an opportunity to meet the moment through technology. They would use the spatial planning and data analysis tools of GIS on their own offices before advising clients of the benefits. “Coming from a software development background, there’s a phrase I like to use,” says one of the company’s product leadership directors, “we eat our own dog food.”

The digital lead and his team began scaling up the indoor concept during the lockdown period to prepare for a return to the office in spring and summer 2020. As employees began trickling back into buildings, company executives focused on safety, cleanliness, and calming the nerves of an anxious workforce.

Even before stepping foot back into the office, new and returning workers could look at smart maps to familiarize themselves with the updated space layout and identify where bathrooms, hand wipes, and sanitizer stations were located. At an office where many people bike to work, it was even possible to book time slots for on-premises showers.

Using spatial simulation, the program designers could forecast the flow of people through hallways and offices and see how that might create crunch points or overcrowding. These insights were fed into GIS-based apps that gave employees turn-by-turn directions to navigate the office and avoid congestion. The technology also helped administrators understand how to situate desks to comply with social distancing measures.

What does our office of the future look like? How much of our space should be collaboration spaces? Using a dataset like [the one] we're capturing gives us a huge amount of evidence to understand and scenario plan.

Digital lead

What a Spreadsheet Won’t Show

When the facilities manager at the London office heard of the project, she immediately asked to enroll in the development process. The office she runs is massive, covering 20,000 square feet per floor across five floors, as well as basement and ground levels. Prior to implementing the GIS indoor technology in November 2020, she and her team had been using a spreadsheet to track who was coming into the office and which desks they were using. At first, it was 200 employees, then 300, and before long the number was creeping toward 400. “There was no way we could do that with a spreadsheet,” she says.

The GIS indoor-mapping program integrated with the London office’s hoteling system. It empowered employees to locate their own seats and made it easy for them to find colleagues by glancing at a smart map or searching by name. The facilities manager knew the accurate number and location of employees each day, which helped her locate enough fire marshals and first-aid responders on each floor.

Adding to workplace safety, the indoor program’s ability to remember where employees sat throughout the day enabled a track-and-trace capability. If a COVID outbreak were to occur, the company could warn any employees who might have been exposed.

The hoteling system and indoor location intelligence also paved the way for solving broader operational issues occasioned by the office’s size and complexity. The facilities manager linked the hoteling platform to an online learning course that educated employees on how to navigate the building safely; they could only book a desk once they had completed the course. The system also enforced a rule that a new floor would only open for booking when the floor below had reached 75 percent capacity. This encouraged the efficient use of cleaning and energy resources.

Hybrid Era Workplace Design

While indoor location intelligence brings efficiency to daily office operations, it also unveils insights of a higher order. The design firm’s HR leaders found data in GIS that helped shape the hybrid work paradigm. For example, Thursday was the most popular day to be in the office, and junior workers booked desks more often than senior employees, most likely because they feared remote work would hurt their chances to grow. These findings could inform C-suite decisions about which days to make mandatory for in-office work, if any. (Some companies have begun insisting that executives work remotely a few days a week, along with the rest of the staff, to avoid in-office employees gaining an unfair advantage over remote workers.)

As a multidisciplinary company, the design firm had a vested interest in ensuring that different teams interacted. The indoor location intelligence program made it possible to book “neighbourhoods” of desks in various configurations. Instead of marketing always sitting next to sales, they might rub shoulders with members of the IT team one week, or executive leadership the next. These reconfigurations could spark the kinds of ideas and innovations that the office of the future will be expected to produce.

Spatial usage patterns in the office, supplemented with data like employee surveys, could inform decisions unique to the hybrid era. Based on that data, a COO might choose to shutter a sprawling urban headquarters in favour of smaller, cheaper satellite locations in the suburbs. On a more granular level, spatial insights could push leaders to invest in cutting-edge solutions like virtual reality or augmented reality to unite a geographically fragmented staff.

We want to know, how well are the ‘market square’ areas used? Have we got the right furniture in there? Are we supporting the business in the correct way?

Facilities manager

The Hidden Geography of Office Life

Unwritten spatial rules quietly shape much of office life: an alcove well suited to sharing gossip, an elevator where the CEO might be caught on the way to lunch, a staircase that makes it easy to slip away for an early exit. Indoor location intelligence helps uncover trends in office geography and turn them into better workplace design. If, for example, no one books desks in a certain section of a floor, managers might consider whether there’s an issue with lighting or temperature control in the area. If groups of employees tend to work in the office on certain days, managers and HR executives can find better configurations for collaboration.

These are the kinds of workplace challenges business leaders will need to address, and indoor location intelligence can guide decisions on the future of work. “I think facilities management is going to become more of a crystal ball,” predicts the engineering firm’s London office manager. “You’ll know what it is that people want before they know that they want it, because you’ve got the data and because you’re seeing the trends and patterns.”

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

In a move that could alter the practice of buying and selling homes, real estate broker Redfin is adding climate risk scores to sale listings. Home buyers can now evaluate climate risk the way they assess local schools, tax rates, and neighbourhood appeal.

The new data addresses the public’s growing interest in understanding the shifting nature of risk. It’s a pursuit shared by business leaders, many of whom already use geographic information system (GIS) technology to anticipate climate shifts and adjust investment strategies accordingly.

Climate Risk on Buyers’ Minds

Nearly 80 percent of current and potential homeowners told Redfin they’d be hesitant to buy a home in an area with frequent or intense natural disasters. In the same survey, nearly half of people planning to move in the next year indicated that extreme temperatures and increasing natural disasters played a role in that decision.

Given the weather disruptions that have already beset many areas of the world, it’s no surprise that home buyers and businesses are considering climate risk in their investment decisions. In each of the past 40 years, the United States averaged seven weather disasters costing more than $1 billion (adjusted for inflation). But in just the past six years, the average number of $1 billion events per year was more than 15, according to NOAA data. These events can devastate homes, businesses, neighbourhoods, critical infrastructure, and supply chains.

GIS-generated location intelligence has long helped companies respond to weather events. Now, its ability to model long-term weather patterns and related climate risk could shape real estate investments for individuals and organisations.

Assessing Climate Risk—A New Normal for Real Estate?

Climate risk data similar to the kind Redfin now provides is not only valuable in home buying but also increasingly important to commercial property investment decisions. Commercial real estate leader CBRE estimates that 35 percent of global REIT properties are exposed to hazardous climate events such as inland flooding and hurricanes.

To create more resilient investments, real estate investors are increasingly using climate risk data to make decisions in locations susceptible to climate change, according to the Urban Land Institute. But they’re not evaluating climate risk alone; they’re also factoring in efforts by cities to increase resilience to climate change.

In industries like commercial real estate, telecom, and retail—where choosing the right location is key to the bottom line—predicting climate impacts on potential investments is becoming a competitive advantage.

For example, engineering, design, and project management firm Atkins uses GIS technology to perform climate modelling, drawing on the precision of GIS-produced location intelligence to steer clients toward safer investments and ways to fortify their supply chains.

Atkins’ simulations use predictive analytics to create location intelligence on climate scenarios. The resultant GIS map shows how tropical storms or extreme temperatures might disrupt the flow of shipping containers across global supply lines years from now.

This article originally appeared in the global edition of WhereNext.

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.

Daniel Humm, owner and head chef at Eleven Madison Park (EMP) in New York, had big news this spring. His upscale restaurant—one of only 13 in the US to earn three Michelin stars—would henceforth be strictly vegetarian. It was like BMW announcing it would discontinue car production to focus on its bicycle line.

Few businesses contemplate—let alone implement—such a radical rethinking of product offerings. But any change—whether carried out by a small restaurant, regional brand, or national franchise—requires a close understanding of what customers want and how much change they will tolerate. Companies often can find this insight in data related to consumer preferences and psychographics, viewed through the lens of location intelligence.

Consumer Preferences in Flux

The change Humm is bringing to EMP is undeniably bold. As the Wall Street Journal noted, Humm, like most prestige chefs, built his reputation on meat and seafood dishes. Worldwide, Michelin awarded three stars to just one vegetarian restaurant this year: King’s Joy in Beijing.

But Humm’s announcement, made as the city began to relax coronavirus-related occupancy requirements, was also well-timed. As the world wakes up from the COVID-19 pandemic, change is in the air. A recent Forrester study found that 75 percent of us say the pandemic will lead to long-term changes in our behaviour and experiences.

Evidence suggests that interest in plant-based diets could be part of this reappraisal. A study commissioned by Proagrica, an agriculture and animal health technology company, found that nearly 20 percent of people in the UK ate more vegetarian food during the first year of the pandemic, and the same percentage plan to make the habit permanent. An especially intriguing data point for the restaurant industry: nearly 40 percent of respondents said they would consider ordering plant-based meat alternatives in restaurants, including fast-food establishments.

As savvy businesses adjust their offerings to acknowledge these and other consumer changes, they would do well to rely on location intelligence as a guide, because it reveals where important trends and consumers may intersect and can help assess new approaches and strategies.

Sensing Consumer Preferences Geographically

For a retailer, manufacturer, or service company considering bold changes, the first step is to understand what its customers and potential customers want. Just as it would be foolhardy to increase umbrella inventory in a desert region, it makes little sense to sell novel items or experiences in areas where the demographics and psychographics don’t indicate support.

When Carl’s Jr. tries to sell customers on its plant-based Beyond Famous Star Burger, and Del Taco promotes its Epic Beyond Original Mex Burrito, they want to know where such products are likely to be successful. To that end, many companies, including restaurant chains, apply a location intelligence strategy when they optimize their locations and their offerings.

For instance, using a geographic information system (GIS), some companies analyse anonymized social media data to understand consumer preferences in certain locations. A chain planning where to introduce vegetarian options might use GIS to identify geographic clusters of people who voice support for animal rights or plant-based diets. Human mobility data—similarly anonymized—can reveal consumer preferences and patterns much as it revealed social distancing practices to public health officials during the COVID pandemic.

On the Move

Not only are tastes and habits shifting in ways that can be hard to grasp without the help of location data, but people’s physical locations are as well. Overall, the number of people making permanent moves has increased modestly since the start of the pandemic—but certain metro areas are experiencing dramatic shifts in population size or makeup.

As companies contemplate major changes in the post-pandemic environment, they’ll want to delve into these demographic shifts to better understand market potential.

Using GIS, companies can analyse the demographic breakdown of urban, suburban, and rural markets and, through smart maps, visualize the location of certain buyer personas. They can even enlist the AI capabilities of GIS capabilities to uncover consumer clusters that are not immediately apparent.

Strategic-minded brands round out that analysis with psychographic insight on consumer preferences. Psychographics can be useful in discovering geographic locations with high concentrations of people concerned with wellness lifestyles, for instance. The same techniques could reveal areas where healthy eating is a primary concern. Savvy GIS analysts create maps showing these patterns, providing product marketers, merchandise planners, and real estate executives with useful intelligence for near-term and strategic plans.

As the world emerges from what we can only hope is the worst of the pandemic, shifts in consumer preferences are likely to accelerate. Companies can make the most of these changes by anchoring data in a coherent framework of location intelligence.

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

Sometimes it takes an audacious, even intimidating goal to inspire a company to find new levels of innovation.

That was the thinking behind the ambitious growth strategy launched in 2016 by an insurance firm based in the Midwest. With agile startups beginning to crowd the insurance market, company executives sought to reach more commercial and personal clients who could benefit from the firm’s high-touch, consultative approach. The senior leadership team set a goal big enough to catalyse new approaches to reach that customer base: grow its annual premium by hundreds of millions of dollars—responsibly and effectively for customers.

The growth plan was two-pronged: find new clients in existing markets throughout the company’s multistate territory, while also expanding into new geographies. Since the company sells policies through a network of thousands of independent agencies, executives needed to understand which offices and geographies showed the greatest potential for growth—and they had to do so using data to supplement their instincts. To expand at the scale and pace of the strategic plan, company leaders knew they needed data technology that could pinpoint and predict high-performing opportunities. They didn’t realize that would lead them to the four best practices of location intelligence.

Mining Data for Competitive Advantage

One of the first steps C-suite executives took was to hire a data and analytics officer from a financial institution—an industry where the ability to mine information for competitive advantage was already a main differentiator of success. He then recruited a team of data scientists and analysts with experience in big data applications like machine learning algorithms.

Powered by data savvy, an innovative corporate culture, and location intelligence, the company is on its way to attaining its strategic goals and outperforming the industry on growth and profitability.

Finding New Leads with Machine Learning

The machine learning algorithms core to the company’s data-powered growth helped accelerate and improve market analysis. The analytics team employed AI to comb through enormous datasets and produce conclusions and predictions on a scale the human mind couldn’t match. Combined with geographic context from location intelligence, machine learning algorithms gave executives insight on where growth looked most promising.

By feeding the algorithms huge amounts of company and third-party data, the analytics team could teach models to recognize the variables that signal growth potential. Based on analysis of historical patterns, the algorithms can recognize that an agency located in a town with a certain set of demographic and geographic attributes should generate a certain level of business.

The resultant GeoAI-powered map helped automate processes, saving the sales team hours, if not days, by singling out the best leads for new distribution points in areas where the firm had no presence.

Instead of guesswork, decision-makers draw conclusions based on facts and patterns surfaced by AI.

A Map Key to Communication and Risk Assessment

The segmented smart map made it easier to share information related to the growth plan across departments. Instead of searching through files or charts, colleagues consulted a GIS-powered dashboard showing the location of partner agencies, competitive agencies, and possible areas of expansion.

The analysis was further refined to reflect different lines of business, which depended on different data inputs and were projected to grow at varying rates. Using GeoAI-based analytics, the team segmented those variables and delivered useful smart maps to executives responsible for each line.

When we talk about GIS . . . it can apply to all aspects of our business, whether that's identifying where customers are and what their needs are, or distribution.

Chief strategy

officer

Risk Assessment in the Age of Climate Change

Executives knew that growth at any price wasn’t smart growth, so they focused on sustainable ways to expand. Location intelligence enabled them to move into new territories at a fast clip while sidestepping rising threats from climate-related volatility and natural disasters. Company underwriters could look at current policies and literally see on a map where they stood in relation to existing or potential hazards.

For example, the data analytics team helped build a tool that allowed underwriters to plug any address into a search bar. An automated geocoding service calculates how far that point is from the closest shoreline. This capability gives underwriters a better sense of threats to a property or business from events like hurricanes or other severe weather, resulting in an analytics-backed assessment of whether to assume the risk in the first place.

Underwriters used the same tool to analyse existing policies and identify misclassified risks. Some policies were actually closer to the coastline than had initially been recorded, while others were farther away. In both cases, accurate geospatial insights helped the company fulfil the core business function of appropriately taking risk.

Automation aided the process by adding new or updated data to the national grid. “That’s a big time savings just from a model maintenance standpoint,” the analytics director says. “It frees up our data scientists to do more value-add work rather than updating and changing data.”

The four A’s of location intelligence also make it possible to contextualize information that might otherwise be treated as disconnected data points, discarded, or shrugged at in other firms. Instead, analysts were able to discover patterns that make the company more competitive.

For instance, a hot spot analysis of claims around one Ohio city revealed areas where customers were reporting damages at higher levels than seen in the past. By overlaying data like population growth over the geographic clusters where claim activity increased, managers could determine whether the uptick was simply due to a larger volume of residents. That insight could trigger the company to allocate more claims adjusters to the area.

Alternately, if those claims happened to coincide with clusters of hail storms or other climate-related trends, the information might lead executives to slow the pace of policy writing there, or change the kind of products available.

The future is: how do we leverage . . . additional data variables, how do we become more predictive, and how do we manage the risk more effectively?

Chief strategy

officer

A Suite of Data Technologies

Company leaders began with an ambitious goal, then put the right talent in place. The data science team translated the strategic ambition into algorithms and smart maps that could point the company toward growth, agency by agency, juxtaposed against potential risk. That GIS-powered location intelligence was made possible by a suite of technologies working in tandem: the insights of analytics, the predictive modelling of artificial intelligence, the efficiency of automation, and the processing power of the cloud.

“Whether it’s our heat maps or our competitor footprint on there, everyone gets it,” the analytics director says. “It’s immediately obvious what you’re trying to do. You want quick understanding, you want recall, and hopefully it drives quick action. To me, mapping does those things.”

This article was originally published on the global edition of Wherenext

A cursory glance at recent business headlines would seem to tell a straightforward if grim tale for traditional stores: e-commerce is ascendant, while brick-and-mortar struggles to remain viable.

An April UBS report estimates that 80,000 US retail locations—or close to 10 percent of total stores in the country—will shutter by 2026, while e-commerce sales will rise to 27 percent of total retail purchases.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Data-savvy retail companies are blending the two modes of shopping into an omnichannel strategy that can spark business advantage. Rather than framing online and physical sales as a zero-sum contest, leading executives recognize that stores and e-commerce can actually boost each other—a phenomenon known as the halo effect.

The largest sporting goods retailer in the US has taken this approach and emerged from the coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever. Bucking what some might think of as conventional wisdom in the era of one-click shopping, DICK’S Sporting Goods is adding to its network of brick-and-mortar stores to complement a growing online presence. Whether customers are browsing aisles of basketballs, lacrosse sticks, and running shoes, or swinging by for curbside pick-up of online orders, DICK’S strategically placed locations act as important customer engagement points in a thriving omnichannel network.

DICK’S Sporting Goods Expands a Thriving Retail Ecosystem

The company’s real estate division supports that network by relying on a geographic information system (GIS) to guide market development and retail optimisation. Using the business insight generated by GIS—known as location intelligence—the company’s real estate directors forecast customer demand in new trade areas and analyse the concentration and spacing of stores in developed markets.

For instance, the team cross-references census-based data on sporting goods expenditures against its own loyalty data on online sales to spot areas of high customer demand, signalling strong potential for a DICK’S store.

DICK’S analysts also used location intelligence to plan the geographic footprint of an unprecedented venture: an experiential concept store called House of Sport, opened this March in Victor, New York, with another to open in Knoxville, Tennessee in June. The sprawling New York location is the company’s biggest store ever at 100,000 square feet, equipped with an outdoor track, a putting green, and an indoor rock climbing wall.

Over the past year, the company’s holistic approach to brick-and-mortar stores and digital channels has been instrumental in serving customers. DICK’S e-commerce sales surpassed $2.8 billion in 2020, a 100 percent increase. The strongest growth came from in-store and curbside pickup, as BOPIS sales increased more than 350% over the previous year.

With more than 850 stores across the country, DICK’S Sporting Goods was well-positioned to cater to consumers replacing gym memberships with home exercise equipment due to pandemic restrictions, or jumping into outdoor sports to accommodate social distancing. Acting as mini-distribution centres, the stores helped the company fulfill online orders quickly and efficiently. Since these brick-and-mortar sites had been selected for their accessibility to consumers, they helped cut down on delivery times for online purchases.

The company was, in part, able to capitalize on such trends because it had already established a thriving network of physical stores in trade areas assessed annually by GIS analysts

“The heavy lift of data here is massive,” says Jack Holden, a GIS specialist and market research analyst at DICK’S. “We’re trying to get the result right, trying to get the right site, and help people understand the data to inform very important decisions.”

Fact-Checking Assumptions with Location Intelligence

Five or so years ago, DICK’S analysts wondered whether the relationship between physical stores and online shopping might ultimately be a cannibalistic one.

“The traditional thinking then, mostly outside the organization, was that brick-and-mortar was going to be really hurt by e-commerce, and that we might not need as many stores,” says Bill Grassel, director of real estate market research and strategy at DICK’S Sporting Goods.

One of the benefits of location intelligence is that it checks assumptions against facts on the ground—and this particular assumption ended up being wrong. “A lot of the spatial analysis that we’ve been able to do has said [that] when we add new stores, we actually see our entire omnichannel sales go up,” Grassel says. “Unless we had been able to analyse those customer behaviours at that level, we might have assumed, if we open a store, we’re going to hurt our e-commerce sales and vice versa,” he continues. “But we really found more of a symbiotic relationship between the two.”

Understanding our customer and the latest trends is important and something we’re always trying to evolve.

Jack Holden, DICK's Sporting Goods GIS specialist

The Sporting Life

Those and other location-based assessments are created by a team of four analysts that Grassel oversees. As one of the company’s real estate directors, Grassel is responsible for shaping forecasts about whether the company should open a new site, which markets are becoming over-penetrated, and where new opportunities exist.

Those decisions are ultimately approved by a real estate board. When Grassel and his fellow directors need facts to inform the board’s plans, they ring up Jack Holden, a GIS analyst and evangelist who’s driven by the desire to put the best data in his colleagues’ hands, often via smart maps.

“I really enjoy looking at maps and what they’re able to tell us, and the different things people are seeing even when we’re looking at the same map,” Holden says. “Getting more and more people engaged with mapping is a goal of my position.”

Born in England, Holden grew up using maps with his father to chart hiking adventures across Europe. He went to school for geography and learned GIS, then got his first job at the oil and gas firm Perenco, using spatial analysis to study water intake levels in wells and ways to reduce the harmful effects of salt.

When he joined DICK’S Sporting Goods, headquartered just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was intrigued by the prospect of exploring a new sector, and found himself immersed in a different vocabulary and concepts unique to retail. “GIS was my foundation,” he says. “It’s the common ground that I take from one industry to another.”

His predecessor in the role at DICK’S, Todd Henry, introduced GIS as an enterprise technology and established the system’s analytical benefits. “He built the chapel; I’m maintaining and updating it and helping the team learn how to worship there,” Holden says. Part of that work involves fine-tuning the granularity of the data that real estate directors use to support decisions about store locations and market optimization. In the process, he often shows colleagues the next gear that GIS technology can achieve.

“One of the things I think is most valuable about having someone like Jack on the team is to really teach us not only how to use [GIS] day in and day out, but also what it’s capable of being used for,” says Kara Tirimacco, a market research senior analyst at DICK’S Sporting Goods who regularly presents location-based analysis to company executives.

GIS can help us determine how to best use data to help us plan for the future.

Bill Grassel, DICK’S Sporting Goods director of real estate market research and strategy

Locating Latent Demand

After 72 years in business and with more than 850 stores, DICK’S’ retail expansion is gradual and intentional. Accordingly, much of the work that Holden and his colleagues do focuses on market optimization.

They create trade area maps that help reveal the cause of certain trends—like connecting a store’s poor performance to an overconcentration of DICK’S locations in that region.

“Without having that spatial dimension and being able to look at a market holistically, you might just say, well, this store doesn’t seem to be doing as well as it should,” Grassel says. “When you’re actually looking at it spatially, then you have this geographic component, and a lot of times that helps explain some of the profitability things we’re looking for.”

As market research analyst Richard Boyles, one of Holden’s colleagues, puts it, “You can’t map out LA in a CSV file.”

When real estate directors are trying to understand the relationship between a particular geography and a store, location intelligence can be indispensable in tailoring the product mix or store size to the needs of the local community.

Mapping the Unexpected

In addition to guiding the expansion of the retail network, GIS-based insight also helps DICK’S respond to unexpected occurrences.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was one such occurrence. The danger of the virus and the need to gather and share information quickly made maps and dashboards a natural fit.

“As devastating as this whole pandemic has been, opportunities arise out of trying to answer some questions about a very serious subject,” Holden says. In addition to directing colleagues to good sources of data on the pandemic and helping them create maps of their own, Holden produced dashboards showing where DICK’S stores were open, where stores were closed due to shutdowns, and the location of points of interest like testing sites. “We saw that come to life in a map,” Tirimacco says.

The use of GIS to chart COVID-19’s effects showed colleagues how location data could be used in analytics at DICK’S, Holden says. After map-based presentations, he and the team often field requests from coworkers asking if they can access the online GIS platform. “It’s neat to get more people involved and try and educate people a little bit in the geospatial world,” he says.

As markets recover, many consumers are anxious to get out of the house and engage in a little in-person retail therapy, making a fluid omnichannel approach a retail advantage. Thanks to its store-centered, location-smart strategy, DICK’S Sporting Goods will be ready with its doors open and its e-commerce channels thriving—serving customers however they choose to engage.

To learn more about the role of location intelligence in retail, explore these resources.

This article was originally published on the global edition of Wherenext

Our earliest memories of maps tend to be of flattened, 2D images: wall-mounted world atlases in grade school classrooms, thumb-worn TripTiks in the glove compartment of the family car.

While these paper-based maps offered a helpful sense of place, they couldn’t realistically convey the vastness of the continents and oceans, or show the deep tapestry of neighbourhoods and landscapes glimpsed in passing on road trips. And they certainly couldn’t read real-time data from a mobile phone or weather sensor.

Thanks to cutting-edge geospatial technology, maps today are that smart. Coordinating layers of data from countless sources, a geographic information system, or GIS, turns dots and lines into an intelligent nervous system, or smart map.

GIS-powered maps capture the richness of geographic context: the socioeconomic contours of a city’s population, topographic features surrounding a proposed solar farm, the proximity of real estate to the coastline or other points of interest. This insight, known as location intelligence, has made smart maps indispensable in mastering the new data-driven frontiers of business, from health care to retail, logistics to manufacturing.

Enabled by advances in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery, digital maps can now function as living organisms, sensitive to historical trends and real-time data, able to forecast the future based on the present and past.

The ways that companies like FedEx, Carhartt, and BP are using smart maps today can be categorized into five areas of innovation where location intelligence from GIS is driving transformative change:

• Better investments and executive decisions
• Improved sustainability and equity
• New levels of efficiency and business resilience
• Data-driven customer responsiveness
• Increased collaboration and communication

In this new age of mapping, data isn’t left inert in spreadsheets or documents, but is infused with spatial meaning that yields competitive advantage and guides ethical corporate stewardship. Here’s a look at how that happens.

1. Grounding Investments and Executive Decisions in Geographic Truth

When company leaders confronted fluctuations in their business in the past, they often had to speculate about underlying causes. GIS’s ability to illuminate trends in data across time and space can take the guesswork out of important questions. Smart maps reveal the complex ecosystems that connect a store, office, or service centre to the surrounding community, giving executives guidance on the best ways to allocate time and capital.

A hospital seeing declining patient visits in a once-stable market might attribute that phenomenon to any number of factors, from poor outreach to changes in health-care policy. By studying the market on a smart map, the leaders of one hospital network discovered that a rise of competitors in the area was the main source of the patient drop-off. That geospatial analysis helped executives respond to the competition, instead of wasting resources chasing a solution to the wrong problem.

Such acuity is even more valuable in newer fields that don’t have decades of results to learn from.

Driven by lower costs and greening consumer sentiment, energy producers today face a surge of demand for renewable or carbon-free energy. Clean energy providers use GIS to understand the complex factors that influence the siting of offshore wind farms and other new power sources. Smart maps make it possible to visualize seabed geology, water, and wind patterns, as well as how new structures would connect to existing infrastructure.

By unlocking competitive advantages concealed within data, location intelligence makes decision-making at the highest corporate levels less an article of faith and more a fact-based exercise.

2. Smart Maps for the Era of Corporate Social Responsibility

On urgent issues ranging from sustainability to racial equity, the C-suite is rising to the challenge of social responsibility and stakeholder capitalism, with industry leaders like Google and Nike pledging to change business models to reflect corporate obligations to society. Forward-looking executives are turning to location intelligence to illuminate the bridge between promises and action.

Smart mapping is helping one of the world’s leading refiners of palm oil monitor the plantations it works with to determine whether suppliers are contributing to deforestation. Satellite imagery gives business leaders eyes on tens of millions of acres where encroachment or harmful practices might be occurring. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence enables the automation of imagery analysis, using metrics like proximity to roads or distance between plantations to predict areas most likely to be vulnerable to logging. That predictive capacity allows the company to take proactive steps while reducing the need for on-the-ground trips.

GIS makes the supply chain more transparent, ensuring that the palm oil it moves can be traced back to the mills where it was originally processed. The company is able to stay in line with industry-wide compliance efforts while reducing brand and environmental risks.

Smart maps are also playing a role in reversing one of the most damaging trends to marginalized populations in the United States: redlining, or the practice of refusing loans and mortgages to non-White communities and immigrants. This systemic prejudice has created economic deserts with low rates of entrepreneurship and homeownership.

One firm is attempting to spur economic growth in such places by using location intelligence, targeting areas where local populations don’t have access to fair banking—a fact that has typically left residents at the mercy of predatory institutions like payday lenders and check cashers. Instead, this microfinance pioneer employs smart maps to find neglected neighbourhoods using anonymized data on metrics like income levels and country of origin. Offering small fixed-interest loans in underserved areas creates ripples of positive economic change, contributing to growth in household wealth, business creation, and community health.

As more leaders in the Fortune 500 and beyond join the movement to instil corporate social responsibility into their operations, GIS is becoming an essential tool to align sustainability and equity goals with everyday practices.

3. Achieving New Heights of Efficiency and Business Resilience

Imagine the difficulty of tracking 20,000 aircraft flights each month, many of them carrying not only packages with delivery times to hit but also replacement parts and tools needed to maintain other planes crisscrossing the globe.

The complexity of that logistical choreography led shipping giant FedEx to rely on location intelligence. Serving as the foundation of FedEx’s tracking system, smart maps display real-time progress for hundreds of jet aircraft and make it possible to pull up information about each plane and its cargo with a single click. Because of these efforts, only .025 percent of FedEx’s flights fail to take off within 15 minutes of scheduled departure times.

GIS excels at slicing through knotty logistics challenges because managers in charge of keeping trains and planes on time don’t have to sort through manuals, spreadsheets, presentations, or PDFs for answers. They can go directly to shareable, interactive maps that show up-to-date data—in essence, a digital twin of the transportation network—allowing users to plan thoughtfully and adapt on the fly.

Responding effectively to the unexpected is a core element of business resilience, and it’s in such situations that winners often separate themselves from the pack. Almost no one predicted the scale of last year’s COVID-19 pandemic at the start. Yet the quick response mounted by Bass Pro Shops’ chief security officer, who was well-versed in GIS, helped the company maintain business continuity.

Dashboards displayed the operational status of the outdoor brand’s nationwide network of stores, color-coded to show which were closed, open, or partially open. That common picture united the efforts of the company’s C-suite, making it easier to shift inventory to the busiest stores and even allocate personal protective gear after the founder donated one million masks to frontline health-care workers.

Today, with Americans trusting CEOs more than their government, customers often turn to employers, top brands, and local stores for information and the goods and services they need in the midst of crisis. GIS gives business leaders the tools to keep pace with that level of customer demand, sustaining operational resilience in the face of disorganization and disaster.

With GIS-based smart maps, an overlay of data sources can form a common picture of the business, including COVID-19 infection rates and store sales numbers.

4. Crafting Customer Responsiveness Strategies

It’s not just the world that’s changing—customers change too, migrating to new digital platforms or shopping channels with a velocity that can catch businesses off guard. Companies that don’t have the agility to be more responsive to the needs of their client base risk losing ground to competitors.

• Everything from store design to safety measures can be tailored to better serve customers with insight from smart maps. Using geospatial technology, a design and engineering firm consulting on a new residential development in North London found efficiencies that allowed for a blend of affordable housing and desirable green spaces.
• A New Jersey utility combined headsets, augmented reality, and location intelligence to empower workers to “see” through concrete before excavating underground water and gas pipes. That technology avoids burst lines and costly repairs that might make busy roads inaccessible.
• Brands like Carhartt and Swarovski are employing smart maps to understand subtle shifts in consumer behaviour. And many retailers are realizing that a two-year-old market analysis on the income, education, and population characteristics of a given ZIP code won’t offer the kind of granular insight a brand needs to stay ahead today.

Customers now have a menu of retail options, from curbside pickup to online order and delivery. Understanding how, where, and why consumers are shopping the way they are is fundamental to crafting an omnichannel strategy. Mapping can plot out how those habits are changing daily so a company can better serve customers whether they’re walking in the door or connecting online.

The coronavirus pandemic perfectly demonstrates how forces outside an executive’s control can trigger new factors and microtrends that GIS is uniquely capable of tracking. Pandemic-related patterns—including that more men were shopping in-store than women during lockdown phases, or that some main avenues had less foot traffic than side streets—could influence strategic decisions. A CEO might use that location intelligence to decide which sites stay open, or how to target marketing to niche groups. Small adjustments can be the difference between survival and closure in trying economic times, and smart maps give companies that edge.

5. A Shared Platform for Collaboration and Communication

Communication technologies have advanced exponentially in recent decades. The time elapsed between the invention of the telephone and email was roughly 100 years, yet in just the last 10 years, we’ve seen a profusion of platforms—from social media to Slack—that are reshaping how we interact.

GIS is often found at the intersections of innovative change because maps are fundamentally shared platforms, inspiring understanding and collaboration like few other modes do. Employed on an enterprise level, geospatial analytics helped energy giant BP share data across departments otherwise siloed from each other. That has led to the creation of a new kind of analyst, one who is “bilingual” in the business vernacular of executives and the GIS analysts who track the latest developments in data science.

The connective power of location intelligence has extended even to the ski slopes, where old, analogue modes of information often left important details about infrastructure locked in the minds of employees. When that information was instead coded into a smart map of the mountain, everything from repairs to snowmaking became simplified and streamlined, contributing to even more economic success.

Even with the recent tectonic shifts in technology and commerce, certain concepts remain fixed in the human mind, fundamental to our understanding of the world. A map is one such archetype. Adapted from paper form to the digital realm, where they enable new advances in pattern-finding and strategic planning, maps have never been more powerful than they are today as agents of business change.

This article was originally published on the global edition of Wherenext