Location Analytics
What is Location Analytics?
Location analytics extracts additional insights from business data by adding a layer of geolocation information. Usually, this is used for transactional data such as sales, logistics, and supply chains to allow a new dimension that helps contextualize specific figures.
More importantly, it gives you a way to visualize the flow of goods, sales, and supplies with depth and distance. Generally, most of the information produced across industries today already include at least some geographic component. A product’s shipping route, point of origin, and point of sale are already used in some degree to categorize and segment data.
By adding location analytics to existing business intelligence, organizations can take advantage of this geographic data to create new insights and provide both different points of comparison. For organizations that have multiple locations or operations across the globe, understanding the geographical aspect of their business is crucial.
Cost savings, sale opportunities, and efficiency improvements can all come by cross-referencing transactional data with geolocation and other data. Location analysis gives you the tools to both analyze and visualize this data to make it more accessible to your stakeholders and more actionable.
How can I use Location Analytics?
Today, there’s no shortage of ways multiple industries can and do use location and geo-analytics. In the retail industry, for instance, sales data can be valuable by location, and can give companies greater context when making strategic decisions about where to allocate more resources.
By combining sales and location data, companies can create heat maps that show the most profitable areas and those where improvements could be made.
Aside from sales, companies can use their location data by comparing it to customer satisfaction metrics. This lets companies determine regional preferences, effective sales strategies, and peak purchasing periods to better plan their global efforts.
For couriers and governmental postal agencies, location analytics can be used to track packages and delivery routes. On a broader level, they can also be used to determine the best possible routes by combining previous data alongside real-time traffic data and combining multiple delivery points to minimize wasted resources and time.
Supply chain and logistics companies can also reduce time wasted and find optimal travel routes for their supplies by determining the efficiency of existing chains. Using location data, they can visualize routes, find bottlenecks, and discover the best way to structure their operations for optimal performance.
