Understand Your Business In New Ways with Location Intelligence

The analytics industry changes at such a rapid pace that leaders are often left confused about the best software or analytic techniques to explore to maximize their BI investments, make the most of their current deployments, stay innovative and analytically mature, or to gain an edge over their competitors.

According to Gartner, there are three analytic techniques that companies plan to invest in to modernize their BI and analytics capabilities. These include data mining/predictive analytics, geospatial and location intelligence, and link/network/graph analytics. For this article, we will focus on geospatial and location intelligence.

You’ve probably heard that 80% of all business data contains a location component. Because of this, Forbes says “it is critical to understand how location affects business. Properly analyzing location can provide insights that support and improve decision making in everything from marketing to supply chain logistics and operations.”

While you can use traditional BI tools to find patterns and trends, seeing and analyzing your business data in the context of its location helps you understand your business in new ways that allow you to make more informed and impactful decisions.

With location intelligence you can:

• Supplement traditional BI to reveal new ways to look at existing data, allowing you to discover new operational efficiencies or ways to compete.
• Visualize and analyze the relationship between corporate data (like revenues and inventory) and location-specific data (such as sales territories, store locations, and customer locations).
• Remove blind spots in your data and detect patterns that weren’t previously obvious, allowing you to see the whole picture.
• Combine maps with demographics, consumer spending, weather data, crime statistics, and more.  When you combine data from external sources, you get an enhanced perspective in the context of where your data is located, what it’s near, and how it’s all connected.

New Technology Brings Mapping to Non-GIS Professionals

Utilizing location intelligence doesn’t have to be difficult and expensive or require specialized expertise to implement and manage.

“Today’s location analytics technologies, like QlikMaps, enables business users to develop maps and use them for geospatial data discovery. We really love QlikMaps, as it is a vehicle that can drive business decisions, not just a tool that puts a bunch of cool features together, and QlikMaps has broken down the barriers to operational use of geospatial big data,” said Steve Lytle, Director of Location Analytics at Analytics8.

With QlikMaps, end users can build a multi-layer map in just seconds that has custom coloring, pop-ups, and drill down functionality. And the best part is, no coding is required to build a map in QlikMaps, so anyone in the organization, not just developers, can create maps and use them for analysis and insightful decision making.

QlikMaps in Real Life

External Data Provides Deeper Insights
Bring in external data from outside your data model and get deeper insights into what is going on- see which patients are visiting which hospitals and where people are traveling to and from. Determine if factors like age or ethnicity are impacting what hospitals are visited and if certain services are perhaps missing from a specific location that would increase attendance (for example, are Spanish speaking services needed to better serve your clients?).

See Inside Locations To Drive Decision Making
Perform indoor and venue mapping. Zoom into incredibly small polygons that can represent individual buildings, retail stalls inside airports and shopping malls, agricultural fields. For example, inside an airport, get insight into where to place advertisements based on where people are spending the most time and money.

Want to see more?

Check out an on-demand webinar of the latest release of the product, QlikMaps 3.0.

Access The Webinar Here