Whether moving in a driverless car or deliver an e-commerce product at customers doorstep. “Location” plays an important role. There is a significant dimension of “Location” in every business transactions. Location can be an address, a service boundary, a sales territory, or a delivery route. Therefore location-specific data and its analytics are high in demand among various enterprises. Analytics of location-based data helps an organization to earn more profit and also contribute in making operational activities much more efficient and faster. Enterprises from different domains, therefore, now started using location-based data analytics application. “Spatial Intelligence” is one of them.
Spatial Intelligence
Spatial Intelligence (SI) is an application of GIS and is also known as Location Intelligence. Spatial Intelligence is the process of deriving meaningful insights from geospatial data captured by GIS. With many different observations, patterns get discovered which help a business to take better decisions, optimize their business operations and increase their profits.
Eminence of GIS
GIS stands for Geographic Information System. GIS is a system, which is designed to capture, store, manipulate, manage and present “Location” specific data to its end users in graphical format. It is a system which comprises of software, hardware, people, data, and methods.
GIS software lets an organization to produce maps and other graphic displays of geographic information for analysis and presentation. GIS is much more than a container of maps in digital form. GIS hardware helps to capture an image and other digital data for a particular location. People are the end users of GIS; it can be GIS technicians, managers, administrators, etc.
Spatial Intelligence for Businesses Transformation
It is generally known fact that more than 80% of all data has a location element to it and that location directly affects the kind of insights that you might draw from many sets of information. By carrying out a spatial analysis of this data using varied business intelligence (BI) tools, decision makers will able to better understand the past, current and forthcoming aspects of business operations to derive valuable insights and make most effective decisions for their businesses.
Most of the time enterprises require customer’s data related to specific locations to know income levels, educational background, buying habits of persons residing in a specific area which helps a business to find a probable location where that particular business get flourished.
Spatial Intelligence derives meaningful observations for an existing business as well. In which areas an organization is performing well? Which are the underperforming areas? Which are the areas where a company needs to focus immediate attention? There is a series of many important questions related to a business growth. Spatial intelligence has the potential to derive meaningful answers to these questions.
Spatial relationships, patterns and trends reveal priceless business intelligence and bring easy-to-understand visualization to business applications. The power of location intelligence enables companies to identify and increase where business performs stronger and cut down on failing assets.
Spatial Intelligence is Getting Recognition among Different Enterprises
Companies from different verticals are taking Spatial Intelligence very seriously and investing huge money on it. Traditional players of the geospatial industry like Esri, Hexagon and Pitney Bowes are working with spatial data on a large scale. Apart from these companies many hard-core IT corporations like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are also venturing into spatial analytics at full throttle. For instance, by integrating Esri’s technologies into Azure IoT Suite’s preconfigured solutions, Microsoft is empowering customers to gain valuable insights about where their assets are and what they are doing at all times, anywhere in the world.
Which sectors are gaining from Spatial Intelligence?
There are two categories of businesses which are using Spatial Intelligence. The first set is of those businesses which are naturally embedded in geographies like transport, telecommunication, or real estate, which absolutely depend on location-based information. The second set comprises of the group of users who not essentially use geospatial data on an everyday basis but they still depend on it for better performance. These would be retailers, insurance companies and banks.
Let’s enlighten how these sectors are gaining with Spatial Intelligence:
Logistics: To check the consumption rate of a particular product on a particular location help warehouse management to determine, which stock is needed on a priority basis? Thus it helps a logistic company to maintain demand-supply ratio without any caveat. Companies like United Parcel Service and FedEx are augmenting delivery routes using spatial analytics.
Transport: To determine the shortest and fastest transportation routes for delivery, SI is very helpful. Apart from this, it also provides direction to travellers while driving.
Real State: Many people buy a house based on the location. People prefer a location which is near to a hospital, a railway station, schools etc. Spatial analytics provides research, analysis, and presentation of each prospective site. It helps in determining ideal sites for development.
Telecommunication: In analyzing rivals network coverage, actual bandwidth, potential area to tap new business opportunity, SI is really helpful for telecommunication.
Energy: Spatial Intelligence is helping energy industry to identify the potential location for energy exploration.
Retail: Spatial analysis is helping the retail industry to maintain stock delivery, store management, inventory management, marketing and sales.
Advertisement Industry: SI helps Advertisement and PR agency in order to find potential location, to install billboard so that it gets maximum views.
Healthcare: To identifying those locations, which are more prone to a certain disease, SI provides valuable inputs to the health officials to make policy and administrative decisions to control epidemic diseases.
Airports and airlines: Air traffic control use SI to track flight operations with greater accuracy and efficiency. SI helps airlines to reroute flight path in case of an emergency. It also helps in optimizing fuel and staff cost.
Government agencies: Not only private companies but many government agencies are also using SI. Defense agencies, town planning department or public distribution system all are using SI for better administration and efficient operations.
Insurance Company: Climate is not under anyone’s control but policies are. Drought and hailstorm have become a common phenomenon since last few decades. Drought and hailstorm contribute to large-scale crop damages. Crop insurance has gained popularity due to drought and hailstorm. SI helps insurance company to predict in advance about future climate behaviors for a particular location and helps them in making crop insurance policy and promotion as well.
Humans think visually, therefore spatially. Due to visual decoding, comparison of data and invaluable business insights, SI has already made inroads across various enterprises. With many emerging technologies like crowdsourcing, human geography and visual analytics, dominance of Spatial Intelligence will only grow further.