Advertisment

Manage your data spatially in the new year

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

The market was abuzz with lots of new technologies and trends last year-SOA,

Unified Communication, Green IT, Web 2.0, SaaS, virtualization, mobility, etc.

We covered each of these hot trends in detail throughout last year, and will

continue doing so this year as well, because they're not going out of fashion

anytime soon. But there's one trend that we haven't covered much last year,

which is also likely to setup a storm this year. That trend is of using

technology for analyzing spatial data, more commonly known as GIS.

Advertisment

Geographic Information System or GIS is not a new concept. It's been there

for many years, and has gradually been making inroads into many different

industries. But over the recent past, we've seen some very innovative uses of

this technology. Last year, we saw it being used by the power sector, wherein a

power distribution company mapped some of its important data on the map of the

area it supplied power to. This data included location of customers,

transmission lines, and even lamp posts. Using this data, the company was able

manage customer complaints more easily, plan power cuts, and much more.



Anil Chopra, Editor

Two years ago, we saw an insurance company deploying GIS for risk management.

It mapped certain demographic data on a city map, such as population density,

flood data, number of road accidents in the area, etc. This helped the company

in its underwriting process.

Advertisment

Likewise, there can be many other exciting applications of GIS, for just

about every industry be it real estate, healthcare, pharma, retail, oil and gas

productions, etc. The possibilities are mind-boggling. In fact, the trend now is

to develop GIS solutions that integrate with your common business applications.

How about mapping your ERP or CRM data to a GIS? For instance, if you're a

manufacturing organization with warehouses and manufacturing plants in multiple

locations, then you could use GIS to gain some useful insights about them. For

instance, you could determine the warehouse that's closest to a customer, so

that you save time and courier costs in shipping orders to the customer.

Likewise, you could immediately track inventory information, production status,

and much more about each location directly from the map.

GIS could also be used to analyze other types of data. How about calculating

region wise sales over the year for your companyto determine why sales have been

high or low in different areas. Using GIS with CRM, you could determine where

your maximum sales are coming from, and which customers have the maximum

complaints.

All the information we talked of could be easily generated from reports, but

GIS makes it more convenient. So here's to quicker and easier analysis of data

for more informed decisions in the new year.

Happy New Year!

Advertisment