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JOHANNESBURG – June 04, 2009 – While data continues to drive business value, the way in which it is analysed can set the most effective organisations apart from their competitors. With this in mind, the contexts in which companies strategise and look to leverage information assets must include location and dynamic geographic visualisation.
“Business Intelligence (BI) is the use of information that enables organisations to best decide, measure, manage and optimise performance to achieve efficiency and financial benefit,” explains Alan Ellis, CEO of ST Group. “BI solutions are designed to extract and analyse information from data warehouses, allowing decision makers to take action to improve business performance. But, while they are ideal for analysing dimensions of ‘whom’, ‘what’ and ‘when’, these tools fall short of being able to answer questions in relation to ‘where’, such as the relation of where customers live to where they make their purchases.”
So-called “Location Intelligence” (LI) is a critical aspect of business planning and processes which allows businesses to take organisational data and apply location to empower effective decision-making. LI answers questions in relation to “where” and allows companies to market, plan, assign assets, track resources and manage services with the intelligent use of geographical data.
As BI is a vital enterprise application, applying location context to it can allow for optimisation within every organisation. For example, making retail locations more competitive requires intelligent use of location information. Any intention to influence customers through advertising or direct mail should be conceived after consideration of the characteristics of where those customers are.
“Answering this ‘where’ question - where are my most profitable customers, where are my competitors located, where are my retail locations performing best - is a fundamental need.”
Ellis maintains that Location Intelligence can enhance the business focus of BI. “It is the integration and use of location-related content and context that enables businesses to make decisions and take action as the visual power of maps reveals trends, patterns and insights that tabular views and pie-charts cannot.”
ST Group’s Location Business Intelligence Solution (LBIS) is an out of the box solution that effectively combines both LI and BI, enabling businesses to acquire better insight. Essentially a BI solution combined with a mapping tool, LBIS allows the user to integrate report and analysis data with locational data – helping organisations make better, more relevant decisions, faster.
Demographic and other location data can be used to enrich and add value to the core BI data in the data warehouse. Utilising BI data cubes, an analyst is able to synchronise pivot table, graph and relevant map layers enabling an hierarchical output. Having seen the data in a particular way, the analyst can now immediately view it in another mode and, with the cross-function drill down capabilities of LBIS, this view can be modified in any of the output windows - tabular, graph or map.
Instant manipulation of how data is viewed allows the analyst to make relevant comparisons in real-time. This powerful tool offers businesses the opportunity to bring spatial analysis to a wider audience, moving from being a device for the BI specialists only, to a true tool for all business users, successfully empowering organisations to deploy effective business strategies. This also means that IT departments will not be required to maintain, learn and use two sets of administrative tools nor train users on different applications, effectively saving software and service costs and enhancing user productivity.
LBIS allows the user to export the report to CSV format, enabling the instant sharing of analytical data. Further, its enhanced features enable users to print any or all of the data outputs. The solution runs on MI2GO and is a server-based deployment ensuring straightforward access by users – a program that can be used for sophisticated queries, without needing to know a query language like SQL. Users also have web based access through http.
“LBIS provides historical, current and predictive views of operations, giving business the competitive advantage,” says Ellis. “It is the only solution for making intelligent business decisions.”
About ST Group
Founded in 1994, Spatial Technologies is above all a solutions company, focused on the delivery of location-based business intelligence value to clients. The company’s technology harnesses the power of location to deliver a competitive advantage to their clients in the shortest time and as cost-effectively as possible by using Pitney Bowes world-class software and technology.
Today Spatial Technologies is part of the expanded ST Group, which also comprises UConnect (focused on mobility solutions and resource management) and Connected World Solutions (development support and training). ST Group strives to be the group of choice for providing location intelligence and mobility solutions across the enterprise. The group places a high value on developing long-term relationships with all stakeholders. Clients come from, among others, the banking, retail, logistics, finance and telecommunications sectors.
CONTACTS:
ST Group, Lisa de Kock, tel: +27 11 314 0788, e-mail: lisad@stgroup.co.za
icomm, Nicola Read, 083 269 2227, nicola@pr.co.za
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