Published on January 30th, 2021 | by Sumit Bhowal

Location analytics and its benefits

Location analytics is the process of combining business and location data to generate location-specific insights. Transactional data, for example, logistics, sales, supply chain, etc contain geographic data with it. Analysis of this provides more dynamic insights with visuals of maps along with important data points to relate with. This enables contextualization at many levels inside the organization, especially for business users.

The flow of goods in the supply chain and routes in logistics, product sales in retails can be easily understood in detail. Users can slice and dice, drill up and down their data to get more in-depth insights. They can further do segmentation and more based on data points like the point of sale, shipping route, point of booking, and more.

For businesses, that are operating across various nations and multiple locations, it becomes extremely important to associate insights to these locations for a better understanding of the business. Location analytics also enables them to do comparisons between locations for similar KPIs and monitor location-wise performance.

Improving operation efficiency, enhancing ROI, accelerating sales, and reducing costs, all can be easily done with the help of location analytics. From making insights more comprehensive to enabling leaders to make data-driven decisions, it can offer so much more to business. Let us see what more location analytics can do:

Enhancing ROI

Location analytics quickly generate insights on current business performance and future scope. When general data is combined with geographical data, stakeholders can clearly see investment versus return at various locations. They can also know, which locations can do with lesser resources and which ones need more for better revenue. By consuming visual insights, they can figure out directly via maps about which strategy is suitable for which location. They can utilize techniques like heatmapping to get at glance insights.

Improving sales

Location analytics can specifically be important in improving sales for retailers. They can do this via developing targeted marketing strategies for specific locations and taking a targeted approach for specific customer segments. Analytics can help them link the consumer behavior, buying pattern, market trends, and more to a particular latitude and longitude. Location-based merchandising and product assortment decisions can also help in improving experience and sales.

Reducing cost

Its uses are not just limited to performance monitoring but can also expand to see how the expenses are distributed at various places. With maps, leaders can directly relate expense amounts and reasons to the locations. They can know which area like marketing, rent or wages are contributing to overall expense in which region and can quickly identify efficiency gaps as compared to the amount invested. Specific trends, patterns, and correlations can also be easily recognized, which can be further used to identify cost triggers.

Similarly, the supply chain and logistics industry can also use this to minimize expenses. It can help in identifying the best route for fleets and can even provide alternate route suggestions in real-time for optimized work. It can also help track products and packages right from a manufacturing unit or booking point to a retail store or delivery point.

Providing a better customer experience

The consumers of today are hard to please and need customized products and personalized offerings for a better experience. Location analytics can help retailers do this, by enabling them to identify which customers want exactly what and deliver it to them at the right location. By analyzing data coming from one location, the root cause of any problem can be understood and eradicated.

These are just a few of the benefits of location analytics. It empowers businesses to be more efficient and smarter in the operation and execution. With technology spreading more every day, the benefits of location analytics will certainly spread in more industry and it will become not just an additional feature but one of the core features of differentiation.

Tags: benefits, location analytics

About the Author

Sumit Bhowal An Internet addict and a MASTAN , Also a lazy Freelancer . I don't try to reinvent the wheel I just like to soak things in Steroid's :p Thanks (y)