One place: can we be your geospatial vending machine?

When one of our Fortune 500 clients described us as a ‘geospatial data vending machine’ we didn’t take it personally.

In fact, we took it as a compliment.

What our client explained was we saved them significant amounts of resource, time, and money by compiling all of their data and sourcing, cleansing, licensing, and compiling third-party data, and packaged it up ready for their use.

It got us thinking about our platform, Kalibrate Location Intelligence (KLI), and how our team works to enhance a client’s access to their information and other data while saving them money with the best data and technology. That can also be enhanced within our analytics function, which delivers bespoke models to meet our clients’ needs at a fraction of the cost, resource, and time implications of in-house builds.

The benefits the client articulated were efficiency and cost savings – we save them resources, time, and money – and the vending machine analogy is a fitting one. Consider the work involved in DIYing your third-party data acquisition and ongoing maintenance. You are going to need to research vendors, sign agreements, license the data, cleanse, and update the data, and manage the ongoing licenses and storage costs. That work will touch legal, data analytics, compliance, information technology, data privacy, finance, and real estate and requires hiring specialists. The resource implications are significant – both financial and time – when budgets are already stretched.

We add significant value and free up resources from each of the departments listed above. Due to the configurability of KLI and our relationship with data vendors, the ongoing licensing, management, and storage costs represent recurring value every year of our relationship. It is another stress, another blocker, off their plate so the team can focus on executing on their priorities.

Kalibrate has 14 team members actively working with third party data vendors to ensure our clients get speedy, stress-free access to the highest quality datasets on the market. We keep abreast of the newest data coming to market and manage the data licensing agreements, so clients do not need to worry about managing multiple relationships – and all data is stored and maintained on our server, reducing costs and resource demands.

One place for all your internal and third-party data

The client mentioned above is one of the largest retailers in the world and their competitive edge is sharpest when their teams have everything they need in one place, ready to be analyzed by whoever needs it.

As organizations grow, so does the potential for data silos. In the largest businesses, disparate teams often have valuable data that would benefit others in the company. An often-heard line from our clients is ‘oh, we didn’t know marketing had this information’. That information is often a missing ingredient for a particular challenge they have been trying to answer – that’s why data centralization capabilities are so powerful.

Access any place

The native app for KLI integrates field-based teams and the intelligence they gather on-site or out in a market and allows them to access key data. Users can quickly upload pictures and data allowing operations or marketing users to view the current parking provision, accessibility, point of sale displays, outside signage, or branding. The speed of intelligence exchange between teams is often siloed or lacks visibility into each other’s day-to-day. This is a challenge for even the most integrated operations. With KLI, that challenge is eased by design – because everyone is working from the same centralized source of truth.

One version of truth may not be limited to a single chain. We work with many clients who utilize KLI to manage multiple chains within their portfolio, and this could be a combination of franchised and owned companies One platform, all your data, all your brands – that’s efficiency at every level

A place for growth and collaboration

We consider KLI the most scalable tool on the market due to its highly configurable functionality. Some of our clients have two people using the platform, others have 1,000s. Different team members or departments can be assigned roles, with the ability to visualize their locations and markets, or function-specific data, increasing internal security, privacy, and efficiency. We meet you where you are and grow and scale with you.

Our clients’ use of KLI is diverse, but the core of the platform’s capabilities is summarized as follows:

• Centralize and synchronize all your internal data combined with the most relevant third-party data sets in a single platform
• Deploy your own models or models built by our team to start answering critical location questions
• Collaborate across teams, functions, or the entire organization, sharing outputs and reports seamlessly

We also have a highly experienced analytics and consultancy team. Their role when working with enterprise organizations can vary depending on the amount of model build required and the internal capabilities of the client. Here are three approaches:

• Our analytics builds the model and deploys in platform for the client to use
• Kalibrate delivers training, the client’s teams build their own model, and deploys in platform
• Collaborative approach with our team working alongside the client to develop a model and agree refresh cadence
• 16 members of our consulting team with over 230 years of combined experience
• One-off project analyses, whitespace, impact/cannibalization/closure analyses

To complete the data vending machine analogy – choose your lunch! We give as much or as little guidance as the client needs to grab what they need, generate the insight, and start executing.

Our team of data analysts, modelers, statisticians, consultants, and GIS experts, have many decades of experience understanding how to leverage machine learning, AI, mobility data, social media data, (and many other things in a rapidly changing market) into modeling and market optimization strategies. Even the largest organizations often find it more cost and time effective to outsource this work to our expertise or collaborate with us to learn best practices rather than manage internally. At a time when resources are tight, rather than upskilling an entire team, they find budget can be more productively allocated elsewhere.

Any place – going global

When it comes to scaling internationally or if you are coming to the US, the challenges are multiplied. International datasets vary by availability and granularity. Your preferred vendor of a particular data category may lack coverage, but Kalibrate’s global-first structure means we maintain relationships with data vendors on every continent. Global location intelligence is a different animal, full of different datasets, levels of granularity, need for market knowledge, and support, and most organizations cannot manage that from an internal perspective. For the clients we work with in multiple countries, being able to access information globally and add value across the globe is absolutely a game-changer.

Learn more about Kalibrate Location Intelligence.