BUSINESS GEOGRAPHICS

 Technology is transforming the nature of our products, companies, and industries - even the very nature of competition itself. No circumstances have a greater effect on the way we live, work, and conceive our future than the proliferation of information. Companies that understand and anticipate the power of information technology have the ability to be in control of their destinies.

 The challenge of implementing technology to effectively utilise information allows a company to set itself apart from its competitors, change the structure of its industry, become the lowest cost and / or highest quality producer, and effectively select the most profitable market.

 Geographic Information Systems or (GIS) is intended to help you meet this challenge by arranging your information in a visual format so that you can communicate back and forth between what you know and what you see. The difference between success and failure is the ability to communicate clearly and effectively.

	GIS gives the ability to clearly see the location and symbols of our data geogra

 

To be successful today’s marketplace, business organisations must gain a competitive edge. This requires being able to quickly adopt innovative techniques and technologies that help your business make better, more informed decisions. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can play an essential role in helping business make these decisions, while attaining that competitive edge. GIS software combines the power of computer mapping and data analysis tools to help business succeed. Users of GIS are finding that they are gaining an advantage over competitors because they are able to analyse geography more effectively.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is changing the landscape of business GIS has moved from the research centre to the corporate headquarters, from the scientist’s workstation to the businessman’s personal computer, from the mapmaker to the manager. In the process, it has grown into a major industry employing tens of thousands of people. In 1996, the worldwide market for GIS software, hardware, and services topped $6 billion in revenue.

	With GIS, it is easy to find the best distribution network, shortest path, and direction details.

 

Business managers, marketing strategists, financial analysts, and professional planners are increasingly relying on GIS to organise, analyse, and present their business data. By tying information to specific locations, like street addresses and census tracts, they are creating “business maps” that help them identify patterns and understand relationships not apparent from tables and charts.

Whether they’re scouting store locations, reorganising sales territories, improving delivery routs, identifying new markets, or publishing maps on the internet, these “spatially literate” users have learned to unleash the power of GIS in their business.

	This image shows the service areas covered by the sales reps of the company.

 

GIS is a particular kind of software program that runs on personal computers. In many ways it resembles a database program (it analyses and relates information stored as records), but with one crucial difference: Each record in a GIS contains information used to draw a geometric shape-usually a point, a line, or a polygon. That shape should, in tern, represent a unique place on earth to which the data corresponds. You can think of a GIS system as a spatial database-a database that stores the location and shape of information.

The field of business geographics has grown dramatically during the last few years. One sign of this growth is the increase in the types of software products available. Many desktop mapping packages designed specifically for business users have been released.

Business applications have benefited from the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to manage, analyse, and visualise spatial or geographic relationships that are important to conducting business. GIS can provide solutions throughout your company including such areas as competitive assessment, real estate, planning, sales, facility management, decision support, delivery/distribution, merchandising, and others. For example, GIS has been used successfully to support decisions regarding site selection for new retail establishments, route planning for delivery services, and demographic analysis to support target marketing.

GIS is also used to locate our customers, our competitors' customers and customers of both.

 

Deep within your enterprise system lie answers to the most perplexing problems of any business such as:  

• Where are our customers located ?

• Where are our sales doing well ?

• Where is the best location for a new store ?

• Where can we grow our business ?

The key word in these questions is where. Unfortunately, the operational data your company gathers is designed to run a business and not analyse it. In order to get the right answers quickly, you need a system that will take advantage of every system of your data. Unless you have a GIS system, you are missing the most important dimensions of all, location. Think about it, over 80% of your corporate data has a location attached to it, such as a customer address or area code, store location, or even warehouse shelf.

	The red pieces of each pie chart shows the market share of our company compared to the market share of a its major competitor in every Lebanese mohafazat

 

A global marketplace, competitive pressure, and downsizing, are just some of the challenges facing business today. The ability to anticipate and manage these challenges is a direct product of the information tools that help identify or perform the following:

n      Markets with the best opportunity

n      Profitable customers

n      Facility optimisation

n      Competitive strategies

In no time you’ll be working with your data geographically, seeing patterns you couldn’t see before, revealing hidden trends, and gaining new insights. GIS software makes it easy to integrate data from all over your organisation and display them on maps.