GPS customer location map dashboards
The GEO maps were really the most beneficial for our business.
It "forced" us to find all the GPS/GIS data for our customers. It could have taken a long time to collect the latitude/longitude data, but we did it in less than 2 days by using an android app.
We dropped pins on the customer locations and exported the data. We covered 2361 customers in less than 48 hours by using a single rep in each of 13 locations to drop the pins (biggest sales area had 596 customers and we had to use 2 people for the task - we did a quick O&M calc beforehand at avg of 5 minutes per pin drop to determine the effort required)
The data exports in an "html" format but the data can be easily found between the placemarker identifiers. You can even strip this data out in excel with cut and past if you don't have a bit more sophisticated skills, or with a bit of clever numbering and sorting etc.. The "easiest" end-user way is to record a VBA macro in Excel and to run it repetitively (manually or in a loop) since the data is repeated in the same "blocks" of positions .
The exported "html" file looks as follows (I marked one "block" with <======'s, to highlight the data for a single customer/pin )
Now for App !!!!! (try it, it is really worth it) It also helps a heck of a lot when you color-code the pins to see cross territory mixes etc. It helped us in many respects to reorganize our delivery routes and visit planning etc
This information obviously applies to any BI solution where you need to quickly and easily find the latitude/longitude's for some GEO mapping in your Dashboard.
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
