Beyond CRM: Location intelligence
CRM is hooking up with geographic information systems and business intelligence to give business an ever-wider window on the world...
By Phil Parent
In real estate, it’s all about location, location... and location. And, increasingly, in the tech world, CRM is following suit, by incorporating ‘location intelligence’ into its systems – to good effect.
In Australia, the major utilities in particular have latched on to this developing application which combines GIS (geographic information system), CRM (customer relationship management) and BI (business intelligence), to provide true ‘location intelligence’.
In another technical twist, GIS, is also being used by a Sydney ‘data engineer’ company that is compressing spatial database information so it can run on hand-held devices.
This is a technology that is, literally, on the move. So how is it being used? Energy companies are becoming major users, but it is also starting to move into the consumer space.
CRM goes geographic
Energex is one of Australia’s largest and fastest-growing electricity providers, with more than 3,800 staff. The utility provides electricity to around 2.8 million people, and deals with 1.3 million connections and 25,000 square kilometres of territory, in south-east Queensland. It is also quite innovative in the way it’s using location intelligence technology.
To help the company better manage its response to outages, Energex is using ESRI Australia’s location intelligence gateway solution to provide critical insights into the locational aspect of blackouts.
The gateway does this by pulling together information from multiple corporate systems, including customer and asset information, and then presenting it as a single view through a web-based geographic interface.
For example, suppose homes are blacked out in several suburbs, householders could contact the utility’s call centre which could tell then exactly who is affected by looking at a map with, say, red dots showing the lines down. The operator – and the engineers fixing the problem – could also drill down (by clicking on the GIS-enabled dots) to access further information, such as what the blackout’s cause is and, hopefully, how long it is likely to last.
In addition, from the company’s point of view, this new ability to connect and view data from different sources through a geographic view (GIS-enabled map) also means assets can be tracked in a new way – by drilling down through the GIS-connected information levels. This can help with asset management and, thus, enable better decision-making.
Energex’s network strategic data manager, Tom Williams, comments: “Of real value to us is that outages can be explored in detail, including the original cause of the incident, construction activities for restoration and actual repair tasks undertaken. ESRI’s location intelligence solution has given us the ability to view all this information through a common interface.”
Energex is also using the solution for a data-capture project that has already identified an extra $500 million worth of assets, such as underground pillars and cable joints, that had not previously been tracked. This unexpected result has led to increased revenues of $21 million a year, through return on capital.
“This capture is testament to the value of greater synergy across the organisation and having a more consistent view of assets,” says Williams.
“From a business perspective, it has allowed Energex to make insightful decisions about where to invest money for the future and which parts of our business could be improved.”
Real-time information
SP AusNet, Victoria’s largest energy delivery business, is also using location intelligence to improve customer service and help facilitate service restoration during blackouts.
The utility’s Outage Information Centre (OIC) is using location intelligence to enhance its capabilities. It can now distribute outage information in near real-time to those who need it. These would typically include the incident response team, general managers and the corporate communications unit.
SP AusNet’s network operations centre is responsible for managing the power outage restoration process. Now, with the help of the enhanced OIC, it can deliver updated information, without this detracting from its main focus of getting the blacked-out parts of the network up-and-running again.
During a blackout, the OIC tracks three key characteristics: ‘what’ type of outage; ‘where’ outages have occurred, and the ‘time’ taken to get services up again. The company installed ESRI’s gateway solution, EView, to provide insights into the ‘where’ aspect of blackouts.
Jeff Warke, SP AusNet’s enterprise solution architect, says the new interface means those who need to can view information geographically and also drill down to detail when necessary.
Data sources that can now be accessed via the company’s outage information centre include its outage management system as well as the ESRI geographic information system. Raw data is fed into the data warehouse and then summarised into more efficient data structures for use by network operations centre staff. The user interface integrates features from both ESRI’s EView and IBM’s business intelligence solution, Cognos.
Digital maps: The key
While location intelligence might just be the ‘killer app’ that combines all the benefits of CRM, BI and GIS in a single unified view, the paramount enabler is the digital base map.
Until quite recently, digital base maps were developed primarily for the GIS-related activities of local councils and environmental agencies, as well as the automated mapping/facilities management applications for utilities, target marketers and other organisations with spatial needs. As specialised maps, they had certain attributes that were optimised for their specific applications.
However, this has changed with the advent of GPSbased navigation in cars. Other mainstream internet-based mapping applications, such as Google Earth and ‘mash-ups’ (the combination of online maps and location-based information) have also helped transform the market for digital base maps. This has exploded and now digital mapping is a mainstream business.
How big? Well, a good example is Navteq. The world’s largest maker of digital maps used in car-navigation equipment, Navteq was bought out by Nokia last year for US$8.1 billion, says Michael Stokes, managing director of Sydney based Navigate Spatial Systems and Data Engineers, Navteq’s local partner.
“Nokia is the world's biggest mobile-phone company. That should give you some sort of idea of how fast this market is developing and how much interest has been generated by these developments,” says Stokes.
Navteq’s clients include Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, and it has been profitable every quarter since going public three years ago. Its local partner, Navigate, specialises in enhancing digital base maps for easier integration into map-based applications.
“One of the major barriers to more widespread utilisation of GIS-type applications for devices such as mobile phones is the sheer size of the digital maps that provide a spatial context,” explains Stokes.
“A new development, called Smart Data Compression (SDC), redefines feature classes to share attribute information with different geometries, thereby reducing database sizes by up to 90%. So what we are doing is taking Australian maps in the standard Navteq format and compressing them with SDC to make them more amenable for smaller devices. We’re one of the few companies worldwide doing this.”
Maps compressed using SDC are used in ESRI’s GIS applications. These include ArcGIS StreetMap, ArcIMS RouteServer, RouteMAP IMS, Business Analyst and BusinessMAP.
In today’s competitive environment, it’s not enough to know just who your customers are. Knowing where they are is equally important, especially if you are providing a service that is location-based such as power, communications, deliveries or pick-ups, or an on-site service such as building inspections or maintenance.
Location intelligence is just starting to gain traction in the corporate world. It could become a major factor in helping organisations find – and keep – customers.
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Hosted CRM: Saving $$$s and going ‘social’ Salesforce.com started it all. The company was the first off the block, in 1999, in offering CRM as a web service. In fact, Salesforce was doing SaaS before SaaS even entered the vocabulary. And it has been pretty successful. The company has over 55,000 customers worldwide who use Salesforce to manage their sales, marketing, customer service and other critical business functions. The SaaS market is healthy too, with analyst Gartner predicting it will be worth US$6.5 billion this year. The SaaS model is particularly suited to New Zealand as we are a nation of small- to medium-sized businesses. We don’t have money to burn and any technology that can help us cut costs, while maintaining services, is going to do well. SaaS-based CRM delivers on both counts. While Salesforce is still strong, it now has its rivals, NetSuite in particular. The latter aims its products at mid-market companies in particular. In April last year it launched its OneWorld service, which addresses the needs of companies with multiple business units; it can also handle different currencies, tax rules and reporting requirements, so is good for exporters, and touches on the bumping up of reporting requirements companies now face in the post credit-crunch economy. NetSuite’s pitch is the basic SaaS one of relieving businesses of their IT headaches so they can concentrate on their core business. But there is an extra in the industry-specific vertical solutions it has developed – so that what you get “already works the way you and your people do”, cutting down on customisation and training costs. It also promotes its integration of CRM with accounting/ERP and e-commerce as another cost saver – and productivity booster – which is of particular value in present economic circumstances. “NetSuite is the only SaaS business suite that actually lets an organisation manage the complete customer lifecycle – from first touch to closed sale, to repeat purchase” says Mini Peiris, NetSuite’s vice president for product marketing. “This single view of the customer provides for seamless business processes across departments, resulting in tremendous productivity gains.” Salesforce goes mobile It has just launched a slimmed-down version of its service for use on high-end mobiles. The Mobile Lite service runs on the BlackBerry and the iPhone, as well as Microsoft Windows. It allows salespeople to access company accounts and data while out and about. And just prior to this, in March, Salesforce added a new “Opportunity Genius” feature to its CRM service that can match a salesperson’s current deals with ones previously closed by others, to see what works best. The idea is that sales staff can contact co-workers to discuss such. Analyst Nucleus Research commented that we are still in the early days of salespeople leveraging social networking in this way, and companies need to foster such by, say, creating commission-sharing structures to encourage staff to co-operate. Sugar CRM is another, albeit smaller, player in the market. Teiq is Sugar’s CRM partner in New Zealand. It also has a small presence in Australia. “The SaaS model works very well for all parties,” says James Beamish-White, local director of Teiq. “Clients like it because they can have all of the advantages of enterprise solutions without any of the support issues associated with running major applications. Plus, because SaaS is, by definition, browser-based, users can access it from any browser, anywhere. SaaS is scalable as well, so adding capacity is easy. We are firm believers in the future of web-based services and see SaaS as a growing trend,” he says. Research backs this up. According to IT analyst Springboard Research, lower cost of ownership is the most significant reason for Australian and New Zealand enterprises adopting SaaS. And SaaS adoption is growing. In its report, SaaS in ANZ: A Fast Maturing Market, Springboard forecasts the ANZ SaaS market will register a compound annual growth rate of 55 percent between 2007 and 2011, and reach A$683 million (US$444 million) by 2011. The report also highlights that SaaS deployment among ANZ enterprises is far from maturity, with the majority of respondents currently using SaaS applications in isolation. Only 20 percent of respondents have integrated SaaS applications with traditional enterprise applications and fewer still have enabled integration between SaaS applications. “Just look at the web-based applications that Google is offering,” says Beamish-White. “They have email, calendars, documents and more. Users can create, modify and share all sorts of information. Right now, they are targeting individuals, but business and enterprise applications can’t be far away.” Salesforce’s new product directions are going along this path. In addition to the aforementioned “Genius” feature, the company has also recently allowed its customers to access Salesforce’s content database, so they can bundle-up PDFs and white papers etc and publish them on a public website, to which sales prospects can then be sent a link. |
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