Solutions Guide

“What Do You Do?”

When we are asked “what do you do”, we almost always have to describe it differently, depending on who is asking. The quick response is “we do things with maps and spatial databases to solve business problems.”  We are what is known as a “location-based” business.  The longer answer is we provide certain key tools that are part of larger business processes and several complete solutions – in both cases where data quality, location, maps, databases and geospatial calculations are important.

Most of what we offer can be used in many industries and types of businesses, but there are some industries and use cases that stand out.

Some of the industries and business operations we serve:

Some use cases in question form:

• How can I see my customers on a map? How can I relate my customers to my …retail network? …my cellular network? …distribution centers?
• What are the vehicle traffic patterns, including average speed by time of day around my retail locations?  How can I optimally route my vehicles to pickup/delivery products or deliver services (repair, installation, etc.)
• What are the demographics of the areas my customers live and/or work in?  d
• How can I add new stores to my network considering the demographics, projected demographic, people traffic patterns, competitors, etc?
• I need a demographic report of the areas within 5, 10, 15 and 30 minute drive times? For urban locations, I want the reports by walk-time.  Sometimes, I want reports by radius.
• How can measure the risk and potential loss of my insurance customers as it relates to common perils (hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, hail damage, flooding, etc.)?
• My service fleet operates in areas, not via a radius or drive time from my facilities?  How can I optimize the number and size of the areas (zones)?
• How can I manage the areas covered by my sales force? How many territories should I have and where and what size?  Urban ones are smaller than suburban or rural ones. (These are sales operations and planning uses.)
• I have GPS coordinates. How can I find the appropriate address, closest intersection, list of Points of Interest (POIs) related to these coordinates?
• I have a vehicle/asset tracking business or a personal protection application. In emergency situations, how can I have my systems transfer calls to or identify the police/fire/emergency response jurisdictions for my users?
• What are the crime rates for list of locations?
• How can I market to families with school aged children?
• My Real Estate site needs neighborhoods identified and school/campus boundaries/attendance zones.

Our offerings:

1. APIs and Tools

• Geocoding. Geocoding is the process of matching addresses to a point on the Earth, designated by latitude and longitude coordinates. There are MANY business processces that require accurate geocoding. We have several geocoding offerings:

• SaaS Geocoding – REST and SOAP APIs for developers. Part of the OnDemand suite of Software-as-a-Service APIs.
• Spectrum Geocoding – Precisely’s premier Platform for Enterprise Geocoding, Data Quality, Data Management and Data Governance.
• MapMarker Online – A portal-based system for batching files of addresses. Worldwide coverage. Nothing to install!

• Address Validation and Correction. Related to geocoding but often needed on its own, is Address Validation and Correction.  This process deciphers, cleanses and officially validates addresses per USPS rules. Information on type of address (residence or business) and occupancy status are included.  Like with geocoding, there are many uses, including standardizing data for use by analysts and data scientists in data analytics – not just the traditional mail use case.
  Available as REST and SOAP APIs, as part of the Spectrum system or as MapMarker Online. Batching is supported and service for many countries is available.
• Reverse Geocoding: Do you have coordinates and need to know the address? Then Reverse Geocoding is the right tool. This is common in tracking applications where you have GPS-generated coordinates and you need to know the address and/or what is around it. Available as REST and SOAP APIs or as part of the Spectrum system. Batching is supported and service for many countries is available.
• Insurance Risk Calculations – Do you have addresses or coordinates where you need to evaluate some common insurance risks? These services are available: Flood Risk, Fire Risk, Earthquake Risk, Wind Pool Risk, Distance to Shoreline/Coastal Waters Service.  Batching is supported and service for many countries is available.
• E911/PSAP – Given a location, determine the Public Safety agency information and Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) call routing information, phone numbers, certain FCC information, etc. For use in 911, online, VOIP, telematics, or alarm-type products and services. Also used for network planning. We also sell the geographic boundaries, which are updated quarterly.
• Sales Tax Jurisdiction and Rates – given a location, what are the tax districts and rates? We support these types: Sales, General Use, Insurance Premium, Payroll, Property, Special Purpose, etc.
• …and several Specialty services such as advanced parsing, standardizing peoples and companies names, name separation, name variants, Global Watchlist, email address verification, phone append, time zone calculations, etc.

2. What we call Knowledge Worker Applications

There are three products are in this grouping:

1. MapInfo Professional: MapInfo Pro is a desktop application that some users call the “Excel™ for mapping and location analysis.”  Like Excel, MapInfo is used by many different types of companies and by many job titles.  The most obvious output or use for MapInfo Pro is to make maps – maps with your data displayed in many different ways. Sales organizations can display customers, shade boundaries like ZIP codes, use the tools to build sales territories.Also like Excel, MapInfo provides ways to perform significant analysis of data. Beyond Excel, MapInfo provides ways for you to analyze and think about the data in a tabular way and a geographic way simultaneously – finding relationships that would otherwise be hard to find. MapInfo doesn’t replace Excel, it provides a way for you to think geographically.
2. AnySite and Magnify:  AnySite and Magnify are mapping applications that focus on demographics, site selection, market analysis, etc.  Typical industries are retail, restaurant, real estate, healthcare and financial services. AnySite is for the desktop and Magnify is a browser-based subscription-based offering with a subset of capabilities as compared to AnySite.
3. Training:  We offer training in most products but we do the most training in MapInfo.
4. “We do the work”:  We often perform per-project consulting – such as building/redistricting sales/distributor territories, help with insurance rating maps, customer analysis, maps, etc. Contact us for details!

3: Data

Unlike most software, many mapping applications require extra data besides your own.  We offer hundreds of data products.  For example, a common dataset is a database of ZIP Codes.   These datasets aren’t just a listing of of ZIP Codes, they include spatial data that describes the boundary of each ZIP Code. Included is the “center” of each ZIP code as a set of coordinates.  We have similar data for many other pieces of information around the world: Country boundaries, counties, provinces, postal codes, US Census Tracts, Block Groups, neighborhoods, school campuses, school attendance zones,  auto-dealer lot boundaries, congressional districts, cellular coverage for each carrier by technology (including 5G coverage), flood risks, earthquake zones, property parcels, 911 jurisdictions (PSAPs), area codes, telephone exchanges, etc.

Also, unlike many vendors, the data we sell can be used in many mapping and database systems, not just the products we sell.   For example our data can be used i:  Esri, Tableau, R Statistical Data, Autodesk, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Azure SQL, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Amazon AWS (DynamoDB, Aurora, RDS, Redshift ElasiCache, Keyspaces, Neptune, Timestream, QLDB, etc.), Hadoop DFS,, MariaDB, Kinetica, PostGIS, PostgressSQL, Excel, MySQL, IBM Db2, IBM Informix, Netezza, SAP HANA, Teradata, Aspectum, Cityworks, ERDAS, Intergraph, Smallworld, Golden Software, MapBox)

Deployment Options