ICYMI: The GIS Role in Security, Product Tracing, and Enterprise Collaboration

The most transformative relationships between GIS teams and high-performing business units often begin surprisingly small.

A security team might ask for a map of store locations to help analysts make sense of recent incidents. In the process of answering that request, the GIS team senses unmet—and unspoken—business needs. As they get to know their colleagues in corporate security, they begin to establish a platform that addresses the security team’s true challenges: reliable data, real-time monitoring, and efficient incident analysis.

In complex organizations, the most effective partnerships often begin with a simple question. Veteran GIS teams know how to spot the deeper need beneath those requests.

That level of attentiveness helped bolster corporate security at Walgreens, create sophisticated product traceability in Grapery’s supply chain, and facilitate information exchange across Disneyland’s departments. This WhereNext ICYMI covers all three examples in under six minutes.

Check out the video below or view the full conversation on our webcast, GIS and the Many Faces of Efficiency.

Chris Chiappinelli, WhereNext: We know that data is often scattered across an organization—that tends to make it difficult to act on. Can you talk about what location data has to do with making business decisions more efficient?

Ben Farster, Walgreens: We have a really great group in the security operations center here, and over the years we’ve coordinated with them a lot. They have some of their own solutions that are solid, but over the years we’ve exposed them to some of our GIS applications and started to grow a relationship there—from one-offs, to a little more discussion, to getting some things connected. We started to show them [that] we can get weather information, we can get fire information from Cal Fire, or whatever it might be whenever that’s going on.

One of the things we’ve done in terms of the data is what started as a desktop—literally a refreshing Python script on a laptop—to get it on a server, to get it to be a solid integration where we’re getting information from them on status of stores for various situations that are going on, be it weather, be it vandalism, be it whatever could happen to a store—you name it, they have a story. And integrating all that data gives us the opportunity then to see that spatial relationship between our locations to protect our customers, our patients, our team members, when things are going on.

It’s been used for preparedness, response, review after, and how we can respond better next time. It gives us a really good operational view of how we can respond in those situations. But again, getting the data fed and updated—I think it feeds every 15 minutes—that data is basically live with everything everyone’s putting in. And most recently we had the surprising ice and snowstorms in the South and the Southeast which impacted a huge amount of the population and of course our assets as well. So being able to give our operations teams that lens of what might happen and when and interpret that—and also give them that self-serve tool so they can do it themselves—has been really valuable.

Chiappinelli: Garrett, do you mind sharing another example where location technology is helping boost efficiency there at Grapery?

Garrett Hestand, Grapery: Another area where we’ve seen efficiency gains is within our executive reporting and planning. Previously, assembling reports required pulling data from multiple sources, explaining context separately. Now, leadership can access dashboards that connect operational data directly to the geography, so we’ve connected through other business analytical tools and GIS, our ERP system, so we can track down to the block level of where products are selling from, what condition they’re coming out of, what stores are . . . We can track down pretty much the whole line of where the stores that we’ve shipped to—where that store received its fruit from, down to the block level.

Seeing that information spatially changes the whole conversation. Instead of reviewing isolated numbers where people don’t know where this data is coming from, where this fruit’s coming from, now we can track exactly where, and see if there’s any correlation between where that fruit is coming from and if there’s any issues quality-wise, seeing what we can help develop to make the fruit better and stand out more within the market.

Chiappinelli: That’s fascinating. So you know the pedigree, essentially, of the finished goods out in the marketplace, and you can trace that back to the field. Very impressive. Sam, what about you—can you share another area where GIS is contributing to efficiency?

Sam Lustado, Disneyland: I think what’s been really efficient and helpful is that element of information sharing and accessibility, like Garrett was mentioning. I think that really opened up a wide opportunity for resort-wide staff to really get invested within a GIS environment. That idea of GIS enterprise collaboration, of sharing information—[with] the complexity of user permissions and licensing and cybersecurity, all of that fun stuff, and trying to get a user to that information—I really commend everyone who is involved in that space.

But once you figure that out and once you can get that information to your users, it really is transformative. And every line of business over here, they need to know information even if they don’t maintain it themselves. So there’s a lot of crossover operations. We’re a large organization, and [with] GIS becoming that central location for it, we’re seeing a lot of efficiency gains for teams that are trying to share that knowledge within their team and with other teams.

So the Esri apps like Field Maps . . . Survey123 . . . QuickCapture—all those—are really great for our field teams. And then serving it up on the dashboards [in] Experience [Builder], and the ability to customize it for different executives, has really shown our leadership its value.