At some point in every procurement process, the question of price comes up. Enterprise software is always a significant investment, and it’s always tempting when comparing bids to focus on price. But as Antti Rautiainen—who runs location intelligence for S Group, Finland’s largest commercial cooperative—knows, price is the wrong metric to land on when making a purchase decision.
Rautiainen and I have something in common: We both have backgrounds in the retail industry and at Esri, and we’ve both sat inside the software procurement process, translating business objectives into the case for a tool. We just made the move in opposite directions. I moved from retail into Esri; Rautiainen moved from Esri into retail, and today he’s the one driving software decisions at S Group—a cooperative whose businesses span grocery, convenience, fuel, restaurants, and hospitality. With such a wide range of businesses, he knows his company requires a unified platform to bring disparate geographic insight into the enterprise’s business data.
Rautiainen’s experience has given him a unique understanding of business value. Having worked with location intelligence in retail for more than 20 years, he has seen both the vendor and practitioner sides of enterprise geographic information system (GIS) technology. Across S Group’s businesses, location intelligence supports decisions ranging from store networks and delivery concepts to restaurant planning and new service locations. When he transitioned to a practitioner role at S Group, the value equation broadened to include business operations supporting the mission of each business unit he served, a much larger scope of responsibility.
“When I was at Esri, ROI was about the platform, and about understanding what the customer needed from it,” he explained. That’s the vendor’s version of the question, and it’s a fair one: Does this tool solve the problem in front of the customer, and can you show them that it does?
But once he was inside S Group, running GIS single-handedly across store network planning, online grocery pickup points, delivery concepts, EV charging networks, and restaurant siting, that framing stopped working. “As a practitioner, I had to think holistically about GIS as part of a bigger plan,” he explained, “and about its impact on overall performance for the company.”
It’s a shift a lot of practitioners who come up through vendor-side roles never quite make. Selling ROI and living with it are two different jobs.
S Group’s GIS operation is lean by necessity. The commercial pressure to be efficient never lets up, which means weighing every option against what a team of one could realistically sustain—not just what looks good on the invoice. Efficiency on day one doesn’t mean a tool stays efficient six months later—something that looks like the cheaper choice at launch can get expensive fast once development and long-term stability come due. And as a team of one, Rautiainen didn’t have the bandwidth to absorb that kind of surprise. Any approach that couldn’t hold up reliably across every line of business, or that demanded constant specialized care just to keep running, wasn’t actually the bargain it appeared to be.
That insight shaped his selection criteria. The deciding factors needed to include operational considerations, not just the initial cost. “The users don’t care what platform they use,” Rautiainen said. “They want access, reliability, and apps that deliver value.”
That’s what keeps S Group on ArcGIS Enterprise. As Rautiainen put it, the platform “enables a single GIS specialist with a strong analytics and business background to deliver solutions that would otherwise require a dedicated development team or significant external consulting resources.”
The results back it up. Rautiainen was initially skeptical of ArcGIS Experience Builder, calling it “less familiar” than ArcGIS Web AppBuilder at first. That changed once he saw what it enabled: a full portfolio of applications, built and maintained without a dedicated development team, with new tools going from requested to published in hours when the business needs them.
Every one of those applications reflects the same recalibrated standard of value. “The key was not to start from the technology, but from the users,” Rautiainen said. Most S Group employees already work daily with tools like Power BI, so he designed GIS applications that feel consistent with that experience, a design principle worth underlining for any organization supporting nonspecialist users. The people using these applications are not GIS experts or geographers. A map is a tool to communicate, not the end result. “For business users, the most important question is simple,” Rautiainen said. “Can they get the information they need quickly, reliably, and in a form that is easy to understand?”
It’s the same question Rautiainen started with at Esri—just answered from the other side of the table. Not, does the platform perform? But, does the business perform because of it? At S Group, with one specialist, one platform, and significant operational weight riding on the answer, that distinction has proven decisive. The invoice was never the whole story—and it’s a standard worth holding every retail GIS deployment to, regardless of team size.
