Hi guys.
I've been talking to a lot with customers, prospects, partners and SAP presales recently. In almost 90% of the use-cases pertaining to business needs that I see, these use-cases require the use of geomapping to be fully addressed.
For example, a Fortune 500 telecom operator wants his Operation managers to be able to better analyze and forecast where most maintenance will occur on their networks, and where to deploy workforce to leverage productivity.
Or another example, a big company that manages thousands of ATM over several countries, wants to give the possibility to their workforce to monitor in real-time ATM status and do analytics over them.
Lumira is a good tool to start answering this use-cases.
But to give truly relevant answers to them, what's better than a map?
If you think about it for a few seconds, almost everything that is involved in everyday businesses is physically located somewhere.
What's the point of finding that some of your networks do not work at their full potential, if you don't know where they are on the field?
What's the point of finding that you are losing some customers, if you don't know where the phenomenon is happening?
In more complex business use-cases, what's the point of finding that some of your patients have diabetes if you can't correlate it with where they live, where they work, or even where are the fast-food stores located, ...?
Starting from this point, how can one be sure to take the best decisions and actions, if one is missing half of the truth about the data?
I'm truly conviced that lots of business questions can't be answered without maps.
For this reason, we've worked a lot here at Galigeo to provide a powerful geomapping tool for Lumira that helps every user, no matter if they come from business or IT, to answer strategic questions, while being easy to understand and to use. The version 2 of Galigeo For Lumira is the fulfilement of the above simplicity requirement, and I'll give you a quick tour into it right now.
Your business have its own data and its own KPIs
Visualize them on a map
What's the point of using a map if you can't see what really matters for your business?
Galigeo For Lumira lets you add your own geodata in a really self-service way.
You can add your corporate geodata, or even whatever geodata you find over the internet, from static files (shapefile, geojson, ...) or from ESRI (On-Premise and Online).
This means that if you have the coordinates of your customers in your datatset, you can map them.
If you have your own custom territories, defined by your company to improve sales efficiency for example, you can map them.
If you have a reference to any administrative boundaries (districts, regions, ...) in your data, and thought that it would be nice to see your KPIs on them, you will be able to map these administrative boundaries.
The animated pictures below illustrate this :
You have your own territories, and the districts you are working on, that's good.
But you might work at a regional level. And your company runs on a country level. And your sales teams work at a local level.
No problem, Galigeo For Lumira will let you visualize all the geographical levels you want and drill through them.
Let's say I have some accounts with turnover information, distributed into corporate sales territories, themselves distributed into administrative districts.
Then, I'll just have to drag and drop my districts, my sales territories and my accounts in the right field in Lumira (like any other chart), and Galigeo For Lumira will automatically create a hierarchy for you.
The animated picture below will show you how :
As you might guess, Galigeo For Lumira embeds a Smart Mapping engine that allow users to drill-down and up through their data without having to configure a geographical hierarchy beforehand. The Smart Mapping engine will automatically detect if the given dimensions offer the possibility to drill-down and back-up through them.
SAP leitmotiv is Run Simple, well it's also Galigeo's.
Being able to display a KPI through several hierarchical business layers is really nice from a business perspective, but what if you are not sure if the given KPIs are correctly represented on the map?
Let the expert guide you to represent in a smart way
your data on the map
You are an expert in your business, no doubt about it. But you might have never been introduced to geomapping or geography, yet you already had the occasion to see how powerful it can be (maybe while reading this article :wink: !).
Don't worry, Galigeo For Lumira Smart Mapping engine will always propose the best visualization to represent your dimensions.
To showcase this, let's carry on with the example I've started earlier.
I have all my accounts on the map, and have calculated a new measure directly in Lumira. I've basically subtracted the expected turnover that was planned for 2015 to the real turnover for the same year. It gives me a good estimation of turnover performance for each of my accounts.
As the above animated picture shows, when adding the performance measure in Lumira, the Smart Mapping engine automatically analyzed the dataset, and chose the best way to visualize the performance per account ("semantic coloring"). Here, all the accounts with negative performance appear in red, and all the ones with positive performance appear in green, their size being proportional to their respective performance.
And I did not need to configure anything to achieve that. Galigeo For Lumira took care of everything.
You can have now a clear view of where the performance is bad, and see that it's the case for accounts on the east of the island. That's for sure something that you would not be able to deduce only by using table, or any other charts.
It could be great right now to start analyzing deeper the underperforming accounts.
Select and extract the data that are relevant to your business
directly from the map
Continuing our work with the accounts, it's now really easy to select the ones you want using several tools.
For example, you can select all the underperforming accounts by drawing a lasso around them, and then filter them for example.
You can also select the accounts based on their distance from a given point. This is called isodistance, and is normally considered as an tool for experts, but is brought to you with a baffling ease of use right there.
The so defined list right here is not exhaustive, and these selection tools will let you easily extract what's relevant for you, and focus on it, or export it to an Excel file to go on a deeper analysis or share it with your colleagues for example. Your needs, your choice.
Of course, the data filtered from the map will automatically filter any other chart that shares the same dataset (and vice-versa, the map will get refreshed with filtered data if a chart gets filtered). This is what we call Map2BI is the geomapping world, but I like to call it Bidirectional BI, I think it sums up the concept pretty well.
This is a pretty powerful feature brought to you on silver plate right here.
Having a smart engine that helps to fit visualizations to your business KPIs, but I bet you sometimes have to follow graphical charter rules. And you don't want these accounts to be shown in green, you want them blue, because it's the color of your company logo (or pink, you get the concept :cool: ).
Well, no problem.
Your business has specific rules...
... apply them on the map with the Map Customizer which is embedded within Galigeo For Lumira!
Let's say you want to display turnover per accounts, and want the low turnover to appear in yellow, and the high turnover in red.
You also want to display the turnover potential on the sales territories, but want it to go from light green (low potential) to bright green (high potential).
Just select the colors offered by the Map Customizer to make your data as relevant as possible.
You'll be able to customize each of your business layers separately.
And of course, your customization will work also when creating a story, will be saved when reopening a document in Lumira, and will be applied and updatable even through Lumira Server!
Galigeo For Lumira have been designed to fill business needs and solve business problems in order to improve business performance.
And guess what, it is officially certified by SAP, meaning it has successfully passed through demanding business-driven tests designed by SAP.
It would take too long to present here, in detail, all the features Galigeo For Lumira offers to its users and end-users.
The only thing to keep in mind is that it empowers the business users with self-service - yet advanced geomapping. It guides them clearly analyze their business and help them answer their questions, and make better decisions.
I hope you now have a better understanding of the true power that can be leveraged easily through Galigeo For Lumira.
I'm also sure you have business use-cases in mind that could be solved using such technology.
The best right you could do right now is to test Galigeo For Lumira by yourself.
It will take you less than ten minutes I promise.
You can download it right there.
And during download and installation, why not take a look at some quick tutorials videos that will help you to get started faster.
A sample from the dataset presented in this blog can be downloaded here aswell.
As always, feel free to add a comment to this blog whatever you want to say, and/or contact me directly (you will find my contact details vincentdechandon).
Also, do not hesitate to like this blog, and share it through your favorite social media.
I hope you enjoyed reading (or watching the animated pictures at least :wink: ).
Best regards,
Vincent
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