Bluemaps brings your business data into a visual platform that enhances its comprehension and value; a map. With better understanding, you will decide faster, act proactively and move ahead of competition.
What is Location Intelligence?
Location is a key component in understanding and analyzing complex business data and making key business decisions. Location data can best be visualized spatially i.e. based on geography. Although mapping technologies have been available for a couple of decades, recent technological advancements; such as standardization in representation of data, web services and web based mashup applications made mapping technologies ubiquitous and more accessible, especially in business applications.
Location intelligence is the integration, access and use of location information and technology to help organizations be more effective in their business decisions. Combining business information with location related data in a visual format helps the organization analyze the trends geographically, optimize business processes, and generate meaningful intelligence to improve overall business results.
The Challenge:
Absolute data, such as number of households in a neighborhood, can give a rough estimate of market's potential, but true location intelligence can only be achieved by working with relative data; a matching of store locations to targeted demographics, or the comparison of a company's sales figures to its competitors in the area.
Why use Location Intelligence with Bluemaps?
Bluemaps is a location intelligence solution developed by Bluenet. Bluemaps enables your organization to integrate its business data with the map and location data and imagery provided by Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth. With Bluemaps, you can see your business data on a map, visualize the spatial relations and interactions within your data, zoom and drill down to details and have a greater understanding of the results; thus decide and act more informatively. Bluemaps can integrate with your operational business applications, such as your POS system, ERP system or can be configured to run integrated with your analytical Business Intelligence (BI) platf
Bluemaps Features:
• Shows your business data on a map: Bluemaps can use Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth as a mapping provider and utilize the spatial information in your data to create business maps to suit your needs.
• Eliminates the need for an in-house GIS system: Bluemaps retrieves mapping data and imagery from Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth systems through the internet. Thus, you won't need to manage an in-house mapping solution. You just retrieve an up-to-date and reliable map information and attach your business data on it.
• You can drill for more: Bluemaps provides you a great overview of your business information on a map so that you can analyze and act faster, and should you need more information, you can do a mouse over or click and get further details of the data that interests you. Bluemaps lets you zoom down to reasons.
• Multiple levels of location hierarchy: Whether you track your business based on regions or want to analyze coordinate specific data such as sales in a store, Bluemaps can help you. Bluemaps is flexible and supports multiple levels of area or coordinate based hierarchies that you can use.
• Integrates with your existing operational business application or BI solution: Bluemaps has been designed to work with your existing systems. Whether you want to get real time sales data on a map from your POS system or need to have a better spatial understanding of the data in your business intelligence system, you have a solution.
• Provides a management dashboard for better decision making: It's not a coincidence that most businesses have a map hanging on their wall. Maps provide one of the most visually effective ways to navigate business data. Bluemaps provides a dashboard for the business people to navigate through business data and reports.
• Role based authorization and authentication: Security is a key issue when you are dealing with business data. Bluemaps provides a flexible authorization layer to limit access to data, based on user roles. The authorization layer can integrate with your existing authentication and authorizations systems such as Active Directory or LDAP.
• Clustering support: If you need an overview of your data, Bluemaps is flexible enough to provide you a summary; integrating close locations and showing you a blend of your data. When you zoom in, you will see all the details you need.
• File attachments: You can use Bluemaps as a digital filing cabinet. You can use the visual interface to attach files to any of your predefined locations or just anywhere on the map.
Benefits of Location Intelligence include:
• Detection of trends that are normally difficult to spot using traditional report formats; such as trends based on locality
• Ability to present spatially related data • Capability of displaying tabular data through a map interaction and ability to change focus and the amount of information easily
• Ease of managing and manipulating data by using different spatial layers i.e. showing regions on the maps, ability to display stores and customers together or separately on the same map
IBM Cognos Integration
Bluemaps has been designed to integrate with your existing software platforms with little effort. With Bluenet's expertise in IBM Information Management family of products, IBM Cognos has been one of our focuses in the design. Bluemaps comes with connectors designed for IBM Cognos. If you already have IBM Cognos PowerPlay cubes and Framework Manager models defining your business, all you have to do to is to configure Bluemaps based on your IBM Cognos entities. Bluemaps will transfer your measures and metrics to compelling visual elements presenting your data on the map. Bluemaps will get the data from IBM Cognos using the Cognos SDK. Your Cognos reports are also accessible through Bluemaps' mapping interface. Just click on one of your stores and a window will open showing your Cognos report for that store.
Bluemaps was designed to leverage your existing business systems and provide a better visual platform to analyze the data they manage. Bluemaps can integrate to business applications and analyze operational data or access BI systems to provide a better insight of analytical data. With a short customization and integration term, Bluemaps will make your data come alive.
System Overview
Bluemaps has a layered system architecture and one of the key principles in Bluemaps design is effortless integration to existing systems and effortless customization. The design makes heavy use of application metadata to ease customization and integration and most of the implementations can be completed simply by such configurations. The upmost layer in the architecture is the presentation layer, which focuses on the presentation level integration of the business data, with the mapping data retrieved from the map providers.
The presentation layer is based on web mashup technologies. The presentation layer gets all the data and information from the business layer using web services. The business layer is the fundamental layer where Bluemaps business logic is implemented. This layer does all the application/data management including authorization and authentication, management of the connectors that retrieve data from external sources and interpreting the application metadata. The connectors are external data access modules that provide access to business data on different environments (such as IBM Cognos connector which retrieve data from Cognos PowerCubes). Bluemaps comes with existing connectors for different platforms and it is possible to add any type of connectors during the implementation.
A typical Bluemaps implementation consists of the below steps:
1- ETL design: Matching of the location related data in the business to the data model defined by Bluemaps and configuration of the ETL to retrieve that data.
2- Metadata definition: Structuring of the application metadata to define the geographic visual elements and their behaviors based on business metrics.
3- Connector definition: Defining the connectors or writing new ones to access external data sources.
4- Presentation customization: The presentation layer might be customized based on the business requirements.
5- Action definition: Each interaction with the map could start an action which can be implemented in Bluemaps or can initiate an external service. Final step is the definition of such actions.
About Bluenet:
Bluenet provides Digital Transformation, Data & Analytics, IT Talent Management, and Managed Services to various organizations. Our practitioners work across many industries to deliver solutions that impact our clients' growth, brand, and differentiated customer experience. Our culture enables us to attract and retain great talent. We have deep technology skills to enable key business processes. Founded in 2004, we are headquartered in Tampa (USA). Our other office is located in Izmir, Turkey.