In the past, when a customer ordered home delivery from St-Hubert Bar-B-Q, the Quebec-based restaurant chain, order takers had to shuffle through printed maps to find where the customer lived, and then assign the nearest outlet to prepare the meal and send it out.
Now, a sophisticated geographic information system incorporates the customer’s address into an electronic map, automatically assigning the order to the appropriate outlet while taking into account road construction or other obstacles to delivery. The result: quicker, more efficient delivery, and increased productivity in the restaurants.
Meanwhile, at home products retailer Rona Inc., an electronic mapping system is helping the company pinpoint where to deliver its flyers across the country. The system merges and analyzes city maps, Statistics Canada data and customer information to guide the distribution of different combinations of flyers and inserts, customized for the neighbourhoods surrounding Rona’s 630 stores.
The use of electronic maps is one example of how companies across Canada are turning to technology as they strive to become more productive. With Canadian business under pressure to boost output amid warnings from Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney that our standard of living is at risk in an era of intense global competition, firms are discovering that investments in innovative information systems can provide quick and substantial payoffs.
Mapping systems, for instance, integrate physical information with complex databases of constantly updated statistics, and can improve productivity at institutions across the country, including governments, hospitals and utilities, as well as private companies. “I think it is critical,” said Alex Miller, president of ESRI Canada Ltd., a Toronto-based consultant in geographic information systems (GIS). “Every government and every business needs to know where things are, where people are, how processes work, and how you get from here to there.”
Maps have been used for centuries to guide business ventures – for instance, mapping of the northwest played a key role as the Hudson’s Bay Co. traded for furs. But the more recent combination of maps with electronic databases and Web-based technology is opening new frontiers.
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Canadians have been leaders in the field for 50 years, Mr. Miller said. In fact, geographic information systems were pioneered in Canada in the 1960s to improve the analysis of the country’s agricultural land.
Advances in computers in the 1970s and 1980s allowed immense amounts of data to be merged with geographic information, essentially creating electronic versions of old fashioned “overlays” on physical maps, but with far more detail. Resource industries became big users of this technology for exploration and planning.
Now, even faster computers and Internet technology have extended potential uses for route planning, network design, or almost any application where a company needs to know where its products, vehicles or workers are located. The price of a GIS system can range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.
Increasingly, real-time data is being added to GIS systems. Sears was a pioneer in developing a GIS system in the 1990s that integrated order entry, packing, dispatch and truck routing to vastly improve the efficiency of appliance deliveries, Mr. Miller said. Now the retailer has further improved its system by adding real-time data on road closures and accidents, to help its trucks avoid slow-downs in major cities in North America.
