Many businesses are beginning to think spatially, or about how they can use maps to improve their service delivery or operational efficiencies. That’s a good thing. All the businesses we’ve worked with have done well to do so. But there’s a learning curve and a costly lesson many seem to repeat.
Nine possible business reasons why people want to view their businesses spatially include being able to:
- Figure out where the population is and determine the closest service centres to them.
- Improve customer experiences through better access to services and facilities.
- Know travel times for emergency response services.
- Offer points of interest as a service to customers.
- Determine accessibility to banking services.
- Understand the potential business opportunity for retail outlets, franchises and branches.
- Improve logistics efficiencies.
- Optimise outlet locations.
- Calculate delivery costs.
Regardless of the specific use case, the obvious starting point for many people would seem to be using postal codes to break down a map of the country into bite-sized chunks they can work with. But that’s where many go wrong.
Postal codes are just one type of spatial groupings. There are other spatial boundaries at a higher and lower granularity to accommodate different business needs.
Misaligned
The problem with adopting another boundary system is that, although they are based on logical demarcations and organisation, that logic isn’t necessarily aligned with your business. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to align them with any operations other than their original intended design.
Postal code areas aren’t designed, for example, to fit into emergency response routes, times, population densities, age groups, incomes, credit histories, nor any other criteria.
There are better ways of aligning how we do business with the world that we live in.
They were introduced to South Africa in the 1970s and designed to help automate postal sorting and assist postmen to deliver the post. They’re not even necessarily linked to a geographic area, as some serve large companies, and not every geographic area necessarily has a postal code, such as many tribal areas, farms and small holding areas.
Unfortunately, postal codes are often just too big and not relatable to road networks or size in terms of time to be a reliable source.
For example, in Ekurhuleni there is one postal code that spans more than 70km in diameter. In fact, the data suggests that South Africa’s largest postal code covers an area of over 15 000km while the smallest covers an area of just 12km.
Populations range too, from the average of just over 23 000 people per postal code to over 730 000 for code 1632 in Tembisa at last count. Postal codes are simply unreliable for use in logistics, for security scenarios and several other purposes.
So, what do you do?
There are better ways of aligning how we do business with the world that we live in. Travel bands are one of the options that are much better for many organisations. There are others. For example, another is based on grouping suburbs and regions into footprints that align to distribution networks and customer service level agreements (SLAs).
Customised regions can be based on geographical size or travel time, set by the user. The foundation of the region can be defined by the physical world and how we interact with it. Population density can also be used, even the number of households, allowing organisations to create their own footprint based on their specific requirements.
The same system can be used to generate quotes, estimate service levels, route resources and more. The true value of this approach is that using the address and road networks with uniquely defined boundaries gives users the ultimate granular control over how they provide their services or how they operate.
It doesn’t make sense to use another organisation’s business rules as your own. Their business is different to yours, they serve different customers, and they have different products and services.
Customised regions, organised uniquely for your business, fit logically into operations and are more aligned with the world your business operates in. They provide data to support your requirements and to align with your distribution and footprint.
However, the right solution must meet the needs of your scenario. Will your needs be better served by suburbs grouped together? What infrastructure will yield the best results? The answer is to find the data that best suits your needs and divide the country (or the part of the world you operate in) into the regions that support your reach and customer SLAs.
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