09/16/96 TREASURE MAPS FOR THE MASSES

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TREASURE MAPS FOR THE MASSES
Off-the-shelf geographical software can be a strategic key
When Darin Lewin started as a manager of a mattress store in Houston in 1991, customers never knew when they'd get their beds. Every day, a delivery person would receive a stack of orders. But no one could predict with any accuracy how long it was going to take to get from one delivery to the next. Drivers were almost always running behind, leaving customers waiting--and irate.
Today, Lewin runs his own, more efficient operation. His 25-employee Atlanta franchise, The Mattress Firm, guarantees delivery within a three-hour period and can fill 25% more orders than his old employer could. His secret? A $100 software program that plots all drop-off points on a map of the Atlanta area so the dispatcher can instantly see the distances between them. That way, he can plan the most efficient routes and schedule a realistic number of orders a day in advance.
The benefits of the software, from MapLinx Corp. in Dallas, don't stop there. By depicting sales by neighborhood, MapLinx shows Lewin exactly where his mattresses are selling well, and thus where he should spend money to market them. ``It's like shooting a rifle instead of a shotgun,'' says Lewin. ``We can pinpoint our customer.''
Lewin is among a growing cadre of small-business people discovering how software called ``geographical information systems,'' or GIS, can help them improve customer service, save time, and solve key business problems.
Conceptually, GIS is simple. The programs take information from a database and put it on a map in a variety of forms. Visualizing the data reveals geographic relationships among customers, stores, sales, potential markets, and even a competitor's market that might otherwise remain hidden in tables or charts.
Although GIS has been around for years, until recently these programs had to be custom-made--a process that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars--and ran only on huge mainframe computers. Now, small-business people can buy off-the-shelf GIS software for PCs for as little as $100. With the advent of powerful, user-friendly PCs and GIS programs to match, ``the popularity of GIS is soaring,'' says Bruce Jenkins, vice-president of Daratech Inc., a market researcher in Cambridge, Mass.
Among the most popular programs are MapLinx and BusinessMap, marketed by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Redlands, Calif. These products are cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly versatile. Most of their versatility stems from two functions: plotting database entries by zip code as dots or icons on a map of the U.S. (or a magnified section of it), and color-coding a map to graphically display sales, revenue, population, or any other salient statistic contained in a database.
NO SLACK. The resulting display can help solve a bundle of problems. For deliveries, sales calls, or client visits, a GIS program can save time by helping a road-bound employee schedule stops in an efficient order. Imagine that a salesperson has appointments at the beginning and end of the day. The software can find all of the customers in between those appointments. An easy distance calculation can help the salesperson estimate travel time.
GIS can also help customer-service reps quickly direct customers to nearby vendors. When people call the national service center of Handle With Care Packaging Store outside Denver, employees use MapLinx to locate the nearest franchise for pickup and delivery. ``Within a minute,'' says Marketing Director Carl Pimental, ``we can tell you which is the closest store, the owner's name and telephone number, and how many miles away that store is from the shipping point.''
The uses of GIS extend to more difficult business decisions as well, such as where to build a new retail outlet. Plotting customers or potential customers along with existing stores on the same map makes it immediately clear where the greatest market potential lies. What's more, the map can reveal how close a proposed site is to major highways or competitors. ``GIS can do an analysis of where [retail] opportunities lie that haven't been tapped by a company or its competitors,'' says Daratech's Jenkins.
DAILY FEEDBACK. And GIS is an excellent device for honing a sales and marketing strategy. For instance, Douglas Kelly, media director for Black Rock Golf Corp. in Englewood, Colo., uses BusinessMap to compare the dollars spent on its golf-club infomercials in each broadcasting region to sales in the region. The software allows him to make the comparison daily and quickly cancel ads that aren't working. ``The software saves me lots of time and gives me the big picture all at once,'' says Kelly. Without it, he adds, the analysis would be so tedious that it probably wouldn't be cost-effective for the 30-person firm.
Maps also make powerful presentation tools. Nandika ``Deke'' Dias, president of a computer-training company in Walnut Creek, Calif., is using BusinessMap to entice potential partners to sign on to a proposed expansion plan. He uses the software to build a map of possible markets as he describes them. ``People get a much clearer vision of what we're trying to do when we show them a picture,'' says Dias, whose company is called Advanced Integration Methods.
Today's off-the-shelf GIS products range from simple software bundled in spreadsheet programs to customizable, full-featured products costing up to $1,300 (table). All of the programs can map data from virtually all of the popular databases, spreadsheets, and contact managers. In addition, many of the software packages include such data as census statistics, which could be used to see where consumers of a particular age and income live. Most other marketing data can be bought in a ready-to-use format from third-party vendors.
Bear in mind, maps are memory hogs, so you'll need at least 8 megabytes of RAM and a 486 chip for even a low-end GIS to work at a reasonable speed. (Most busy people will probably insist on 16 megs of RAM and a Pentium processor to save time.) You'll need a hefty hard drive, too. U.S. state maps with highways and zip codes alone eat up 150 megabytes. And since most databases come on CD, a CD-ROM drive is essential. A 17-inch monitor running at 1024x768 pixels may not be absolutely necessary, but it does afford a bigger view of the map and more detail.
Most small-business users will probably find the $100 GIS software adequate. However, if you're a real estate agent, for instance, and need to map your database by exact street address (instead of by zip code), you'll need a more expensive program, such as ESRI's ArcView or one of the products from MapInfo Corp. in Troy, N.Y. You'll also want a higher-end product to link photographs with map icons (so that clicking on a house icon, say, will pop up a picture of the house), to have the programs perform routing functions for you, or to get such detailed geographic marketing information as finding people aged 25-30 with incomes over $30,000 and living in climates warmer than 70 degrees. The downside of ArcView and its ilk is added complexity: Such programs may take an amateur weeks to learn. The time-pressured may want to hire a consultant to customize a high-end program.
CAR TALK. Still, as long as you're using the proper hardware, it's hard to go wrong. Take Paul DeMoret, who says MapInfo Professional allows him to charge double what his competitors do. Based in Gresham, Ore., DeMoret's company, Ownacar Limited Liability Corp., offers car dealerships the exclusive chance to have routed to them all calls from their area that come through Ownacar's vanity phone number, 1-800-OWN-A-CAR. DeMoret plots each dealership on a map that shows him at a glance how many potential customers Ownacar could deliver to each dealer. The more populous the area covered, the higher the price DeMoret can charge dealers for the privilege of routing sales leads to them.
DeMoret says the maps also help him convince dealers over the phone that he is familiar with their area. ``With MapInfo, I sound like I know what I'm talking about. Without it, I'd be fishing in the dark without bait.''
By Ingrid Wickelgren in New York