Why Use GIS?

Your organization has new and legacy data stored in a variety of formats in many locations. You need a way to integrate your data so that you can analyze it as a whole and leverage it to make critical business and planning decisions.

GIS can integrate and relate any data with a spatial component, regardless of the source of the data. For example, you can combine the location of mobile workers, located in real-time by GPS devices, in relation to customers' homes, located by address and derived from your customer database. GIS maps this data, giving dispatchers a visual tool to plan the best routes for mobile staff or send the closest worker to a customer. This saves tremendous time and money.

• Learn how Sears uses GIS to manage a fleet of more than 10,000 mobile workers. [PDF]

Put Your Data to Work

Rather than you working hard to understand your data, GIS puts your data to work for you. GIS can provide you with powerful information—not just how things are, but how they will be in the future based on changes you apply. It has been used to solve problems as diverse as

• Determining where to place self-service coin counting machines
• Visualizing and planning how to improve the yield of crops in a traditional Tuscan vineyard
• Sharing and managing information for an entire city enterprise