Azure Maps at NRF 2020

After participating in the NRF Big Show for the past 15 years as part of the Retail team, I am thrilled to participate in the event in a new role and with a new perspective: I will be representing the Azure Maps team at NRF 2020 and focusing on Location Intelligence in Retail.

 

I will be available in the Microsoft Booth (#4501) for meetings to discuss Geospatial Analytics and Location Intelligence scenarios for Retail. You can schedule a meeting using this LINK. 

 

Retailers can gain valuable customer insights by leveraging location intelligence that correlates retail store & customer locations with demographic data, spend behavior data and a lot more. They can use geospatial platforms like Azure Maps to create solutions that identify the most profitable locations as well as enable them to optimize targeted promotions to specific locations based on the geo-segmentations.

 

Data drives growth and digital transformation for Retail and Retailers have realized the value of geospatial data. To become personal and relevant to customers, and goods, it is important for retailers to know the socioeconomic information of their customers. Geospatial data can provide retailers data on income, housing/rent prices, surrounding business performance, population, and age. This provides insight into the inventory and assortment that they need to carry at a hyperlocal level. Another way retail uses geospatial data is in combination with weather pattern predictions. Weather patterns and correlated buying patterns (especially those related to extreme weather) are critical to reduce overstock and out of stock situations. Weather pattern analysis allows grocery stores to determine when they should stock up on non-perishable items.

 

These are just some of the topics that I will be available to discuss & help with during NRF 2020: 

 

Retail Catchment Analysis: 

 

 

Catchment is defined as the sphere of influence from which retailers draw their customers. Azure Maps  can be used by Retailers to better understand a location and analyze business drivers and disruptors from a spatial perspective. By building isochrones around the store location retailers can search within the Isochrone to determine the demographic mix, parking spaces, competitors and other information that could potentially help drive traffic to, or from, the business. 

 

I have collaborated with a partner called Audax Labs to make a Retail Catchment Analysis solution available to retailers. I will be showcasing a demo of the solution at NRF 2020. 

 

Here are some additional, around catchment analysis & Azure Maps:

• Catchment Area Analysis for a Starbucks Store in Seattle using Azure Maps  
• Jupyter Notebook Sourcecode for Retail Catchment Demo on Github
• Azure IoT Show Retail Location Analytics with Azure Maps

 

 

Logistics & Last Mile Delivery

 

 

Azure Maps provides capabilities that enable retailers in dealing with logistics and last mile delivery challenges with capabilities that enable fleet management, efficient routing, real time traffic, real time weather and multimodal transportation options. I will be walking through a demo solution that uses many of the capabilities available in Azure Maps for Route Optimization, Batch and Matrix Routing. Our partnership with Moovit also enables us to make real time transit and ride share information available through the Azure Maps API. 

 

Driving Retail Profitability with Location + Weather Intelligence

 

 

When predicting retail sales, models consider various data points including historical shopping trend data and influencers like economic indicators. In addition, shifting seasons can seriously affect retail sales. Consumers change their buying habits when temperatures spike or drop. The food we eat, the clothes we wear and a lot more can be determined by fluctuations in the weather. Retailers can use weather forecasting to guide inventory decisions while marketing can use it to drive personalized promotions & advertising. Because Location & Weather Intelligence are key components for decision making, Azure Maps is proud to share, in partnership with AccuWeather, the preview of a new set of Weather Services for Azure customers to integrate into their applications. Azure Maps Weather Services adds a new layer of real-time, location-aware information to our portfolio of native Azure geospatial services powering Microsoft enterprise customer applications. I will be talking about & demonstrating how retailers can use weather & location data for better planning. 

 

Additional Resources:

1. Driving Retail Profitability with Location + Weather Intelligence 

2. Rain or shine: Azure Maps Weather Services will bring insights to your enterprise

 

Power BI Visualization & Location Analytics 

We will be releasing the Azure Maps control for Power BI in February. I have built out several Power BI Location Analytics demos for Retail that I will be showcasing at NRF 2020. With the addition of Power BI, Azure Maps can now be used by non-developers to quickly analyze store locations, better understand customers based on geospatial information and plan logistics and last mile delivery using geospatial capabilities. 

 

I look forward to engaging with you. Please schedule a meeting in the Microsoft booth with me using this link.