Optimizing your location network across markets is absolutely critical in today's competitive economy. In the past, thorough fieldwork and research as new opportunities were presented may have passed as effective location planning. But to succeed today, it's critical to proactively define your optimal long-term target locations, prioritize growth carefully, forecast sales with better accuracy, and respond immediately to opportunities with the right decision support.

The challenge is enormous. Beyond traditional real estate expertise, it takes a very thorough understanding of the growing set of data and technologies being made available these days, sophisticated analytics to turn raw data into conclusions, brand-specific models that are actually calibrated against your own sales history, customized systems to give decision makers exactly what's needed, and the specialized skills to put it all together into new plans, internal processes and courses of action.

When it comes to location planning, most organizations enjoy outstanding real estate leadership for assessing site opportunities in the field, access to brokerages to get information about leasing opportunities, and desktop software to allow analysts to piece together data reports and maps over time. However, this leaves even the most respected organizations with enormous gaps:

• What best to do with tons of relevant corporate and third-party data to arrive at true intelligence and effective decision-making. When many locations opened have performed poorly, sales performance doesn't follow the metrics typically monitored, fieldwork assessments conflict with quantitative data, relevant metrics are geographic and highly complex in nature, and data sources difficult to understand or process, the challenge is all the more daunting.
• Gathering and processing information tends to take far too long.
• Available software tools are typically designed for specialists' use, general-purpose, complicated, and requiring extensive efforts, rather than offering the specific functions, content, and brand customization needed by real estate leaders.
• Effective growth planning processes are highly complex, with few accepted standard methods, few clear growth patterns among successful organizations, and a wide range of methods deployed by different organizations.
• Typically there are alternative data products and technology solutions that are much more effective and/or far less costly to meet location planning needs.
• Subjective decision-making processes that vary from case to case and incomplete standard internal processes.

We've developed a complete set of products that address these challenges that even the very best real estate leaders face. They provide a brand through one short project the kinds of sophisticated location planning capabilities that even the largest organizations pursue over several years using extensive staff and investments. Yet, the new capabilities are customized to your specific brand, completely unique and confidential to others. They're designed for real estate leaders to significantly improve the location planning capabilities they offer their organizations through new, highly complex, growing worlds of big data, analytics, spatial modeling, mapping technologies, and cloud computing.

If you merely want to be notified of location opportunities and receive research material about them as they're identified, there are plenty of capable service providers out there. If you want to make the leap to being a proactive industry leader in location planning and do so in short time, talk with us.

• Brand-Learning Sales Forecasting Model:  A system unique to your specific brand for turning the wide range of factual data about a location into sales forecasts, developed by effectively learning the specific statistical patterns that have followed your brand's actual sales performance at individual location levels.
• Brand-Learning Encroachment Forecasting Model:  A system for estimating the proportion of sales that a new location would take from each existing location in the surrounding area.
• Territory Optimization:  Solutions to improve management of delivery areas or franchisee territories and use their data to further improve location selection and assessment.
• OptiPresence Location Plan:  The long-term growth potential and optimal targeted presence for each market in the country combined with the specific set of optimal locations to target, developed by combining complete scientific location analytics processes with organizational goals and preferences.
• MapleViews:  Cloud-based system for complete, intelligence-based location assessment and planning, producing in seconds brand-specific forecasts and decision support typically involving too much challenge or extensive efforts and expense to otherwise produce.
• Location Quality Reports:  Complete analytics-driven profiles of individual locations or markets in executive summary format, including the kinds of geographic metrics, maps, benchmarks and insights not typically offered through other reporting alternatives.
• Marketing Analytics Solutions:  Analytics solutions to address specific marketing needs using many of the same processes we perform to produce our above core products.