This simple question was posed by a prospective XMap customer who called the DeLorme Professional Sales team a few months ago. With the current financial crisis deepening every day and its effects being felt by virtually every business and industry, this question has lately gained even more importance.
Many might suggest that the best way to save money is not to spend it; however, as any business owner will attest, investment is needed if the business is to survive and grow. The sensible approach is not to eliminate spending but to invest in technologies that will provide a tangible benefit to your business and that will help it run more efficiently.
Over the years, DeLorme has continually striven to establish a balance between offering spatial tools that meet the challenges of the ever-changing GIS landscape, while keeping the cost of this technology within the budget of even the smallest company or organization. However, even with a relatively small investment, there must be a measureable return if the expenditure is to be justified, so how can XMap save you money?
- By helping you efficiently manage your assets. It has been said that everything belongs somewhere. A well-run GIS offers the means to keep track of the location of your critical assets and, consequently, to eliminate redundancy and wastefulness in the management of these assets.
- By improving critical decision making. For any business, access to a well-organized information management system is essential for the decision-making process. When dealing with location-based data, the spatial intelligence offered by a GIS not only results in better decisions, but it also provides a competitive advantage by significantly speeding up the process.
- By helping expand the reach of your GIS to those who need it most. Over the last year, one of the recurring themes that frequent readers of this newsletter will have encountered is the work that has been done to improve data distribution in XMap. Many companies have implemented the synchronization process to ensure that field crews have immediate access to updated information at the job site. Previously, the deployment of this essential data would have been a manual process costing time and productivity. In effect, XMap is helping maximize the return on your current GIS investment by provide a streamlined data distribution mechanism.
- By helping your mobile workforce save fuel with efficient route planning and GPS-based navigation. DeLorme has been building optimized route planning tools for almost 20 years and, during that time, more and more companies have come to rely on XMap and other DeLorme products to help control travel costs. More often than not, routing is more than just A-to-B; it frequently involves going by way of C, D, E, and F. The integrated voice-controlled navigation functionality of XMap can save time and money by suggesting the quickest or shortest possible driving directions, by offering alternative routes to avoid congestion, and helping fleet managers monitor driving patterns by recording the track followed by each driver.
- By helping you build your GIS without the need to hire a GIS specialist. Because XMap’s design and development team have focused on building the core GIS functionality that most GIS professionals use on a daily basis, XMap offers an uncomplicated approach to GIS data management. As a result, your company can implement this technology using your current staff with minimal need for expensive training.
- By offering GIS tools you can actually use. There is no more wasteful expenditure than an expensive tool that is left sitting on a shelf because no one is able to use it. Anyone with even the most rudimentary technical ability will be able to use XMap in a productive capacity immediately after it is installed.
- By helping streamline your workflow. If there is one benefit of GIS implementation that applies to all business applications, it is that adoption of GIS technology will typically result in a measureable streamlining of workflow. The best gauge of the potential impact of GIS on your business practices is to speak someone from a company that recently invested in this technology and ask how it affected their workflow. It is likely they will cite numerous examples of how time has been saved, the burden on man-hours has been reduced, and the overall operations of the company have become more efficient.
- By offering efficient and immediate access to your data for your clients or constituents. For an organization that is required to provide access to data, the manpower needed to service these requests is often a major hindrance to operational efficiency. XMap includes tools for creating and managing a Web site to which all relevant data layers can be posted. By serving data using this method, previously over-burdened office staff are free to perform other duties.
- By quickly and accurately pinpointing addresses or other locations. At DeLorme, we not only develop the software, we also build and manage one of the most accurate databases of roads and streets available today. All XMap users have access to this street-level data for address searching and geo-coding. In business where time is money, time wasted driving haphazardly around while trying to find an address is as wasteful as throwing money away.
- By combining all of the necessary mapping, GIS, GPS, and navigation tools that you need into a single application. XMap is more that GIS; it includes a wide and diverse array of spatial tools in a single application. This eliminates the need to purchase multiple software packages, additional tools, or software extensions.
- By offering the means for you to produce superior-quality maps that will help entice customers and clients to your business.
What better way to save money than to make money? With XMap at your disposal, you have a powerful business tool that can help you put your organization firmly on the map.
