Attain Insight Solutions
Combining Map Intelligence with Business Analytics

Founded in 2008, Attain Insight Solutions helps clients in both the public and private sectors get higher ROI from their business analytic investments. The company’s geospatial analytics solution, Attain Insight Map IntelligenceTM, provides high-performance integration of Esri maps into Business Intelligence platforms. Clients can then use the maps in tandem with traditional Business Analytics to drive the best possible market insights and make decisions for progressing in their field.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Paul Hulford, CEO of Attain Insight, explains how Map Intelligence combines data maps with analytics data to aid decision-makers in taking the best path to their success.

What challenges do you think are prevalent in the market today?

Today, businesses collect a huge amount of data through various sources. That’s why organizations often struggle to manage multiple tools to derive valuable insights from incoming data and drive their business forward. In this quest to make sense of all the collected data, visual aids like infographics and maps provide deeper insights. In addition, organizations have also realized that they’ve come a long way in business analytics. Not just the analytics department, but everyone in a company now has access to raw data and insights.Consequently, business analytic tools have become far more important today than they’ve ever been. The analytics tool that they choose will allow the end-user to view the information in multiple ways but should also show multiple sets of data simultaneously to inform complex business decisions.

That’s where Attain Insight can help. Clients can decide on the type of analytics tool they wish to use, and we will bring the geospatial element of the business analytics into the picture using Esri ArcGIS® Maps. Using a map, you can visualize factors like regional population distribution and warehouse-to-store proximity to make better decisions regarding business operations, sales, or marketing.

Can you tell our readers about your products and how exactly they help your clients?

We help our clients in several ways. Typically, organizations have two separate teams responsible for analytics data. One team deals with maps and spatial data like the location of their stores, customers, staff, time taken to deliver their products, etc. The other team manages money, products and inventory, and sales data. Attain Insight Map Intelligence allows you to bring those two areas together in one place so that you can combine map and spatial information with business analytics.

Previously, combining location intelligence with BA would be a difficult task, culminating in an expensive IT project. However, we can easily bridge the gap with Map Intelligence without making it a costly operation. Furthermore, the map data can also be combined and visualized with traditional business data, sales, financial information, etc.

Today, IT departments in most organizations are overworked. They’re stretched most of the time due to technology changes, like cloud migration and security reinforcement. Map Intelligence is plug-and-play. It doesn’t require any coding or programmatic investment. People don’t even need any special training to operate it. It has a simple installation procedure, after which you will have connected the Esri platform with your BA platform, and you can immediately create map-enabled reports bringing your business analytic data to life.

Similarly, report authors don’t need special training to create reports based on the map data. The tool provides you with direct access to Esri’s potent map processing capabilities. So, calculations like the distance between customers and stores, warehouses and stores, as well as customer travel patterns are easy with Map Intelligence. It’s a high ROI tool with less IT investment.

Could you give our readers some practical examples of combining traditional analytics with Map Intelligence?

Our solution can be used in multiple scenarios. Take political elections, for instance. Like customers, there are voters of different age groups, ethnicities, backgrounds, and levels of education. Similar to analyzing customer purchases by product store and location, analyzing voter turnout by demographic indicators helps to confirm if everyone had an equal opportunity to vote. By combining traditional analytics with Map Intelligence, we can learn about the voters and how far voters had to travel on average to get to their polling station.

As another example, we can use maps to track purchases made by the same customer but in different locations. This can even make it easy to spot fraud when for example, a customer travels a long distance to make a purchase that could have been made at any number of stores locally. Prescription fraud is easily seen in this way. Negative behavior of such people is difficult to identify using traditional analytics but very easy to spot on a map.

What, according to you, sets Attain Insight apart from its peers in the market?

Our depth of expertise and the quality of our technology are the two things that differentiate us from others in the market. In addition, we really believe in our mission of helping customers get better ROI out of their analytics. Our decades of experience in the space combined with the high caliber of our products and quick ROI for our clients present themselves as music to the ears of our potential customers.

Are there any future plans that you have envisioned for your organization? For example, any footprint expansion plans you are coming up with within the next 12-18 months?

Continuing our growth, we just acquired a technology out of Australia to move our mapping offerings forward. We are also growing our service footprint to support our customers on a broader geographic scale.