Intelligis Technologies
A Pioneer in GIS-Based Digital Transformation

The catchphrase “Data never sleeps” cannot be stated enough in the enterprise world. Across the board, digitally enabled businesses generate colossal amounts of data every day from which meaningful insights can be derived to boost productivity. Of which, geographic data has off late become a powerful decision-making tool. Founded in 2016, Intelligis Technologies is a company that creates solutions for the digital transformation of enterprises and small-to-medium-sized businesses. An expert that specializes in geographic information systems (GIS), Intelligis integrates technologies like IoT and mobile apps to create simple and engaging solutions. In a recent interview with Jose Manuel Nagel, director of Intelligis Technologies, he discusses how the company has evolved with the vision of helping organizations achieve more through their digital transformation solutions.

What are the trends that customers face in the industry?

Organizations are striving to address the needs of the changing business landscapes along with their customers, and digital transformation has the potential to accelerate business activities, processes, competencies, and models while leveraging technology in a strategic way. In order to ensure longevity, development, and real commercial success, organizations must understand emerging market trends and utilize the available talent pool and technology. An enormously effort- and time-consuming process, digital transformation is often mistaken to be an overnight affair. At Intelligis, we believe that GIS is at the heart of a broad range of digital transformation solutions. We are a combination of professionals from different areas including software development, IoT, analytics, and data science.

How does Intelligis respond to these trends and can you tell us about your solution?

One of the key differentiators of our service is that despite being oriented to large companies primarily, we provide small companies the opportunity to use our world-class technology as well. We are powered by ESRI—the pioneer in GIS—and we are a member of the ESRI partner network. Being an important business partner for ESRI in Latin America gives us the edge to use GIS as the center of digital transformation for companies in countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, and very soon in Mexico, Ecuador, and Chile. This means that we can connect GIS with several related technologies, one of which is the GPS technology which is a rich source of accurate location, time, and speed information that we feed into GIS to gain further valuable information through analytics.

We have two main products. The first one is SmartMapsLite^TM—a SaaS solution that allows companies with field operations to capture different types of information from mobile apps.

The data is sent to a central server and can be analyzed and visualized in real time using web-based dashboards in a geographical context. The SmartMapsProfessional^TM solution has the same functionalities as that of SmartMapsLite^TM, in addition to which it integrates information from multiple sources like sensors, telematics devices, and mobile applications. The data layers are integrated into enterprise systems for managing and optimizing various business processes. We have incorporated various features like dashboards with visualization of analytics in a geographical context, etc. One major difference between both the solutions is that SmartMapsProfessional^TM has additional functionality for personalizing dashboards, business tools, and reports.

All our operating locations have experts who invest a lot of time and effort toward understanding the customer’s precise needs and the KPIs they want to achieve. It allows us to focus on those specific business objectives while designing a solution that is targeted to enhance their KPIs. For instance, if a company realizes that their POS is not well maintained, we recommend them to improve their trade marketing practices. Then, we set out to collaborate with them and design a solution for their trade marketing officers which will provide them all the necessary information about the whole region in real time. An essential aspect of our collaboration phase is that we put more emphasis on the business of our client in order to empower them with the right solution and we do not push any product as such.

Can you provide a case study that highlights your solution?

A large multinational company in the U.S. that deals in the tools and hardware segment had a business-impacting issue with their trade marketing processes in Latin America. They wanted to check if the distributors’ performance was meeting the benchmark and found that their digital marketing teams lacked the necessary technology. We helped them embed our solution into their business model, with which they were able to track their distributors from a single dashboard. As a result of this implementation, this company now has increased its sales through the better stocking of their POS and better management of its distributors in each country.

In the likes of this company, many other businesses use our GPS solutions for various purposes; for instance, logistics companies can track their drivers’ profile, monitor for cases of aggressive driving, and improve safety operations. A European logistics company uses our service to enhance sales and its operations. We have installed telematics units in their fleets which automatically triggers alerts in the event of jamming or kidnapping attempts or any other issues of such nature.

What does the future look like for Intelligis?

We have a unique value proposition that uses GIS as the center of digital transformation solutions that dramatically improves businesses’ performance. In this market space, we are the leading company in LATAM and plan to consolidate our leading position with strong growth in the markets where we have a presence, and through expansion in new markets that we will enter in the short term. Our unique value proposition is our pursuit for innovating and exploring newer use cases for GIS in enterprise business processes, for which we earned a commendable recognition in the National Enterprise Innovation Competition in Panama last year, among more than 70 competing companies. We are also working with universities and schools to educate and train people since there is a general lack of GIS professionals. This year, we are expanding to Mexico, Ecuador and Chile, and our vision is to maintain our position as the leader of GIS-backed digital transformation solutions in Latin America. Within the next two years, we are planning to grow and establish ourselves in every country in t he Latin America region. Further, we are looking forward to providing more advanced levels of service by offering GIS solutions integrated with AI, machine learning, and big data in order to add more value to business processes.