Making use of reliable data collection, analytics, and reporting tools with a proven methodology, GLS consults and supports their clients in identifying the ideal location for their next development project. This analysis includes understanding the qualitative factors, the investment and recurring costs, and a risk assessment of each location, culminating in a report, presentation, and recommendation that provides the material differences between locations and hardens the business case with real-world location intelligence.

The current process GLS was using to collate, score, and evaluate data was highly manual and cumbersome. The process required GLS to consolidate multiple spreadsheets into a master, validating and ensuring that the copy and paste process included all the data and contained no errors.

“We brought in a consultant to look at our business processes and found that we were spending an inordinate amount of time just manipulating data. We would receive information from communities or real estate reps, and we had multiple models that we had to copy/paste into it. Nothing was very automated and it was bogging down the entire process,” recalled Didi Caldwell, President and Founding Principal of Global Location Strategies.

Each step was labor intensive, slowing down the results determination and making scenario changes, ‘what-if’ calculations, and any other reiteration factors manual, tedious, and unsustainable.

GLS was ready to streamline and automate their process through modern and current technologies with two main goals:

1. Automate internal pieces of their process to provide efficiency gains and streamline their effort, resulting in faster client response and internal cost savings
2. Productize the process into a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that would both provide the internal savings and generate a separate revenue stream.

At first, GLS looked for an off-the-shelf solution but couldn’t find anything that fit their exact needs. “The science of site selection and GLS had been around since the early 70s and it was very frustrating that technology had transformed so many other industries, but not ours,” said Caldwell.

“We weren’t having any luck finding a boxed solution that was exactly what we wanted. So, we decided that now was the time to build our own. What had been holding us back was the scale and the cost to develop our own platform, but as those costs have come down and the increased cost of manual processes and errors increased, it made sense that now was the right time to build a solution.”

Kopis kicked off the project with an in-depth discovery process, during which, GLS walked the Kopis team through their current constraints. During this process Kopis was able to compile a detailed plan and vision for the automation of GLS processes.

To address the two main goals laid out by GLS, Kopis broke the project down into two areas:

• Standardizing the spreadsheet
• Creating a cloud-based evaluation application

The creation of a ‘hidden’ spreadsheet tab that collected information in a standardized format that would be added to each RFI response template. Upon return of the spreadsheet, the application ingested the information from the hidden tab into the cloud-based evaluation application.

The evaluation application provided the ability to administer the scoring rubrics and weights as application configurations.  This allows the user to quickly make changes to the weighting or scoring details and recalculate the final scores.

This application will automate the ingestion, provide straight-forward capabilities to adjust the configuration settings of the rubric and weighting, and output the results into a common Excel format that will allow GLS to quickly generate the presentation documents.

The Kopis development team worked closed with the GLS team every step of the way. “Kopis has a great system where you have a project manager, an account manager and a development team. We had status calls every two weeks and I always knew exactly what was being done, how far along in the process we were, what the next milestone was and how close to scope we were,” said Caldwell. “There were no surprises and I was very impressed with how well the development team and project manager worked together. The level of communication was outstanding.”

The Site Shepherd application was initially released to a production environment in early 2020.  The first version of the application required that data be imported from the RFI response spreadsheet in order to analyze site selection information.

Numerous enhancements have been made to the application since that initial vision, including the ability to create new projects/locations by pulling RFI data from an external application, as well as allowing the user to create/change/delete data manually.

Kopis also created several visualizations available from within the application that provide both graphical and table-based views of the data. This makes the data easier to ingest for the user and helps provide input to the presentation documents. Additionally, Power BI reports were embedded in the application to give the user advanced interactive insight into the findings.

In addition to providing services for their own clients, GLS wanted to make the application available to other tenants and allow them to support clients for that tenant.  Modifications were made to the application to utilize Azure B2C functionality in order to support these tenants.

“Software development is an area outside my comfort zone and I was nervous at the beginning of the project, but Kopis was an excellent partner. They are experts in their field so I didn’t have to be. They helped translate our vision into reality through technology, through code, and through software applications. You don’t have to be an expert in the field to have a successful project, you just need the right partner. A partner you can trust, someone that will give you consistency, and be very transparent with you, and we got all that from Kopis,” said Caldwell.

“We absolutely have seen the return on our investment. We can turn around reports and analysis for our clients much more quickly than we were in the past and we now have the ability to focus on the things that are important as opposed to dealing with wrangling data and making sure that scoring scales are working. We can now take step back and have more time to look at the big picture.”