Editor’s note: The growth and adoption of Google Maps Platform over the past 15 years would not have been possible without innovations from our partners and partner ecosystem. We’ve asked a few of our partners to share their reflections on how they were able to embrace location data to not only grow their businesses but also help their customers transform entire industries. Today’s post comes from Shishir Gokhale, Partner, Google Maps Platform at MediaAgility. MediaAgility is a Google Cloud Premier Partner across Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, G Suite, and Chrome. MediaAgility is a global digital consultancy that has been a Google Cloud Premier Partner working with Google Maps Platform since 2012. We have since been partnering with customers to tap into the full potential of Google Maps Platform. During this time, we have seen a surge in the number of businesses that are building location as a core component of their operations. 

As an early Google Cloud partner specialized in location-based services, many of our customers were looking to optimize their day-to-day operations and leverage Google Maps-based visualization to make better business decisions. At the time, the question we heard the most from our customers was, “where are my field assets right now?”

While a good number of these businesses were new-age digital natives anchored to their customers’ location data like ride-hailing and on-demand food delivery services; now traditional companies like logistics and transportation are also tapping into location intelligence to scale and run efficient operations. We have been working with customers of all sizes and from varied industries to maximize the potential of Google Maps Platform and provide measurable business outcomes.

One of our early customers, SmartShift by Mahindra, is a load exchange application built by MediaAgility. SmartShift revolutionized cargo transportation in India. The heavy load transportation had been an unorganized industry for a long time. This location aware application brought efficiency and flexibility to how load runs are booked and empowered drivers to accept the bookings that pay them well. The near-to-market application was built by our Maps and Cloud credentialled engineers in just 120 days.

Our initial goal was to significantly improve our customers’ operational efficiency using location. Once we nailed this, we pivoted to broaden the value horizon that Google Maps Platform could offer for actionable decision making, insights into business performance, and scale to our customers.

As our customers’ expected sophisticated yet rapid deployment of Google Maps Platform built solutions; MediaAgility conceptualized Dista – our AI enabled location intelligence platform. Dista empowers our customers to leverage, customize and adapt location intelligence for their core business operations. Built on Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud, Dista provides ready features like accurate locators, dynamic grid definitions, real-time, cockpit and dashboarding, route optimization and field asset tracking specifically for industries like banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), food, logistics, pharma and others.

Some of the results that we’ve been able to help customers’ achieve with Dista include increased customer coverage through SLA-compliant doorstep delivery of pizzas for Pizza Hut India; scheduling field sales agents for the doorstep sales requests and ensuring increase in sales connects; choosing an optimal delivery plan to reduce the number of vehicles, increasing vehicle-fill ratio, and thereby reducing operational costs to move goods from a warehouse to distribution centers and retailers for manufacturing companies; and determining optimal location to set up new store/warehouse/office and resource planning to service a particular territory. This new, location-aware integration directly impacts and improves efficiency, productivity, and customer experience.

In the post-pandemic world, we are looking forward to enabling businesses to scale their reach and coverage. Businesses now need to bring their services to the consumers’ doorstep and think of innovative ways to ensure business continuity in a profitable and predictable manner. Today, consumers demand every service to be brought to them, exactly where they are. We also believe that in the next few years; we will see a peak in automation driven hybrid location and IOT hybrid solutions.

Google Maps Platform and partners like MediaAgility and Dista will play a critical role in redefining the way businesses operate and scale. The digital disruption, in its truest sense, is affecting how business is done today. And location intelligence is proving to be a must-have. 

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.