At SafeGraph, our sole focus is curating the most accurate and precise points of interest (POI) data for businesses, non-profits, and academics alike to use in their analytics. This broad range of use cases for POI data means our customers require a wide variety of POI types to work with. Over the past few years, we’ve been continuously adding new categories of POIs to our datasets.
One of the most popular POI types we’ve seen a need for is industrial POIs. “Industrial” is a blanket term used to imply a range of non-consumer POIs. Our coverage in the June Places release can be broken into the following categories:
In total, these categories of industrial POIs amount to over 60K data points.
You can see a full breakdown of our industrial POI coverage here.
There are just about endless possibilities for using POIs in an analysis. While industrial POIs are very different from consumer-based POIs, the use cases for them are actually very similar. At SafeGraph, we’ve seen a great deal of interest in industrial POIs for demand forecasting, supply chain management, and commercial insurance purposes.
Financial services firms and brands themselves are increasingly turning to data science as inputs into their demand models and forecasts. While transaction data is fundamental to financial analysis, geospatial data - particularly POIs and their foot traffic - is quickly becoming a must-have for firms.
Analyzing the location and foot traffic of industrial POIs enables firms to take a general pulse on macro-economic activity. If a particular brand or type of industrial location is increasing or decreasing its coverage (or has a change in foot traffic), this could mean that whatever goods it’s producing or distributing will soon see a change in market presence. Firms can then use this data to make more informed decisions about their investment portfolios.
Similarly, measuring foot traffic at ports or industrial wholesaler locations can be a better proxy for demand than at the industrial plants themselves. The ability to analyze multiple levels of the industrial supply chain gives firms an edge in their modeling and forecasting.
Mapping and analyzing the location of various points in a supply chain is essential for not only demand forecasting, but also logistics planning itself. As more and more consumers are purchasing goods online, brands have to find new and innovative ways to meet the growing demand for delivery and high customer expectations.
Industrial POI data provides a way to factor delivery infrastructure into logistics planning and execution. With an accurate and up-to-date account of all locations involved in the supply chain, a brand can efficiently coordinate delivery routes to keep up with consumer demand.
POI footprints are also an important ingredient in supply chain and logistics planning. Accurate and precise building footprints can be deployed as geofences to confirm drop-off or pick-up of goods at any points in the supply chain. With the reliability of good POI and geometry data, brands can be confident in their supply chain and ability to meet increasing consumer demands.
Industrial complexes are much more complicated than your average consumer shop or restaurant. For one, they often have multiple buildings associated with a single address spread out over a much larger physical footprint. Consider the number of buildings at a large fulfillment and distribution center, as well as the surrounding parking lot and roadways.
For the commercial insurance companies who generate the policies that cover these buildings, it's important to have strong, accurate data about the entire parcel as well as the surrounding area. Some variant of this information may be provided by the customer who is being insured but it's key to vet those details from an independent source for increased accuracy and context.
