Reliability in Online Site Selection Technology

Key Takeaway: To be reliable, online site selection technologies must provide the most accurate data possible; they must offer analytical tools utilizing the latest advances to provide the most accurate results possible; and they must be available when businesses and site selectors want to use them. Economic development organizations running legacy technologies with non-Esri data, outdated analytical tools, and uncertain performance risk getting passed over.

Reliability can mean three things in online site selection technology. First, reliability can refer to the accuracy of the data provided, a fundamental issue for users relying on this data to make critical location decisions. In a prior blog, I discussed how our partnership with Esri allows users real-time access to the entire Esri data set, how Esri data has been shown in independent studies to be the most accurate available, and how Esri is the data most requested by businesses. Economic developers and site selectors therefore consider data from our Recruit technology more reliable than cheaper, non-Esri data provided by legacy technologies from less accurate sources.

Second, reliability can refer to the accuracy of analytical tools, such as drive times. GIS WebTech’s Recruit is the only technology taking traffic into account and allowing users to customize their drive time analyses for the day of the week and time of day. Legacy technologies, in contrast, force the user to accept average drive times, which can produce highly inaccurate results and are therefore considered by businesses and site selectors to be less reliable than results gathered from Recruit.

Similarly, Recruit is the only technology to incorporate trucking time analysis, which is more accurate for manufacturers and distributors than drive time analysis, because drive times assume travel by traditional passenger vehicle rather than by truck. Trucking times are a great example of how Recruit’s analytical tools incorporate the latest technical advances and thereby produce more accurate results than the outdated tools provided in legacy software. As a result, analyses performed using Recruit are simply more reliable than analyses provided by legacy software that has not kept up.

The third aspect of reliability in online site selection is uptime, defined as the percentage of time that a system is operational. High uptime is critical for economic developers to have confidence that their online site selection technology is available when site selectors want to access it.

Over the last year, uptime for Recruit has been greater than 99.9%, and our uptime performance has been similarly strong throughout our history. We partner with Microsoft through their Azure platform, providing our clients with world-class hosting services.

But just as we focus relentlessly on innovation and are never satisfied with our technology, we are not satisfied with this high level of uptime. In fact, we are working on several initiatives to improve Recruit’s performance, already best in class, including further improvement in uptime.

Interested in learning more about GIS WebTech’s Recruit technology? Considering switching from a legacy technology to take advantage of the advanced data and analytical tools unavailable elsewhere? Please feel free to contact me or Courtney Bridger, our head of business development, or fill out the contact form on our website.

We also invite you to speak with our clients. They can tell you about the strength of our technology and our sense of service to clients, and most important of all, they can tell you how GIS WebTech’s Recruit has made them more effective as economic developers.