Analyse the world the way we use it, a Tableau solution
Tags: Geospatial, GIS, Tableau, Maps

It’s important that we analyse the world the way we use it, not in straight lines or how the crow flies, otherwise our decisions won’t be accurate.

Most of you will be familiar with the slogan ‘Every Journey Matters’. here at Eqolines we can’t help but agree, every journey taken does matter, however, we like to take this that one step further because what’s most important to us is how accurately that journey is taken, and how informed the decisions made along the way are.

We are accustomed to seeing circular radiuses around a central point to show us how far we can reach within a certain distance and if we increase (or decrease) the distance then the radius increases (or decreases) accordingly.

1 Mile Radius

However, the reality is that if you were to travel for 20 minutes from your house in all the available different directions and noted the results, it would not result in a circular radius. Instead It would look something more like the image below because we don’t move in straight lines. As people and businesses, we are dependent on the road networks, speed profiles and transport connections combined with different modes of transport as well as consideration for peak versus off peak times, all of which will also ensure we see variations in the final result.

20 min walking time vs 1 mile radius

Where we can reach and how long it will take sound like simple questions, but for businesses it’s a difficult task to accomplish with a lot of data and a lot of different variations. For example — when exploring options for the best place to open a new coffee shop, businesses must consider the following: length of daily travel for employees, reachable population density within a certain driving time, optimal routes for couriers during peak and off-peak hours, nearest hospitals, and other community facilities as well as closest trains and bus stations within reachable journey time.

All these examples can’t easily be analysed today using Tableau and to achieve the same outcome, organisations have been using specialist GIS teams or external consultancies like ours to answer simple business questions. Regardless of who, multiple services and tools (Esri, Altryx etc) are used to create accurate journey times in silos separated from the remaining organisational data that gives the business questions more meaning. For example, it’s helpful to know the number of same franchise coffee shops which overlap with a 15 minutes walking distance to see if there is opportunity for consolidation but not being able to see revenue could mean closing the wrong store. If you have an awesome team, outcomes of the GeoSpatial analysis are then imported into Tableau to join with other datasets for comparative analysis so informed decisions can be made.

Result: slow velocity to business questions, data in silos and no democratisation of GeoSpatial analysis.

Tableau in the recent years, have invested significantly in spatial features and recently introduced support for GeoSpatial data sources, Buffer and Area calculation. Unlocking the number of use cases for customers in order to solve some of the business problems but for a lot of use cases customers use alternative tools to accomplish a lot of the examples mentioned above.

We just couldn’t bare it, and this is where Eqolines for Tableau comes in. We wanted Tableau users to be able to answer geographical questions without having to move data or be dependent on specialist resources.

Using Eqolines, Tableau users can now calculate thousands of locations extraordinarily quickly using OSM data or proprietary data from Here Technologies.

So fast in fact, that you can create ad hoc requests based on different travelling parameters repeatedly in an instant, either to analyse within Tableau desktop (Tableau prep coming soon) or to embed part of your dashboard to the Tableau Server / Online and give self-service access to all your business users so they can ask questions themselves. We truly wanted to democratise GeoSpatial analysis to organisations who use Tableau without having to use multiple tools and services, which not only costs a lot but slows the organisation down.

Embedded within the technology is the ability to take into account factors such as one way streets that you find in towns and cities, peak versus off peak traffic, population density and much more that we will cover weekly going forward.

Using the excellent Tableau Dashboard Extension Gallery we have made extensions available as a quick and easy downloads.

And as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve made the path of selecting your data source that you want to create spatial analysis on as seamless as possible using Connect, Create and Collaborate. Using Excel or any Tableau supported sources that has location, latitude and longitudes, you can be up and running in no time at all.

The Eqolines team have been fixated on creating an easy to use no code solution that can be simply and quickly adopted by Tableau analysts and business users alike, so they can directly ask, and have their questions answered.

There are a number of use cases that Eqolines can assist with, some of these we have discussed in https://eqolines.com/industries/

Our Eqolines extension comes pre-packaged with the following features

Key features: Reachability analysis, worldwide reachable population density, fast spatial filtering, estimated rush hour across the globe and much more…

Please visit our website or the Tableau Extension gallery to download a free trial without any commitment.

Over the coming weeks, we will explain capability for each feature in detail. Stay tuned by subscribing to our newsletter.

We would love to hear any feedback, please reach out to our team if you have ideas or suggestions on how we can improve our services.

The Eqolines team & Shariq Wagener