Mobile retail · Lima, Peru · Site selection

Where Lima buys phones, and has no store

Andres plans where a big mobile phone company opens its stores in Lima.

Listen to the story:

The challenge

Lima has grown fast, out into districts like Comas and Ate. His store map is ten years old. People there ride an hour into the centre to buy a phone, or give up and buy from a street stall. He cannot see which districts want a store.

How the flow works

With xMap Flows, Andres built Radar. Radar is an AI employee: a flow of 7 blocks.

  1. Every quarter,

    Every quarter (Schedule)

  2. across all of Lima’s districts,

    All of Lima’s districts (Area of interest)

  3. Radar finds every phone shop, repair stall and accessory store,

    Phone shops and repairs (Map business scan)

  4. sorts them into clean categories,

    One clean category each (Place classifier)

  5. measures how far each one is from the company’s nearest store,

    Our nearest store (Find nearest)

  6. keeps the ones more than three kilometres away,

    Over 3 km from us (Filter)

  7. and maps where they cluster.

    Where demand waits (Show on a map)

What it solves

The result

Radar finds twelve hundred phone shops in clusters more than three kilometres from any store. The biggest are in Comas, Ate and Villa El Salvador. Andres opens two stores there in spring, and both reach their target in the first month.

Andres found his next stores by following the phone shops.

1,200phone shops far from a store
3districts with no store
2new stores, on target

An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.

The flow, block by block

  1. 1

    Every quarter

    Schedule

    Starts the flow on a timetable.

  2. 2

    All of Lima’s districts

    Area of interest

    Sets where the flow looks: countries, cities or specific places, or areas you draw on a map.

  3. 3

    Phone shops and repairs

    Map business scan

    Finds businesses on online maps live: name, category, rating, address, phone, website and whether it is open.

  4. 4

    One clean category each

    Place classifier

    Assigns clean categories and merges duplicate places.

  5. 5

    Our nearest store

    Find nearest

    For each place, finds the nearest of your own points from a CSV you upload, for example the nearest ambulance to each accident or the nearest branch to each new lead, and adds its name and the distance.

  6. 6

    Over 3 km from us

    Filter

    Keeps only the items that match a rule.

  7. 7

    Where demand waits

    Show on a map

    Shows the results as points on a map, with the area of interest.

Templates to build it

Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.

Industries

Learn how it works

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