Twenty new lockers, every one where people live
Ben plans the parcel locker network for a large delivery company in Vancouver.
Listen to the story:
The challenge
Every new locker costs thousands, and he picks sites from a spreadsheet and a hunch. Some sit half empty for a year. Others go in two streets from a locker already there. The board wants twenty new sites by spring, and proof each one is worth it.
How the flow works
With xMap Flows, Ben built Surveyor. Surveyor is an AI employee: a flow of 7 blocks.
On the first Monday of every month,
First Monday of the month (Schedule)
Surveyor takes his sixty candidate sites,
Sixty candidate sites (My data)
counts the people living within a kilometre,
People within 1 km (Demographics)
counts the parcel lockers already near each one,
Lockers already there (Nearby places)
works out how many people a new locker would serve,
People per locker (Calculated field)
keeps the best twenty,
The best twenty (Sort and limit)
and sends the board a report with a map.
Report for the board (Make a report)
What it solves
- Sites picked by hunch: solved by Demographics and Calculated field and Sort and limit
- Half-empty lockers: solved by Demographics
- Lockers too close: solved by Nearby places
The result
This month Surveyor ranks all sixty sites in four minutes. The top one, on Commercial Drive, has eleven thousand people nearby and no locker. Two sites Ben liked sit next to existing lockers, and he drops them before a dollar is spent.
Ben stopped guessing where people live. Now he puts lockers where they are.
An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.
The flow, block by block
- 1
- 2
Sixty candidate sites
Brings in a table you uploaded or a list you saved on the My data page: your stores, customers, target accounts or sites.
- 3
People within 1 km
Who lives in an area: the number of residents, men and women, and nine age groups, from xMap’s population grid (hexagons of about 0.1 km², about 100 countries).
- 4
Lockers already there
Places around a point from xMap’s own places database (300M+ places, refreshed every month): pick the types of place (more than 5,000, such as Restaurant, Cafe, Pharmacy, Hospital or Gas station, or a whole group of them) and how far to look.
- 5
People per locker
Adds fields worked out from the others: a number, a text or a yes/no.
- 6
The best twenty
Puts the items in order, and can keep only the first ones: the 10 best rated, the 20 nearest, the highest fit scores.
- 7
Report for the board
Turns the items that reach it into a clean PDF report with your logo and colour: the summary an xMap LLM block wrote for the whole list, the figures, charts of kinds and cities, a map and the list.
Templates to build it
Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.
- Competitor density around each sitePeople per competitor around each of your sites, ranked.
- Branch network review: which branches the area needsA monthly review of which branches their area needs, with a note for the committee.
- Villages with no health centre nearbyVillages with no health care within 5 km, for the mobile clinic.
- Impact report for donors: people around each siteThe reach section of the donor report, from the people around each site.
- Districts with no pharmacy close byBlocks with many people and few pharmacies, ranked.
- Where young adults lack mental health careBlocks with many young adults and few mental health services.
Learn how it works
- How to score candidate store sitesCompare sites on residents, competitors and neighbours, with an AI score and a reason.
- Location intelligenceUsing where things are, and what is around them, to make business decisions.
- Catchment areaThe area a store or service draws its customers from.
- Ask the map a questionHow many of a kind of place, how many people for each, and where the gaps are, answered on the spot.
- Count what is around each of your placesCompetitors, footfall magnets or services within a distance of each site.
- Compare sites side by sideTwo or three spots measured the same way, one column each, the best of every row marked and the best site and why.
More stories from Logistics & ports
- Five riders who never sit in a closed roadThabo runs a small motorbike courier company in Johannesburg, with five riders and a lot of parcels.
- The dock knows before the load gets warmZoe runs cold chain dispatch at a large chilled food distributor in Brisbane.
- Not one sofa caught in the afternoon stormGabriela runs a small furniture delivery business in Panama City, with two vans and a lot of sofas.
- Six drivers, fair shares, no door twiceYi-ting runs a small family delivery company in Taipei, with six drivers and orders from three online shops.
Build this flow on your own city
Run a live search on the home page without an account, or let Ask xMap build the flow from one sentence.