Where Lima buys phones, and has no store

Andres plans where a big mobile phone company opens its stores in Lima. 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. With xMap Flows, Andres built Radar. Every quarter, across all of Lima’s districts, Radar finds every phone shop, repair stall and accessory store, sorts them into clean categories, measures how far each one is from the company’s nearest store, keeps the ones more than three kilometres away, and maps where they cluster. 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.

The story in words