Twenty new lockers, every one where people live

Ben plans the parcel locker network for a large delivery company in Vancouver. 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. With xMap Flows, Ben built Surveyor. On the first Monday of every month, Surveyor takes his sixty candidate sites, counts the people living within a kilometre, counts the parcel lockers already near each one, works out how many people a new locker would serve, keeps the best twenty, and sends the board a report with a map. 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.

The story in words