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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Wendy’s uses mapping software to pick locations

The Columbian
Published:

At the Wendy’s corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, real estate director John Crouse is swimming in data about the company’s almost 6,000 fast-food restaurants nationwide.

Crouse and one other colleague are responsible for building and analyzing maps of Wendy’s locations and the surrounding areas. They rely on a geography-based data program to quickly comb through large volumes of information — decades of sales records, demographic descriptions of nearby residents, and other data points — to predict how much a restaurant might take in annually at sites in the United States.

Once Crouse researches a potential site, he submits it to an internal committee; if the location is approved, engineering and construction can proceed.

Wendy’s is one of the latest companies to make use of software from a Redlands, Calif., company called Esri. Esri specializes in mapping various kinds of data — much of it culled from publicly available data sets — to help people visualize relationships, patterns and trends.

Especially since the economic downturn in 2008, many large corporations have been looking to such software — known as “geographic information systems” — to better direct their limited real estate budgets, according to Wayne Gearey, senior vice president for location intelligence at commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle.

“It’s just starting to become industry standard for corporate real estate decisions,” said Gearey, who uses Esri and other mapping services, such as MapInfo’s and Google’s, for his clients.

Retailers are especially concerned about moving to places with ample potential employees, he said. “Once, in retail it was, ‘Where is my customer?’ ” Gearey said. “Now it’s about business operations.”

Mapping software has saved Wendy’s about $750,000 over the past two years that the company said it would have spent on various analytical and market research services.

For instance, Esri’s maps pull Census data to shade neighborhoods based on their average income. This helps Wendy’s determine where customers and employees are likely to be.

“We look where more income is, or less income, and where areas are more concentrated with family households, rather than empty nesters,” Crouse said, though he noted that this is just one element of the decision-making process.

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