In two executive interviews, Mike Hickey, President Pitney Bowes Business Insight, and Bernard Gracy, Vice President, Business Development for Product and Services, PitneyBowes discuss the organizational challenges and benefits of integrating location intelligence into workflows and product and service lines. Bernard Gracy talks about how the integration of location intelligence into services and operations resulted in $1 million per year in telecommunications cost savings, and increased profitability and an 8 point uplift in customer satisfaction in their document management group.

Brand is the social contract of business, the implicit agreement between the parties in a transaction about the nature of their long-term relationship. One is tempted to quote Hobbs to the effect that economic life devoid of brands tends to be “solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short,” a description eerily evocative of today’s commercial environment. As with political theory, when discussing brand it is easy to slip into morality tales. The recent collapse of the Tiger Woods and Toyota brands calls up images from Greek tragedy with choruses of talking heads lamenting their fall from greatness.

Bloomberg launched in 1981 with a vision by Mike Bloomberg to provide business and financial analysts with a single all-inclusive platform to access financial news and information. The Energy and Commodities Group has taken this vision to the next level by developing a location-based platform, BMAP, for the access, analysis and visualization of information. This was Andre Parris’ brainchild to turn a mediocre asset database and multiple information sources into a powerful integrated market information and analysis tool. BMAP launched last year and was a 2-year project from inception to rollout. The Energy and Commodities Group is the only physical business at Bloomberg, and “Physical things demand maps,” said Andre Parris, so the Energy and Commodities Group was the natural starting point for developing a robust business mapping application within Bloomberg.