Last week Geolytix hosted our latest event, ‘Global Location Planning Innovations’ at their offices in London. Member’s gathered at their head office on Thursday 3rd July to hear from practitioners who tackle the challenges and capitalise on the opportunities of global location planning.
Our first speaker was long-time member and supporter of the SLA Student Awards, Alex Singleton, Professor of Geographic Information Science, Director of the Geographic Data Service at University of Liverpool. He shared innovations from the Geographic Data Services, Data catalogue and MAPS platform. They provide a National Data Service with analysis ready data products. His team use an evolving method with the main aim to provide Free Global Open Data.
For more information please visit Geods.ac.uk.
Follow them on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/geographic-data-service/
Retail UK – https://data.geods.ac.uk/dataset/retail-centre-boundaries-and-open-indicators
Retail US – https://data.geods.ac.uk/dataset/us-retail-centre-boundaries-and-classification
Next up was Adelina from Yum, represented in 150 countries so truly a global business. How many of us have a KFC in our neighbourhood? KFC are truly a Local and Global business with one of the top spots in the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) arena. Their most important assets are their Market Planning Data and their People, including staff and customers. Check out Adelina’s presentation to find out more…
You can find her on LinkedIn.
Our third speaker, Will Minnett from McArthur Glenn are Global Developers of designer outlets. The owner wanted to bring the American model to the UK – focusing on really clean toilets! Who doesn’t love a really nice loo when you’re out shopping. Their feedback shows that 95% of visitors to their outlet malls will return. They do this by following a 10 principle plan. Check out Will’s presentation to find out more, or you can find him on LinkedIn.
We then heard from three of our overseas members, sharing how they came to be doing location planning globally, or in different regions, what they have learnt and what advice they would give to others considering a change. We heard from
- Kate Broad, National Location Planning Manager at Coles, Australia
- Tom Brown, Director Market Planning, Store Development & Design / Asia Pacific, Starbucks Coffee Company
- Coco Lin, Shanghai Geolytix
Truly a fascinating insight and really interesting. All three took a different approach to answering the questions we set them, so dive in and listen to their talks on the Event page here: https://thesla.org/2025/05/innovations-in-global-location-planning/
Blair Freebairn, founder of our sponsors Geolytix finished our round of presentations with his thoughts on the future of Global Location Planning. One thing he saw as lacking and a big opportunity in the future is mobility data, which is not readily available. He also talked about moves to make Bank data accessible – It’s still understandably highly restricted but could banks get used to us using this information?
He ended by reviewing AI and the many uses of Chat GPT. Whilst it can’t do maths well, spacial analysis and connectiveness or interactions across space it does have its uses. If you give it good data it CAN do some interesting analysis very quickly. It might also come up with new and innovative suggestions.
It was one of those gorgeous sunny days when the city feels like a holiday destination abroad, so the terrace drinks afterwards were the perfect conclusion to a great evening. Huge thanks to Geolytix and in particular Lizzie Dawson for pulling together the whole event, her team for welcoming everyone so warmly and of course to all of our excellent speakers in person and on the screen. Lastly, thanks to all the members who joined us; both familiar faces and lots of new members joining us for the first time. We hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did.
If you attended this event we’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share a comment below.