I’ve been doing some work recently on the number of manufacturers there are in the UK of a certain size. Looking down a list of cold, hard data goes some way to understanding where the opportunity lies, but bringing the data to life with visuals makes a massive difference in helping me shape strategy. With this in mind I turned to Microsoft MapPoint.
MapPoint can link up geographic and other data in your Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Dynamics business system and plot it on a map. The example here shows the concentration of manufacturers in each post code area across the UK. Darker greens mean more manufacturers.
When you’ve got a minute it might be worth downloading a trial of Microsoft MapPoint 2010.