INTERVIEW
The Future is All About Real-Time Location technology is at the heart of keeping us moving in today’s digital era, driving transformation in business processes and workflows. Jason Jameson, SVP and General Manager, APAC, at HERE Technologies, speaks about the latest trends and potential of Location Intelligence across various industries in this interview with Geospatial World.
Today, we can see location and geospatial technologies are at the core of digital transformation. How far will this trend go and how significant is it to our industry? This is definitely the macro trend. We’ve gone from location data, which tells us where things are, to spatial intelligence, which helps us make sense of how things are interacting with one another in the environment that they are in. The whole idea of digital transformation is really about being able to do things and react to things in real-time. It 6 | www.geospatialworld.net | May-June 2022
sounds futuristic but we’re already in the early stage of that journey. One great example from Europe is Mercedes-Benz, which deploys our HD Live Map for DRIVE PILOT — their Level 3 automated driving system — designed to operate a vehicle under certain conditions in Germany. Examples like this demonstrate the importance of spatial intelligence, and how high-definition maps make everything much more granular, to understand exactly where you are and to react in real-time.
The future will be all about how we can ingest and process information in real-time. Artificial intelligence (AI) will become very important because there aren’t enough data scientists in the world to process all this data that's being generated; AI has to help us understand that data at scale.
How do you think location is transforming business processes and workflows? Speaking about transformation, one industry that has been completely transformed during the pandemic is the supply chain industry. We’ve seen serious constraints and bottlenecks as the system gets pushed. We’ve also found that end-to-end visibility is fairly weak in this industry. Companies are now looking to improve visibility of their supply chain across multi-modal transportation. This is where we will see ongoing transformation in the transportation and logistics business processes and workflows. To give an example, we’re working with Siemens Healthineers to track and monitor the location, condition and ETA (expected time of arrival) of their medical equipment shipments in real-time. Hospitals need to know where these devices are in the chain so they can plan medical procedures more efficiently. Real-time visibility allows better prediction around ETAs and that improves customer service. Businesses can predict when things are going to happen and more proactively notify customers in case of delays. This enables customers to make better decisions in real-time as well.
