For businesses of any size, the decision to expand can help increase profits and reach new customers. This may involve adding physical locations or obtaining new spaces to produce goods. KBC Advisors assists clients with managing and executing the best real estate outcomes for their businesses using data-backed guidance. With a focus on premier industrial space, KBC’s full-service platform caters to tenant, landlord, and investor needs.
To show the availability of commercial sites and their locations, the location intelligence team at KBC Advisors used to use an external app to track existing assets and land sites, export the files, and then upload the information into a separate system for visualization. This process was time-consuming and required team members to focus to avoid making errors while moving information from system to system.
In search of a better solution, KBC’s location intelligence team implemented ArcGIS Data Pipelines for more seamless data integration with ArcGIS. This has improved the accuracy of data and automated processes—saving time, enhancing efficiency, and enabling the location intelligence team to more effectively deliver clients and real estate brokerage professionals the data they need.
A Disconnected, Manual Process
In KBC’s old workflow, the location intelligence team would create data and track projects and business deals in external platforms. A GIS analyst would then use ArcGIS Pro to plot the coordinates of available site locations and publish them to ArcGIS Online. The web layers displaying the data were then showcased in client-facing apps—but they would quickly become out-of-date.
The disconnected systems translated to too many manual steps, leading to inefficiencies and errors. Information was extracted dozens of times a week, so KBC’s GIS team wanted a more efficient process for data visualization.
“[The process] was too slow,” said James Drumm, director of services and technology at KBC Advisors. “Edits in either application weren’t always being tracked in the other application.”
This was critical when tracking whether a potential site was available or unavailable. The most current status was not always reflected in the system because the data was based on a static spreadsheet downloaded at the time rather than on real-time data.
Streamlined Data Integration
Drumm began searching for a new solution that would help integrate outside apps with ArcGIS. After receiving email notifications about a new Esri product, Drumm and the GIS team became early adopters of ArcGIS Data Pipelines. This app streamlines data integration in ArcGIS Online by offering an efficient way to ingest, prepare, and maintain data—even if it’s in a separate system.
The group still needed to use a mediary data storage solution, however. When Drumm saw that Data Pipelines supported Microsoft Azure Blob Storage as an input data source, he chose that as the intermediate connector between ArcGIS Online and an outside platform.
Drumm and KBC’s team of GIS analysts began using Data Pipelines in late 2023, and use “exploded” after they established a connection to their Azure Blob Storage container, said Drumm. He added that the team found Data Pipelines easy to learn and use and that connecting the cloud storage container was very straightforward.
The implementation process began by having KBC’s internal Microsoft Azure specialist set up a job that would push the data from an external platform to Azure Blob Storage. From there, Data Pipelines can access the latest data.
The integration process is now automated and set to a schedule. Azure Blob Storage refreshes multiple times per day, and the respective data pipelines are scheduled to run at the same cadence. Using this process, the data in ArcGIS Online is updated every few hours, ensuring that the latest changes are reflected throughout the day.
Real-Time Data Reflection
The revamped workflow with Data Pipelines has streamlined operations and offered many benefits to the location intelligence team’s daily workflows, according to Selena Lawson, GIS manager at KBC Advisors. The use of Data Pipelines has saved time, and many of the data pipelines run multiple times per day, Monday through Friday. So instead of having the team spend time on manual extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, any data updates get automatically reflected in ArcGIS Online.
“This real-time reflection of the data ensures our users have the most up-to-date information we can provide,” said Lawson.
Data Pipelines has vastly improved the team’s speed and reliability, according to Drumm. The scheduling feature that lets the location intelligence team schedule data updates based on a specified time frame is critical and helps ensure the availability of current data. The recurring Azure Blob Storage refresh operation takes only seven minutes, and then the data pipelines that are connected automatically kick off shortly afterward to update the feature services in ArcGIS Online. In total, the updates take less than 20 minutes.
“Due to the scheduling function, we can redirect much of our focus from repeat tasks to more intricate analyses and deliverables,” said Lawson.
Automation Improves Accuracy
Data accuracy has improved with Data Pipelines as well. Now, after researchers enter the data into KBC’s main database, Data Pipelines moves it into ArcGIS Online without any additional human interaction. According to Lawson, this ensures that “the schemas match, data is formatted correctly, and no time is spent correcting transformation errors.”
If an error is made when data gets entered, however, the data pipeline will catch and correct it, and the cleaned data will be reflected in ArcGIS Online.
“The data update capability enables us to no longer rely on multiple sources and users for data input. Because of this, there are virtually no human errors or manual time spent on the Esri side of things,” said Lawson. “This saves an average of 75 percent of our analysts’ total time spent on data update requests.”
Moving data is no longer an issue for the team, either, because it is automated.
“This saved time allows our analysts to focus on location analysis, serving our clients, and building custom applications instead of data cleanup and updates,” said Drumm.
Plotting the coordinates of commercial sites comprises 99 percent of the location intelligence team’s workflow, according to Drumm, so it is critical work. The new workflow with Data Pipelines means that the team is no longer converting tabular locations into a feature service to show it on a map. The Create geometry tool in Data Pipelines is used instead to create a point geometry field from a tabular dataset that contains longitude and latitude fields and then update an existing feature service automatically.
The GIS team has now created hundreds of feature layers with Data Pipelines. With all that data being connected, accurate, and available in ArcGIS Online, deliverables such as a labor study or a site survey comparison can be done in a day, not weeks, helping KBC better serve its clients.
“One of the most important things in our industry…is speed combined with accuracy. So if I can cut out manual steps, if I can cut out extra people doing things, if I can cut out you having to enter data in four different systems, that just vastly improves our speed to a solution,” said Drumm. “My personal goal for the team is speed and accuracy, and we can meet that.”
