Organisations with a large number of branches or access points need to make both tactical and strategic decisions about how to balance market effectiveness with cost and quality of service delivery.  This is inherently a spatial problem.

A network optimisation plan

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For example, a retail bank may have several thousands of service points ranging from full service branches to sub-branches to ATMs.  There will be a number of objectives including the maintenance of service levels to existing customers, the recruitment of new customers and the upselling and cross selling of additional products and services.

Decisions need to be made on a day-to-day basis as to which locations should be retained, what range of services should be provided at each location and which new locations should be added to the network.

 A number of key questions arise:

• What is the ideal network size? In particular, given the current situation will additions to the network provide net increase in profitability or cannibalise existing access points.  What is the incremental effect?
• Which potential locations should be added to the network?
• Which existing locations should be reviewed? Are there opportunities to remove access points and retain business due to overlaps in the network coverage?
• What level of service should be provided at each location?
• When rolling out a new product or service, how should this be prioritised?

In order to answer these and similar questions, the Wendover Group can construct detailed geographic models of client networks and customer behaviour.  These are firstly configured to predict the current levels of business and patterns of customer usage across the existing network.  The same model can then be used to predict what will happen under any number of "what if?" scenarios. 

For example, network planning models can predict:

• The amount of business that would be lost as the result of an access point closure
• The migration of business to each neighbouring location as the result of an access point closing nearby
• The next n most profitable locations to add new access points
• The next n best opportunities to rationalise the network
• The ideal network "blueprint" given a set of criteria such as the minimum level of service acceptable in any residential location, the minimum sales per access point etc.