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Greenville company develops site selection app

Molly Hulsey //June 8, 2021//

Greenville company develops site selection app

Molly Hulsey //June 8, 2021//

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Global Locations Strategies’ Didi Caldwell, founding principal of the Greenville site location firm, is taking her company’s location benchmarking system to the cloud with a new analytic application called Site Shepherd.

Site Shepherd allows users to screen, score and financially assess location data to determine optimal location recommendations for new business operations from anywhere in the world, according to a news release.

“Site Shepherd was developed as a way to tame the big data tsunami that is required to make clear, strategic location decisions,” Caldwell said in the release. “What previously took weeks and multiple spreadsheets to decipher may now be achieved in a single platform often in a matter of days or even hours with Site Shepherd.”

The app will allow users to eliminate spreadsheets by importing site-specific data into their personal cloud-based storage file, the release said. The smart technology platform analyzes and scores sites based on user-defined criteria and provides visual insights and recommendations on the optimal location for a new business.

Using data-driven analytics, Site Shepherd strategically mines a high volume of data points to pinpoint potential locations, according to the release.

A typical location benchmarking analysis of an automotive manufacturing plant could involve evaluating 50 sites from around the world. The project manager may receive as many as 500 datapoints per site for a cumulative total of 25,000 datapoints.

In the past, these tens of thousands of datapoints were managed in spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, requiring data transposition into various analytical models and multiple touchpoints any time a piece of data was updated.

With Site Shepherd, the same data is imported to a cloud-based database. Anytime an update is made to a data point, the information automatically rolls into all of the analytical models.

Targeted users for the app include corporations, economic development organizations, architects, engineers, contractors, real estate brokers, real estate developers and site selectors.

Caldwell said her company has been developing the technology for the past five years with 12 months of successful beta testing.

“There will still be many enterprise-level companies that require the personal services of a professional site selection consultant for location analysis, but for the vast majority of companies there is Site Shepherd,” she said in the release.

Global Location Strategies will officially unveil Site Shepherd this week at the virtual SelectUSA conference and will also host a virtual Site Shepherd launch party on from 10-11 a.m. Tuesday, June 29.

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