Data science consulting team builds an AI tool that predicts the best location to build shops for Rakuten Mobile

Rakuten Mobile is rapidly increasing its offline outlet footprint across Japan. Setting up a shop has its own challenges, the most important being the location of the shop. For aiding Rakuten Mobile in choosing the best possible locations to set up their shops in various areas, the data science consulting team has come up with an AI-powered tool that predicts the best possible location for setting up shops based on location analytics. Three interactive dashboards, a customer attribute dashboard, sales prediction dashboard, and shop optimization dashboard have been built for this regard. The team has used a combination of spatial/geographical data points like population, income level, postal codes, transportation, nearby places of attraction, and competitive intelligence data like competitor shops, competitor sales, Rakuten mobile sales data in the area, etc. to come with the store performance prediction. This tool has helped to predict the sales if shops are set up within a certain radius at chosen locations. By extensively using this tool, the Rakuten Mobile team has could select the best possible locations for setting up their offline shores.