CUSTOMER STORIES
From Location Analysis to Full-Stack Spatial Data Science
Location is a strategy. Location should power decision-making. Before we were doing that, but it was really slow, it was not scalable, and it was not reproducible. And now our data lives in our warehouse data models, and the data is not only powering the analysis I'm providing for the property and the marketing teams, it is also accessible for them.
Gerardo Ezequiel Martín Carreño
Full-Stack Spatial Data Scientist at TJX
Location is a strategy. Location should power decision-making. Before we were doing that, but it was really slow, it was not scalable, and it was not reproducible. And now our data lives in our warehouse data models, and the data is not only powering the analysis I'm providing for the property and the marketing teams, it is also accessible for them.
Gerardo Ezequiel Martín Carreño
,
Full-Stack Spatial Data Scientist at TJX
The Client
TJX
TJX is a retail company with a presence across Europe, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Austria, and the Netherlands, with plans to expand into Spain. With approximately 700 stores and serving around 50 million active users, TJX processes hundreds of millions of transactions annually.
Given that roughly 80% of corporate data contains a hidden geospatial component and human behavior is influenced by geography, location analysis is critical for TJX's success in retail.
The Challenge
Overcoming legacy geospatial workflows
Before adopting a modern spatial data science approach, TJX faced significant challenges with its legacy, desk-based geospatial workflows. The property team's process for finding new store locations and understanding customer catchments was slow, manual, and error-prone. Data was fragmented, stored in OneDrive, with analysis performed using proprietary GIS software like MapInfo. Generating reports involved manual screenshots and complex Excel lookups, making the process non-scalable and unreproducible. A single location analysis could take two weeks or more, hindering agile decision-making and preventing portfolio-wide insights.
Results
From Location Analysis to full-stack Spatial Data Science
By transforming its geospatial stack to a cloud-native, modern approach, TJX has dramatically accelerated its analysis and decision-making capabilities. What once took over two weeks now takes less than a day, or even 15-30 minutes for catchment analysis and PDF generation. The process has become semi-automated, with integrated and accessible data living in Snowflake, serving as a single source of truth.
Analysis is now reusable, well-scripted, and documented, enabling portfolio-wide analysis and spatial optimization. This efficiency allows the geospatial team to dedicate more time to advanced modeling, machine learning, and deep learning, ultimately providing faster and more strategic insights to both the property and marketing teams.
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Why CARTO?
Powering cloud-native Spatial Data Science
CARTO plays a key role in TJX's transformation by sitting on top of their cloud infrastructure (Snowflake) to enable interactive visualizations and advanced spatial analysis. The CARTO Spatial Extension for Snowflake allows for bidirectional syncing between local desktop software (QGIS) and the cloud warehouse, ensuring data consistency and accessibility. CARTO Builder facilitates the creation of ad-hoc dashboards for property and marketing teams, solving specific business questions.
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A cloud-native approach
CARTO is the Location Intelligence platform built to run natively within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. This seamless integration eliminates GIS data silos, enabling anyone to transform spatial analysis into actionable business insights directly inside the Snowflake environment.
CARTO’s platform eliminates slow and ungovernable ETL processes, and ensures enterprise-grade speed, scalability, and security.
Geospatial teams like TJX’s gain native access to the full power of Snowflake’s scalable, multi-cluster architecture - including Apache Iceberg tables, Snowpark data engineering & ML, and Cortex AI. CARTO extends Snowflake’s capabilities with rich geospatial visualizations, an advanced Analytics Toolbox, low-code design and automation, and app development tools - all available as a native app via the Snowflake Marketplace.
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