How One Person Maps Everything RSC Needs
At Refrigeration Sales Corporation, the company’s everyday geographic questions run through one person and a tool he taught himself to use.
If you’re looking to do a geographic analysis of how well you’re serving your market, that’s where I always start.
Doug Wight · U.S. Supply Chain Lead, Refrigeration Sales CorporationDoug Wight, who leads U.S. supply chain for the HVAC and refrigeration distributor, picked up Maptive more than a decade ago and became RSC’s de facto mapmaker. He reaches for it whenever sales, logistics, or leadership needs a location question answered, building drive-time service areas, sales territories, and acquisition maps quickly, the kind of work that would otherwise wait on an outside resource.
Key outcomes
- More than a decade as RSC’s in-house mapmaker for sales, logistics, and leadership requests.
- Drive-time service areas that show what a distribution center can reach within a delivery day.
- Sales territories and market-share maps built from RSC’s own sales data.
- Acquisition maps that show a target’s locations and coverage for leadership presentations.
- Maps produced by reusing and layering existing data, with no outside resource needed.
Tools Behind the Results
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RSC’s One-Person Mapping Function
Refrigeration Sales Corporation distributes HVAC and refrigeration equipment to contractors across Ohio and Pennsylvania, part of a larger group that has grown through several acquisitions. It has no dedicated mapping or GIS staff. What it has is Doug Wight, who leads U.S. supply chain, picked up Maptive more than a decade ago, taught himself the basics, and became the person colleagues come to for a map. The requests arrive from every direction, sales one week, logistics the next, marketing after that.
Wight is the first to say he is not a specialist. He needed a map once, found Maptive approachable enough to make one, and the requests never stopped. Keeping the work with one person also keeps it consistent, a single source the rest of RSC can rely on.
With no GIS staff in house, RSC relies on one supply chain leader and Maptive for the maps its teams need.
Drive-Time Service Areas for Logistics
Logistics is where Wight works in Maptive most. His role centers on transportation and distribution, and drive-time service areas show him how far a location can reach. When RSC weighs a new distribution center, he maps the area a truck can cover within an eight- or nine-hour day, which shows what a site can realistically serve before any commitment is made.
The same view answers routine delivery questions. Because RSC runs its own fleet to supply contractors, the practical reach of each location shapes how routes and schedules come together. A drive-time area follows the roads a truck would travel rather than a straight-line estimate, so that is the version he prefers.
A drive-time service area shows what a distribution center can deliver to within a single day, the question logistics asks most.
Territories and Market-Share Maps for Sales
For the sales side, Wight builds territories and market-share maps from RSC’s own data. A sales manager might bring customer sales figures and ask for a territory, and Maptive builds it from that data along the county or zip-code lines the business already tracks. Market-share maps follow the same path, showing where RSC is strong and where it is under-served.
Layering is what keeps this quick. Rather than starting over for each request, Wight keeps maps of branch locations, customers, and competitors ready and combines them as needed. When the group acquires another company, he adds its locations to an existing map within minutes instead of building one from scratch.
Built from data RSC already keeps, a territory or market-share map comes together by layering existing maps rather than starting from scratch.
A Map Ready Before the Meeting
The maps matter most during acquisitions, when leadership needs to understand a target’s market before making an offer. Maptive brings the target’s locations together with RSC’s territory and drive-time coverage, producing a picture of how well it serves an area and where the gaps and branch opportunities are. Those maps become part of the presentations that inform the decision.
RSC’s heaviest, most specialized analysis stays with a dedicated team on a more complex platform, and what that work involves is kept inside the company. Maptive covers everything else, the everyday mapping Wight can do himself, without the cost or the learning curve of a system built for far more than RSC needs. Most requests come back to him quickly, because the right map is usually one he has already built.
For acquisition analysis, a map of a target’s coverage and gaps becomes part of what leadership weighs, often ready the same day it is asked for.
A distributor’s geographic questions are mostly practical ones, and answering them quickly matters more than answering them elaborately. That is the case Wight’s decade with Maptive makes. A right-sized tool in the hands of someone who knows the business produces the map a decision needs while the question is still fresh, and the heavier analysis stays where it belongs, for the jobs that call for it.
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