Geographical location as an organizational resource: use of computational techniques to subsidize location decision making in the banking industry

The location of a business site is a material resource and, along with its financial and technological resources, may provide a company with a distinguished position in comparison with its competitors. Deciding on the best location of a business site is a major task and requires several studies This paper proposes the integration of a Geographic Information System and an Expert System (SES) to support decision-making regarding the choice of the best location to open a branch of bank so that location constitutes a competition material resource for the organization. In this paper, we develop a system called the Realty Prospecting System for the Banking Sector (RPS), which allows these variables to be detailed in terms of value, rarity and difficulty to imitate and substitute. Assuming that the resource based view (RBV) emphasizes the strategic choice by the recovery of important actions such as identifying, developing and deploying key resources for the management of the organization to maximize returns, an analysis of the prospected properties in terms of competitive advantage was also conducted, concluding that the RBV is the element that contributes to the SPI. It increases ability to analyze the system beyond the question of location, i.e., the RBV allows prospected properties to be examined in terms of competitive advantage.