When the pandemic hit in 2020, everything changed overnight.
Borders closed ⇒ Flights were cancelled ⇒ Travel restrictions shifted by the hour.
And then the question came from the Executive Team:
“Where are all of our mobile employees?”
Not by policy. Not by move type. On a map.
A map.
They were asking about risk exposure, travel disruption, and emergency evacuation scenarios.
It was completely reasonable. Except we didn’t have that view.
To answer that question, we had to start pulling data.
International permanent moves were in one system.
Expats were in another.
Non-benefit and tracking-only employees lived in email folders and spreadsheets.
Each system had pieces of the picture - like a puzzle spread out on the dining room table. The first step was simply building the border.
That’s when the aggregation began.
Export files.
Clean them up.
Standardize location names.
Make sure home and host were clearly labeled.
Cross-check against what we thought we knew.
This process alone took days.
Once everything was finally compiled into one spreadsheet, the real request surfaced:
“Can you show this visually?”
Of course we could. They were executives and they needed a visual.
So we built a map.
Every mobile employee was represented by a marker. Country by country. Zooming in and out to explain exposure. Overlaying travel restrictions. Researching risk levels and trying to anticipate follow-up questions before they were asked.
This took at least a week. Not because the analysis was complex, but because the data wasn’t connected.
The work itself wasn’t unreasonable. Leadership should know where their mobile employees are during a global crisis.
The problem was that answering the question required creating a picture from scratch.
Every. Single. Time.
The systems didn’t talk to each other. There wasn’t one source of truth.
There certainly wasn’t a live dashboard with an interactive map.
It lived across platforms.
Across vendors.
Across inboxes.
When urgency increases, fragmentation becomes visible.
If employee records and move types had been centralized in one place – with a built-in, interactive map of the population – that week would have looked very different.
Today, Navi brings employee records and move types into one system, and the dashboard includes an interactive map of your population.
With Navi, you’re not reconstructing the answer; you’re viewing it in real time.
In moments of urgency, that difference matters.
When leadership asks for visibility, they’re asking for confidence.
Confidence shouldn’t require a week-long project.