North Pole Logistics is the exclusive global operator responsible for delivering presents to children who celebrate Christmas. Operating from a single distribution centre at the North Pole, the organisation must reach more than 900 million homes in one extended night, across every time zone and almost every inhabited country.
For centuries, the operation relied on parchment charts, local elf knowledge and intuition. It worked, just about, but was increasingly hard to justify when the rest of the world had advanced to data-driven planning. Santa recognised it was time to modernise the map.
Santa Claus, Chief Logistics Officer, North Pole Logistics.
Santa’s decision was validated by Tekantis’ own location intelligence lead, James Dales, who helped architect the solution.
James Dales, Director of Geospatial Intelligence, Tekantis.
The Christmas Eve Challenge
Even with a magical sleigh, the operational realities mirror those of any large-scale logistics environment. More than 900 million homes need to be reached. Around 2.4 billion children expect gifts. There are roughly 31 hours of usable darkness from the first bedtime in the Pacific to the last sunrise in Hawaii. Routing inefficiencies could add an estimated 1.5 billion cumulative kilometres.
Behind the mythology, Santa’s team faced real operational constraints and familiar geospatial challenges.
No unified geospatial view: Wish lists, naughty or nice scores and household addresses lived in separate systems with no shared spatial context.
Inefficient routing across time zones: The traditional “follow the night westwards” approach took darkness into account but ignored population clusters, local bedtime behaviour, airspace restrictions and weather systems.
Limited ability to test scenarios: Storms, reindeer performance issues and last-minute list changes could not be modelled effectively.
Fragmented reporting across teams: Multiple tools, no shared live map and inconsistent situational awareness created misalignment.
North Pole Logistics needed a location intelligence layer inside their existing Microsoft ecosystem that could unify data, optimise routing and give every team a common operational picture.
The Solution: Icon Map as Santa’s Live Control Map
Working with Tekantis, Santa deployed Icon Map inside a new Power BI environment known as the Christmas Eve Control Tower.
A single high-performance visual drives the entire experience.
Global Demand Modelling with H3 Hexagons: A global H3 grid captures child and household counts, wish list volumes, naughty or nice distribution, historical delivery times and weather or airspace risks. This creates a consistent spatial model that allows Santa to zoom from world scale to metro scale without losing structure.
Territory Awareness with Polygons: Polygon layers provide essential context such as country boundaries, restricted airspace, ice sheets and environmental zones. These help plan compliant and efficient cross-region routes.
Time Zone Aware Routing with Lines: Line layers visualise candidate sleigh paths, following the curvature of the Earth showing the shortest path - priority sequences based on darkness windows and metrics for distance, dwell times and congestion patterns. Santa can evaluate multiple strategy options and understand trade-offs instantly.
Custom Icons and Images: Custom imagery makes the map intuitive for all elf teams. This includes sleigh and reindeer status indicators, weather alerts and high-demand hotspots.
Circles, Heatmaps and Clustering for Local Detail: At city level, the map transitions to detailed layers such as street-level heatmaps, clustered demand markers and circle-based density cues. This supports efficient micro routing in dense urban areas.
Live Telemetry on Christmas Eve
During the night, sleigh telemetry streams into Power BI, visited hex cells update automatically, and weather or airspace layers refresh continually. Every team shares the same interactive map, filtered to their region and responsibilities. This turns a global one-night operation into a coordinated and data-driven process.
Results: A More Predictable Christmas Eve
Higher on-time delivery: Improved sequencing ensured more stops occurred before local wake-up times.
Reduced total flight distance: H3 clustering and route optimisation reduced unnecessary hops.
Faster response to disruption: Storms and delays were modelled instantly by adjusting hex and line patterns.
Improved team alignment: All elf teams work from the same live geospatial picture.
Stronger post-season insight: The same dashboards support year-round review and planning.
Why Icon Map
North Pole Logistics selected Icon Map because it runs natively inside Power BI with full security and governance, handles millions of geometries with consistent performance, supports mixed geometry types in a single visual, provides rich styling suited to complex routes and status information, and removes the need for a separate GIS platform.
From Tradition to Transformation
Icon Map has not replaced the spirit of Christmas. It has strengthened it with modern location intelligence.
As Santa summarised:
“We still rely on Christmas spirit, but now it comes with proper location intelligence. Icon Map put the whole world on my dashboard and gave me the confidence that every good child is truly on the map.”