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Track: Business Services: Marketing and Advertising
Martha Cassidy
Geographic Data Technology (GDT)
11 Lafayette Street
Lebanon, NH 03766-1445
Telephone: 800-331-7881
Fax: 606-643-6808
E-mail: marthc@gdt1.com
Using ArcInfo to Compose Custom Territory Maps as a Commercial Venture
Defining Issue: Visualizing sales territories, market penetration, and customer or competitor locations is key in today's quickly changing environment. Both private firms and public agencies gain insight to their business by using maps to display their business solutions and models. GIS Solution: GDT uses ArcInfo to provide paper maps to a wide variety of customers to display their business decisions geographically. Maps may be entirely custom or a combination of customer data and off-the-shelf products. Methodology: The customer provides a set of business data they would like to visualize. Input data examples include customer addresses, sales territory definitions, percent of market penetration by ZIP Code, number of loans per census tract, revenue figures per store location, and demographic data. The customer also chooses what geography they would like to use to make their data meaningful to further analyze their business. The TABLES module is used to define features in the customer data. Often
a lookup table is utilized to categorize data into a customer-defined set for thematic display by value. The ArcInfo generate command is used to create point or polygon coverages from the customer set(s) of data. Annotation, symbol generation, shading, and coverage manipulation are accomplished using ARCEDIT. Many of the features included on a map are predetermined by a customer. Finally, the map is plotted at whatever size the customer requests on a Hp650C plotter. Repeat map requests from a customer are primarily handled by writing a set of AMLs to cover 75 to 90 percent of the map generation process. Examples of customers serviced in an automatic fashion include major automobile, insurance, retail, and direct mail house customers. Software: ArcInfo Version 7.0.3 including ARCPLOT, ARCEDIT, and TABLES modules in conjunction with an HP 650C plotter running on a switched Ethernet and fiber network.
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