Which is the best delivery depot to serve your customers? And more subtly, which is the second-best depot? Or to look at a similar problem that starts the other way round, which of your retail stores is most likely to be used by each of your potential customers?
These are classic challenges for geographic information systems, and tend to be tackled with one of two types of product – an isochrone drivetime calculation system (a “how far can I get in a given time?” system) or a “find nearest” system. Products of both kinds have been further developed in recent months by Kingswood MapMechanics, the leading specialist in GIS and digital mapping, including a true many-to-many drivetime matrix calculator.
Now, however, the company has come up with a new system called Service Allocator which combines the best of these approaches in a single product. It is available as a module for use with GeoConcept, the leading GIS for which Kingswood MapMechanics is the UK distributor.
With Service Allocator, GeoConcept considers two separate geocoded datasets (depots and customers, for instance), and for each record in one dataset it finds the nearest location in the other. It then appends three new fields to the original set – the identity of the nearest location, the travel time between the two locations and the distance.
Not only does it find the nearest location for each record; it can also find up to four alternatives, giving a total of five possible choices (and fifteen new fields).
“Service Allocator is ideal for many typical GIS tasks,” says general manager Theresa Barlow. “For instance, in distribution it can help allocate deliveries to depots, and in sales and marketing it can help with territory planning.”
One of the first applications of the system is by a retail delivery business, which wanted to be able to establish the nearest two high-street stores to each rural customer in order to apply a new charging system (in which part of the delivery cost reflects travel time).
Another company adopting the system wanted to be able to direct-mail potential mobile phone users according to the specific retail store they were likely to use.
Unlike many products attempting a similar function, Service Allocator calculates distances from road network maps, not on a direct crow-fly basis, so it reflects real-world travel time much more accurately.
Users can designate which roads should be considered (for instance, all roads or just main roads), and can apply their own speed criteria. Alternatively they can take advantage of special road speed data files available from Kingswood MapMechanics, which differentiate between real-world speeds achievable at various times of day (peak, off-peak and so on).
Once the calculations have been completed, the resulting enhanced data files can be used in further analysis. For instance, they allow the user to display catchments or territories on a map, colour-coded to designate regions or depots serving them.
Like the existing drivetime matrix and find-nearest modules, Service Allocator has been developed by Kingswood MapMechanics itself, using software development kits that are available for building enhancements to GeoConcept.
“Service Allocator now takes advantage of that refinement, adding the ‘find nearest’ capability to create a system that is easy to set up and automates the calculations. As far as the user is concerned, it completes the whole process transparently in a single pass.” |
