What's New in Business Analyst 10.1

This release brings some great improvements for adding custom data, generating reports, and improving workflows.

Optimized search of your business data. Using the Add Business listings dialog, you can easily add your data and also use faster and more sophisticated search tools. This gives you more flexibility and control over results returned from your business searches.

Easier to import and use your data in reports. We’ve expanded the Custom Data Setup wizard, to include the capability of pointing to metadata files in a new dialog window.

There’s also a new intuitive, 3-step workflow that makes it easy to generate reports using your data along with demographic and other data in Business Analyst. You can easily grab sections of reports and combine point data with summary data, charts, and maps—all on the same report.

Improved Location—Allocation, or Sales Modeling Wizard. We brought the best of Location-Allocation from ArcGIS Network Analyst to Business Analyst to help you efficiently locate stores and facilities. You can model locations based on three goals.

• Maximize Attendance: Candidate stores are chosen such that as much demand as possible is allocated to candidate stores. Competitor locations are not included, so algorithms assume that the farther people have to travel to reach your location, the less likely they are to use it. This analysis is particularly useful for specialty stores or service locations that have little or no competition benefit significantly from this problem type.
• Maximize Target Share: The goal is to capture as much of the total market share as possible with a given number of candidate stores. You define the number of candidate locations to analyze potential market share. This analysis requires a competitor layer and uses the Huff Model. Big box and large discount stores typically use Maximize Market Share to locate a finite set of new stores.
• Target Market Share: Target Market Share shows how to achieve market share goals with the fewest candidate stores or locations. Large discount stores use this analysis when they want to know how much expansion is required to reach a certain specific market share or see what strategy would be needed just to maintain their current market share given the introduction of new competing facilities.

More Territory Design capabilities including improved usability and filtering, 17 new tools for automating workflows, constrain by attribute, and improved balancing algorithms.

New drive time hierarchies. Using the the best from ArcGIS Network Analyst, you can quickly find quickest drive times—and have provided two ways to install the new software, depending on your needs.

Please note: you must be using ArcGIS for Desktop, 10.1 to install Business Analyst 10.1. Business Analyst 10.1 is available September 2012.