Are You Maximizing The Value Of All Your Data?

Transcription

1 Are You Maximizing The Value Of All Your Data? Using The SAS Bridge for ESRI With ArcGIS Business Analyst In A Retail Market Analysis SAS and ESRI: Bringing GIS Mapping and SAS Data Together Presented at SEUGI 21 Vienna 2003 June 19, 2003 ESRI 380 New York St., Redlands, CA , USA TEL FAX info@esri.com WEB

2 Are You Maximizing The Value Of All Your Data? Using The SAS Bridge for ESRI With ArcGIS Business Analyst In A Retail Market Analysis SAS and ESRI: Bringing GIS Mapping and SAS Data Together What is GIS? A geographic information system (GIS) combines layers of information about a place to give you a better understanding of that place. A GIS links spatial data (geography) with tabular data (attribute data such as street name, ZIP Code, direction of travel) to help users create, manage, analyze, and display information for enhanced decision making and improved communications. In addition, most organizations have access to complementary data, such as demographic data showing incomes, occupations, and education. These data already have a spatial component included and are usually available from private companies such as ESRI BIS or various governmental agencies. However, all of these data sources simply add to information overload unless they can be turned into business insights. A GIS lets you link these data sources together and analyze them in a fundamentally different way, producing new insights into your business that improve your decision making processes. A map created by a GIS is an abstraction of the real world. Any data that is either address based, geography related (tracts, postal codes, block groups, etc.), or contains a latitude and longitude can be used in GIS and the tabular data directly linked to geography. These spatial components are integral parts of your company s data assets. Whether you maintain your store revenues, customer spending patterns, use of health care facilities, or sales force results in a data warehouse, in data marts, or in a DBMS like Oracle, IBM, or SQL Server, you can take advantage of these spatial components to add insight and make better business decisions. It is impossible to perfectly capture reality inside a computer. Instead, spatial data users must somehow abstract real-world phenomena, or entities, into a geometric representation of those entities. Spatial data contains information about the locations and shapes of geographic features and the relationships between them. The Onion Analogy Think of the world as a large onion. When you peel an onion, you see that it is composed of many layers. Real-world entities can be seen the same way the earth can be peeled into many layers, each representing a different theme. For example, you can host all of the streets in one layer and all landuse areas in another layer. As you can imagine, the complexity of the earth allows you to create as many layers as you desire. The question then becomes how to best organize these real-world entities into manageable geometric shapes and store them digitally. Organizing Spatial Data A GIS organizes and stores information about the world as a collection of thematic layers that can be linked by geography. Each layer contains features having similar attributes, like streets and cities that are located within the same geographic extent. This simple but extremely powerful and versatile concept has proven invaluable for solving many real-world problems from tracking delivery vehicles to modeling global atmospheric circulation. Visualization GIS makes it possible to see your data in a different way. By using a visual geographic display (a map), you get new insight into existing data in a way that spreadsheet rows and columns just cannot provide. The first time that you see revenues on a map displayed by sales districts or a map showing competitive trade regions when you re planning a new store location, you ll begin to understand your business in a new way. You are probably already

3 organizing your data geographically, grouping it by states and regions, but the human brain can see patterns much more easily when the data are presented on a map. Spatial Analysis GIS also makes it possible to analyze your data in a fundamentally new way. You can ask questions about where things are in addition to their normal attributes. Think of GIS as adding a new dimension to your query language. For example, you can ask questions such as Show me all of my customers who live within a two-mile radius of Store A and who live in regions with median incomes of greater than $50,000 or Show me all of my customers by postal code and how their sales are distributed across my market. Introducing SAS Bridge for ESRI Both advanced analytics and spatial relationships are key elements in solving problems that need to physically evaluate location as part of strategic decision-making. To address customer-driven demand, SAS and ESRI have created the SAS Bridge for ESRI, a product that establishes a communication link between the two software systems. It increases customers' ability to exchange spatial and attribute data and metadata between ESRI s ArcGIS family of mapping software products and the SAS server in a GUI-driven environment. Applications By eliminating the need for rewriting customized programs when source data changes, the SAS Bridge for ESRI saves users valuable time when they need to join SAS data with spatial data from the ArcGIS environment. This solution has many user applications for business and public sector organizations, as demonstrated below. The U.S. Census Bureau has tested and plans to use the SAS Bridge for ESRI for several geography-based analytical reports including income statistics, regional poverty figures, and equal employment opportunity reports. In addition, the SAS Bridge for ESRI helps the Census Bureau analyze detailed tabulations about children with regard to school district geography. By using the SAS Bridge for ESRI, the insurance industry can more easily answer questions of risk associated with different properties, such as Is the property in a 100- year flood zone or a 1,000-year flood zone? Is crime high in the neighborhood or is it relatively safe? An ESRI spatially-enabled database allows spatial inquiries that answer these types of questions. Based on the results, the measured risk could be assigned and used to help set insurance premiums.

4 In the retail industry, businesses must evaluate consumer spending potential, forecast demand, gauge competitive influence, and select sites for stores and warehouses preferably before making a significant financial commitment. The following scenario is just one example of how the SAS Bridge for ESRI can be used in the retail industry. A Sample Business Case A retailer based in Paris specializing in upscale women s apparel currently has more than 200 stores throughout Europe. They want to open a new store in Great Britain but don t have a solid understanding of who their customers are in terms of where they are coming from and their purchasing behavior. They don t want to deter business from the existing stores and need a better understanding of their market and trade area. How Can SAS Bridge for ESRI and GIS Help Solve This Problem? SAS software is used to model the existing customer database to develop a customer profile and model their propensity to purchase at the existing store location. The SAS table is then brought into the GIS, appending the file to the existing customer file. By joining SAS data to an ArcMap layer (part of ESRI s ArcGIS family), new relationships in the data are uncovered to more easily see the problem and solution.

5 The file is geocoded to identify where customers are, pinpointing those areas in which customers with the highest propensity to purchase are located. This profile is then used to look for sites in Great Britain that have the same demographic characteristics and lifestyle clusters.

6 Conclusions Site selection was aided by the use of the scored customer database The site met the criteria of the highest scoring customers Using a second scored database also resulted in a marketing campaign for the existing store that returned a 5.6% response and a higher return on investment than mailing to all households Current store sales increased by targeting only the highest scoring customers New site had minimal impact on existing trade area Management has new and better understanding of who their customers are SAS Bridge for ESRI Increases efficiency by linking tabular data in SAS with spatial data in ESRI s ArcGIS so that queries can consider spatial proximities as part of the analysis. Improves communication by showing industrial-strength analytical and business intelligence graphics on maps for immediate recognition and understanding. Extends analytical capabilities by obtaining measurable results that inherently consider spatial relationships. Technical Overview SAS Bridge for ESRI 1.0 operates under SAS 8.2 and higher releases with Windows 2000, NT, and XP operating systems. It works with ArcGIS Desktop 8.x. The first version of this tool, V1.0, is a GUI that allows the read-and-write exchange of data between SAS and ArcGIS and exposes SAS metadata or information about all the organizational data within the ArcGIS environment. Example templates for running SAS programs in the ArcGIS environment are also included. For more information, please visit or sasinquiries@esri.com. Debra VanGorden Corporate Marketing Manager ESRI 380 New York Street Redlands, CA , USA dvangorden@esri.com