Identifying customer locations for a commercial establishment

Problem

The goal of this project is to provide an analysis on customers’ locations for a client in Wake County, North Carolina. The client considers launching an advertising campaign with the aim of increasing its customer base by targeting unrepresented areas. The client, having only the addresses to work with, request assistance in identifying the geographic areas with few or no customers and make appropriate recommendations for their advertising campaign.

Analysis Procedure

Given the client’s need to identify unrepresented geographic areas, one way to address that need was to map their current customer base geographically. This should result in a clear visualization of areas to make an analysis. The client kept a database of their customers’ addresses in the common Excel format which can easily be read by a GIS software. The postal addresses can then be spatially highlighted on the map by converting the text and numeric format into geographic coordinates suitable for map use. In this project, ArcGIS Pro was used based on choice. The mapping of the postal addresses, known as geocoding, can be further enhanced by districting them based on zip codes or main streets. The recommendations will result from the spatial analysis of geocoding.

The Excel file was prepped for use in ArcGIS Pro. Two Address Locators were created; one using 5-digit Zip Codes and one using the Dual range of Postal Address. The resulting Address Locators were used to geocode the tabular addresses. Each time, the results were monitored for Matched, Unmatched and Tied records. This is to ensure that the best method was used to generate the geographic coordinates used for mapping. The results were also checked against the coordinates from Google Maps. The whole process was summarized in the workflow diagram below.

Workflow Diagram

Application and Reflection

Geocoding tabular data is one of the important features of the Geospatial Information System. Geocoded data have been used to map customers database, vulnerable facilities for natural disasters preparedness plans, cases in epidemic and many other uses.

Problem Description From 2013 to 2016, the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa was deemed an epidemic. Researchers were trying to locate the origin and the spread of the virus to seek the root cause, then to contain the area of spread.

Data Needed Hospitals and treatment centers in West Africa kept records of personal information of the sick and the deceased. These centers and facilities also sent their data to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Analysis Procedures The hospitals’ records can be geocoded and mapped. The resulting feature layer can then be used in statistical analysis to locate hotspots and radius of spread. This will aid epidemiologists in locating the origin of the virus, complementing other methods used such as contact tracking. Since West Africa does not have US type postal addresses, the Address Locator can simply be created using village, district and country.