Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Set up automation: best place to set up a business based on multiple demographic factors?

hydrogurl01
8 - Asteroid

Hi all,

 

I'm trying to put together some side projects that sound interesting or would be useful for future cases. Has anyone ever tried setting up a workflow to automate best areas to set up a business based on various factors: age, population, race, income, etc. experian variables? If so, would you mind sharing some tips/ideas/workflow to get started on that and what a final output of something like that would look like? I don't have a workflow to share unfortunately since this is just an idea, trying to put something together.

5 REPLIES 5
Inactive User
Not applicable

Yes - you need to have a combined score in order to make this work/optimise the equation. For example:

 

(Average Income x Population) - Maximise this part

(Average Rental Cost x Crime Rate per 100k) - Minimise this part

 

Take this equation and then rank them to other areas of a city. I would use LGAs or Postcodes for example. The overall best rank would be your ideal location.

 

To get income/population/crime etc, statistical websites contain this. For example, in Australia this is freely accessible via ABS. Rental costs you could web scrape rental agencies for prices or once again look for a government provider for this data. Then join it all together based on a location, such as Postcode or LGA.

KaneG
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

Hi @hydrogurl01,

 

If you wanted to look at some examples, there is plenty to go around as your use case used to be a core usage for Alteryx (and still is for several clients). The 4th Macro type (after Standard, Iterative & Batch) is location optimizer and so you can go pretty deep...

 

In the samples (Help > Sample Workflows), take a look at the following:

  • Use scripting & Automation Tools > Build a Macro > Optimize location by minimizing distance
  • Use scripting & Automation Tools > Build a Macro > Optimize location with a gravity model
  • Demographic Analysis > Competitor Demographic Report with Multiple Radii
  • Macro Modules > Location Optimization Allocate
  • QlikSense Starter Kit > Data Preparation - New Location Impact Analysis

 

Some of these may come with Analytic Template Kits, (I know the Qlik one definitely does) as I have a few installed, I can't remember the Out of the Box settings...

 

A few of those examples would require you to work out a demand model similar to what @Inactive User mentioned above.

 

And I would be remiss if I also didn't mention @TaraM's blog about finding a new location for a farm sanctuary in Colorado based on available parcels of land. 

 

I hope that gives you some ideas to build out your project.

hydrogurl01
8 - Asteroid

Thanks so much! Haven't used those features before, so this will be a great place to start learning what those involve.

hydrogurl01
8 - Asteroid

Hi Ryan,

Could you detail more what you mean by maximize and minimize those parts? And would this method yield a data table/not a map?

Inactive User
Not applicable

As an equation the goal of that equation. You can then take those values and create a heat map using the reporting tools to spatially see where the best locations would be.

Labels