Past Analytics Excellence Awards

Excellence Awards 2017: Jason Claunch - Best Use of Alteryx for Spatial Analytics

Catalyst logo.pngAuthor: Jason Claunch - President

Company: Catalyst

Business Partner: Slalom Consulting - Sean Hayward & Marek Koenig

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Alteryx for Spatial Analytics

 

The developed solution used many of the Spatial Analytics components available within Alteryx:

  • Trade Area – have user select target area to analyze
  • Spatial Match – combine multiple geospatial objects,
  • Intersection – cut objects from each other to create subject area
  • Grid tool – sub-divide the trade blocks to determine complete coverage of trade ring
  • Distance – use drivetime calculation to score and rank retailers in the vicinity

Describe the problem you needed to solve

Retail site analysis is a key part of our business and was taking up too much time with repetitive tasks that could have been easily automated.

 

Describe the working solution

To support selection of best-fit operators, Catalyst partnered with Slalom Consulting to develop a tool to identify potential uses to target for outreach and recruitment. Previously, we would have to manually build demographic profiles using tools like qGIS, ESRI, and others, but found the process to be cumbersome and quite repetitive. Demographic data was acquired at the trade bloc level, which was too granular for identify target locations and would not mesh well with the retail data.

 

Alteryx and its spatial capabilities was used in a few ways:

 

1) Minimize our retail data selection from the entire US to a selected state using the Spatial Match tool.catalyst1b.png

 

2) Create a demographic profile for each retail location that consisted of data points such as median income, population, daytime employees, and others. The data was aggregated around a 3 mile radius of the specific retail location with an Alteryx Macro composed of a Trade Area, Grid Tool, Spatial Match, and Summarization tool.

 

catalyst2-A.png catalyst2-B.png catalyst2-C.png

 

3) Using a Map Input, the user selected an area to profile and candidate retailers were output for further review.

catalyst3.png

 

4) After selecting specific retailers to do an in-depth analysis on, Alteryx would score all possible locations by distance (Drivetime Analysis) and by score (proprietary weighting of various demographic attributes). The profiled results were then used to build a client presentation; the automated profiling tool saved us countless hours and allowed us to deliver more detailed analysis for our clients.

 

catalyst4.png

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Using Alteryx was a massive time saver, the tool that we built took a process that normally required at least 8 hours of manual work down to merely a few minutes. This has directly benefited our bottom line by allowing us to focus on more key tasks in our client outreach and recruitment. A return-on-investment was immediately realized after we were able to close a deal with a major client using our new process.

1 Comment
LeahK
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Status changed to: Inspire 2017 Las Vegas Award Entry