Essential Business Analyst Vocabulary

Below are terms that relate to Business Analyst Server.

Term

Description

Base profile

A profile that summarizes a geographic area by Tapestry segments and is used in segmentation reports, maps, and charts. The base profile is used to calculate the index in many reports and charts. In most cases, the base profile you select should be the geographic area from where you draw close to 100 percent of your customers.

Block apportionment

A method in which data is estimated and aggregated in Business Analyst.

Business Analyst data source (BDS)

A custom ArcGIS feature class that allows you to work with and aggregate data in Business Analyst. Only Business Analyst can read BDS layers.

Cannibalization

Calculation of how a store's trade area impedes or overlaps another. The cannibalized area is often an area of inefficiency and market saturation or can be considered an opportunity for cross-marketing.

Distance decay

The distance impact of your customer distribution using rings or drive-time trade areas around a store. Shown as a percentage.

Drive time

The estimated geographic area, or trade area, in which you can drive to a store location. A 5-minute drive-time trade area means that customers from all locations within the outer boundary can reach your store, by car, within a 5-minute drive.

Market

A region of economic activity around a store that defines your customer base. Markets in Business Analyst are often designated by geographic locations and the households or population within those areas.

Market penetration

Calculation of how well you are penetrating a market by comparing your customer locations or sales per customer within a given area to a base variable such as the population.

Principal components analysis (PCA)

A complex algorithm used in some Business Analyst tools that finds correlated variables and ranks the output with a score.

Project

The location for all Business Analyst work saved in a standard structure. All layers—stores, trade areas, analyses, and so on—are copied to your project structure and saved in the Business Analyst repository. This makes it easy to retrieve and share your work. Every new project created contains the same folder structure.

Repository

The central point of storage for Business Analyst workspaces and projects. A repository is associated with a map service with Business Analyst capability. There is only one repository per each map service.

Store setup/Customer setup

The process of adding your franchise and customer location data to the map. When address information is provided, store and customer setup will geocode the data. The store and customer setup process also allows you to link stores to customers using assignments by unique ID, by trade area, or by closest location. When layers are converted to stores and customers, they are available in the Business Analyst repository.

Study area

Defines a location where your analysis will be limited. For example, setting a study area allows you to limit hot spots to a specified region or extract businesses into a set location.

Target profile

A profile that summarizes a customer list or geographic area by Tapestry segments and is used in segmentation reports, maps, and charts. The target profile is used to calculate Percent Composition on many of these reports and charts.

Trade area

Defines an area of influence around your store or franchise location and allows you to better understand your customer base and define your market. Trade areas are often called catchment areas. A drive time in Business Analyst is a service area in the Network Analyst extension.

Variable

An attribute or field used in demographic analysis.

Workspace

One or more areas within a repository used to group and organize Business Analyst projects.

6/20/2013