How Threshold Data Driven Ring (Business Analyst) works

The Threshold Data Driven Ring tool creates ring-based trade areas that expand outward from store locations until they meet a specified criteria. The criteria, or size of each ring, is read from the store layer.

The following is an example of how this tool can be used to examine the optimal location for a new community center in a given market. Assume you have several proposed community center locations in San Diego, California. The point layer has a field called RingSize that contains the number of households required to support a new community center for each location. These values can be unique for each community center location.

To create threshold rings for each location, you would set the community center point file as the store layer and the RingSize field and the field containing threshold. You would then set the threshold layer to the block group data provided with Business Analyst. You can set the field to aggregate to total households and create the ring-based trade areas.

The threshold rings will be of different sizes and provide a visual indicator of the distance each community center would have to draw people.

In contrast to the Threshold Static Ring tool, this tool allows you to have a unique threshold for each store. This threshold (or criteria) is set in the attribute table of the store layer and determines the unique size of each ring for each store based on the variable selected from the field to aggregate to the threshold layer.

This tool is typically used to create radius trade areas for competitors so a store owner can see if a store is being cannibalized by the competition. It can also be used to look for gaps in the market area.