MAPPOINT Q & A

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397 Brian Perch - September 14, 2001

Will Mappoint 2002 handle the following [with possible programming effort in VB]. The company I work for has multiple territories consisting of zip codes. There is a sales amount associated with each zip code. Our users want to be able to manipulate the territories to see the affect on territorial sales [and possible export the new territories for use in other programs]. Will Mappoint 2002 handle this and how much extra programming would be needed?

Answer:

This is very easy in MapPoint 2002. You can create territories by ZIP code or any other boundary type found in the product (county, state, census tract), either manually or by importing a simple Excel workbook. Then you map your sales data by ZIP code, and export this data (sales volume by territory) to Excel and sort it by sales volume. If you feel certain territories have a sales volume that's too high or too low, you can jump back to MapPoint and reassign selected ZIP code areas to balance the sales amounts. Next, you re-export the data and look at it again...repeat until you are happy with the balance. Finally, you simply right-click the Territory entry in the legend and export the ZIP code to Territory assignments to Excel.

You can naturally also write some code to automate the process and set rules to determine how sales volume should be divided between territories. This would be a small programming effort - days rather than weeks to do it right.

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