Businesses obtain true representations of their trade areas by color shading their customers according to the stores they visit.
	The Site Evaluation Workflow Template is a fully functioning example of the consistent and repeatable business processes that can be created with the Workflow Framework.

Esri recently released its first complete enterprise solution for business—ArcGIS Business Analyst Server. This product builds on proven capabilities and the comprehensive data package of ArcGIS Business Analyst Desktop. The product integrates workflows into an enterprise environment by allowing users to publish and share business data, maps, analyses, models, and reports across their organization with a server-oriented solution.

This latest addition to the ArcGIS Business Analyst product family combines GIS server technology with extensive business, demographic, and consumer spending data to provide users with a complete business GeoIntelligence solution.

This server-based solution comes with out-of-the-box Web applications and services to help a spectrum of professionals solve complex business problems by leveraging the ability to deploy services from ArcGIS Business Analyst Server via a browser-based, thin client interface. In addition to giving business professionals access to GIS-enhanced business analysis tools, the organization benefits by reducing the total cost of ownership of these tools by deploying them and providing access via thin clients in focused applications.

ArcGIS Business Analyst Server includes a workflow framework that combines individual ArcGIS Business Analyst Server actions along with attachments, scorecards, and reports in a coordinated workflow template. Workflow templates offer organizations the ability to create consistent and repeatable processes for any analyses and geoprocessing activities related to ArcGIS Business Analyst Server.

Two fully functioning workflow templates are included with this release. The Site Evaluation template identifies four evaluation steps that a business would take to determine the suitability of potential locations. The Customer Analytics template offers seven steps that can be considered when evaluating the success of marketing or advertising campaigns.

In addition, organizations can analyze markets and their competition, find the ideal site for a new business location, evaluate the success and profitability of existing facilities, and perform advanced customer analytics.

	Creating a shape that encompasses all the customers within a specified driving distance or time is easy in the browser-based interface.

With ArcGIS Business Analyst Server, ArcGIS Business Analyst Desktop users now have a mechanism to publish and share analyses and models across departments, enabling collaboration and more informed decision making. Users in organizations operating in different geographies with varied population demographics can adopt models and analyses to local conditions. Imagine having the ability to develop one model at the corporate or organizational level and apply it across several geographies while enabling users in each geography to adjust parameters according to the local demographic makeup.

Analyzing markets and competition, evaluating new and existing locations, and performing customer analytics may sound familiar to longtime ArcGIS Business Analyst Desktop users. Whereas before, analysis models may have existed in silos on individual desktop computers, users now have the ability with ArcGIS Business Analyst Server to publish their analysis to the rest of the team, regardless of the physical location of individual team members. The organization benefits from this collaborative environment by building a knowledge base that can be accessed by multiple departments in different locations to share common models and data repositories.

Use

End users can employ the ArcGIS Business Analyst Server Web client to execute a series of focused applications for solving site location problems and customer targeting and analysis. End users often need only to accomplish specific tasks, utilizing their unique skills to solve recurring problems. The integration of ArcGIS Business Analyst Server with a traditional reporting mechanism enables users in a marketing department to perform a market ranking analysis that evaluates the success of a marketing campaign for a series of given cities.

Serve

Application developers can consume the services published by GIS professionals with ArcGIS Business Analyst Desktop when building new or customizing existing applications without having to become GIS experts. For example, an application developer can quickly build an easy-to-use end user Web application for a company's real estate department that will screen potential new facility locations. Users can pan and zoom on the map from a citywide view to a street-by-street analysis all while ArcGIS Business Analyst Server does the geoprocessing behind the scenes.

Author

ArcGIS Business Analyst Server helps standardize geographic processing techniques and workflow scenarios, reduce software deployment costs, and ease implementation burdens. ArcGIS Business Analyst Desktop users can design and execute models and analysis on their desktops and use ArcGIS Business Analyst Server to publish the results so they can be viewed and accessed throughout the organization. Publication-quality maps, reports, and analysis output can be combined into market studies and distributed in an easy, ready-to-use Web browser-based application.

Integration with Enterprise Systems

ArcGIS Business Analyst Server integrates with existing tools and solutions available in an enterprise and supports communication with business intelligence applications (e.g., access to data warehouses or report engines) with a number of Web services. Once installed, this integrated set of applications and tools is ready to go with no development effort. The business community, along with outward-facing, constituent-focused organizations, needs the ability to leverage its own information against demographic and geographic data in a server environment that enables information and analysis to be deployed across the organization in a collaborative fashion.

More Information

For more details on ArcGIS Business Analyst Server, visit www.esri.com/baserver.