Average Distance to a Store

[JohnGarcia1]

I'm trying to figure out if Business Analyst can find out the average distance to a customer's 5 closest stores.  For example, we may have 10,000 customers and 1000 stores.  I'd like to know what the average drive time (in miles) is from the customers to their closest 5 stores.

I need to get to the point to where I can measure that all customers are 1 mile away their closest store, 2 miles from the 2nd closest store, 2.5 miles from 3 closest store, etc.  You get the picture.

Is this possible in Business Analyst?  I've tried using Network Analyst's "Closest Facility" tool, but that keeps timing out on me because there are way too many calculations.  I won't be able to break the files up because this is something I need to do somewhat frequently. 

Please help.

John

[JohnGarcia1]

Not sure if this helps, but the error i'm getting states that i am "out of memory".

[Jason_RobinsonRobinson]

John,

Definitely the 'closest facility' functions that both that the Locator Report and Desire Lines analysis tool use is very memory intensive as it requires the loading of all the necessary streets.  The amount of RAM that a computer possesses can definitely impact performance here.  Also having Business Analyst installed on a computer with a 64-bit OS (Win7/Vista) will also improve performance in a couple of ways but primarily the ability to actually use more that 4 gigs of RAM.

That being said selecting a single store instead of all stores should work based on your parameters.  Also seeing if you could select a couple of stores and then choosing the selected sites option would be another thing to try.

Another potential performance squeeze is to use the Locator Report in ArcCatalog/ArcToobox (not having ArcMap open at this point). ArcCatalog has a smaller foot print than ArcMap does on system resources.

[JaySandhu]

John,
If you are using Closest Facility, make sure that you put a cut off (say 10 miles) and find 5 closest stores AND make sure hierarchy is OFF. It should solve without running out of memory. However I will suggest that you use OD Cost Matrix solver and not the Closest Facility as it uses less memory (it does not need to return the true shortest path geometry) but otherwise works similarly. Just do the same settings, 10 mile cutoff, find 5 closest and Hierarchy OFF. You will be loading your 10000 customers as Origins and the 1000 stores as destinations.

I did not understand your second comment:
"I need to get to the point to where I can measure that all customers are 1 mile away their closest store, 2 miles from the 2nd closest store, 2.5 miles from 3 closest store, etc. You get the picture."

i.e. what is that you are trying to achieve? Are you trying to open more stores such that all customers are within 1 mile?

Jay Sandhu