MapForums

Greetings all! It is great to become a member of your site.

My question is this:

The company I work for has over 600 locations, which I have mapped using MapPoint 2002. A client recently contacted us who has 1300 customer reps throughout the country, which I have also mapped. They would like to use our business services. To do this, we need to find our closest location to each of their closest reps.

Is there a way to do this? Currently, I locate one of their reps and find the closest facility to them. I then export both their information and our information for the closest location (in miles) into excel. I then copy and paste each export into a master excel sheet to provide the customer the closest facility for that particular rep and so on.

Isn't there an easier way that MapPoint can compare two variables (my business and my customers) to then tell me the closest location for each of their respective locations?

I do not care if we have a rep in Montana and the closest store for them is Chicago, IL. Or if it tells me we have 30 stores in Los Angeles and they have 150 representatives there. I just want to know of those 30 stores, which is the closest, in miles, to each of those reps. Only I want to do this nationwide without having to wast 25 hours doing this manually?

Thank you all so much in advance for this long post, but I really need all of your help!

Thanks again,

Andy

Using some Visual Basic programming you could draw radii, use the QueryShape method, and export to Excel.

There are GIS programs that would make this easier, but you'd have to get another package, export the coordinates of your locations and the customer locations using something like the Pushpin Tool, load the points into the GIS, and pour through the GIS package's manual -- maybe not a bad investment, but also not a slam-dunk without someone to guide you through it.

The short answer it, there's no easy way to get it accomplished immediately, but hopefully the two suggestions above can get you started on the right track without doing them all manually.

Eric

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You could use my MileCharter program to batch calculate all the distances. With the kinds of numbers you're talking about it will take a while to compute (a day?). You would then have a huge table full of distances, and you can either manually find the shortest distances, or you could write an Excel macro to find them.

Having a specially written (or customized) program to perform this for you will be quicker, because some calculations can be skipped.

MileCharter could also be customized to perform this function for you - email me off list, if interested.
MileCharter info (special offer ends 31st Dec):

http://www.mapping-tools.com/milecharter/index.shtml

Richard

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