Using the Business Analyst Mobile App, allow capturing location attributes and pictures without having to create a site (e.g. radius, drivetime, or walktime area) around the location

[ScottPrindle]

Business Analyst users need this enhancement to:

• Have a quick way of capturing location information. They don’t have a need for creating sites at the first stage of capturing location information since a site is needed to get demographic facts and reports. They would like to save just the location attributes and pictures and create sites later.

• Capture location information for multiple stores or buildings that are really close by (for example, in a mall or in an office complex). Currently, this is cumbersome since created sites for various store or building point locations start overlapping with each other – making it hard for users to capture the next close by point location.

[DennisKaplan]

I would also like to add the ability for the app to not have to snap to a street to add a point. The business locations users are looking to add are not directly on the center-line of a street.

[JohnMDye]

Definitely some merit to this idea. I certainly understand where you're coming from, Scott. I guess what I'm grappling with is where would you propose that this information be saved instead of as a prospective site? Would you prefer an ability to create a new 'prospects' dataset which is a project sibling (ie. sits at the same hierarchy as a project) from which you could 'drag and drop' a 'prospect' into a project to create a new site within that project?

What are the specific inefficiencies about just creating a site? Even if you were creating a 'prospect' or something else, you still need to capture the basic site information to be able to execute reports and such. Bare minimum, you need to provide the location information and some kind of 'name'. To create a 'site' you don't need to provide anything except for a location and name, so I'm a little confused as to what the real issue is with just creating a site and either moving forward with it or deleting it within your project.

As for nearby locations, I suppose you're talking about some kind of ability to capture a collection or cluster of stores/sites. I think that's actually a pretty good idea. We never make decisions based on one store or prospect alone, so the ability for a 'site' to not just be a single store but a collection of stores has some real legs to it imho.

[JohnMDye]

Dennis, I think this is a good idea as well, but you should consider logging it separately. It's not possible for people to vote on the merit of your idea when its just a comment.

[PraveenSrivastava]

John and Dennis,

Thanks for your comments. Scott Prindle entered this idea on behalf of a customer to help us get more validation for this. Your comments are helpful in thinking through this from users' perspective.

John,

You are absolutely right that currently it is not possible to save points without any site information. Two problems that I am hearing from users about that. First, it makes users wonder why they need to create trade area (e.g. 1 mi ring or 5 minutes drive time ) when they are interested in only capturing site attributes and pictures. Second, if user is capturing information for points that are close to each other, trade areas come in the way and make it cumbersome to add the point locations close by. 

I like where you are going with the collection of stores for a 'site'. Interested in seeing what other users think about that as well.

Thank you,

Praveen

[JohnMDye]

Hey Praveen,

Thanks for chiming in. A follow up on one of your comments.

First, it makes users wonder why they need to create trade area (e.g. 1 mi ring or 5 minutes drive time ) when they are interested in only capturing site attributes and pictures.

Probably because they also want to run reports and to do that, you must create a study area first. I think the way to think about this is as 'exploratory reporting' for a 'prospective site'. I'd just want to capture basic information and run a report, without having to create a site and store it in a project. If there were a concept of 'prospective sites', basically a site that required minimal information and you could drag and drop it between projects easily, turning them into 'project sites' when you do so, I think that would be helpful.

[PraveenSrivastava]

Thanks for the additional clarification, John.