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Manifold® Business Tools for Manifold System Release 4.50 - $75
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Online Store right now to order your Solver Package products.
Solver Packages may be purchased and downloaded within minutes for instant
gratification! Manifold System Release 4.50 is required for all Solver Packages.
Point
and Click Business Tools - The Manifold
BusinessTools solver package is an add-on product for Manifold Release 4.50. It
includes Territory Balancing, Drive Time Analysis, Most Direct Path, Optimal Route, and
Closest Facilities. The solvers feature user friendly wizards to automate common
business tasks.
Detail (left): Territory Balancing solver from the Business Tools collection automatically groups Mexican states by population into North, South, and central territories of equal population.
Territory Balancing - Manifold's Territory Balancing solver automatically sorts map objects into subsets called territories as directed by the user.
For example, states or provinces in a national map might be allocated into three
territories that represent northern, central, or southern sales regions. The Territory
Balancing solver can automatically allocate objects to "balance" some
important criterion. In the case of three sales territories, perhaps the states or
provinces are allocated so that the overall population in each of the three territories is
approximately the same.
Territory Balancing allows weighting of territories, provides a percentage readout, and allows fully automatic or interactive balancing operations. Centers may be defined about which connected, compact territories are built. The thumbnail at right shows the Territory Balancing wizard, where counties in the state of Georgia have been assigned to four territories so that the population of each territory is 25% of the total. Territories were built up around required centers.
Drive Time Analysis - Drive Time Analysis works with road networks to find the zones reachable from a given point in a given driving time. The solver can be set to find as many reachable zones as desired. For example, one can specify a start point and then ask for two zones to be found consisting of the areas reachable in ten minutes driving and twenty minutes driving. If desired, Manifold will create Area objects ("polygons") for each of the drive time zones.
Note that although the solver is set up using road network and drive time nomenclature, it is really a reachable zone solver that may be used to analyze abstract networks. By entering scalar values or formulas into the speed and distance boxes, one can find the zones reachable by number of hops, by cost, and other analyses. For sophisticated drive time analytics, users can enter formulas involving several fields into the speed and distance boxes.
Optimal Route - This solver finds an optimal route through a road network to visit a given set of locations, beginning at a start point and ending at a finish point. Points may be selected interactively by pointing and clicking on a preview map.
The input box for Distance is a "combo box" and allows the selection of a numeric field to use, the direct entry of a number, or entry of a formula that will be computed "on the fly." Note that formulas may be used to achieve unit conversions, if desired. Computation of distance "on the fly" is especially useful for maps of road networks that do not include pre-computed distances for each link.
Send Email from Manifold Release 4.50
-
This ultra-cool new solver installs into Manifold System Release 4.50
with Business Tools and allows you to send email and page people from within Manifold. If one of the data attribute fields in your map has
an email address, you can send email to all the objects in the selection, in all layers or
in a particular layer. Emergency coordinators can be notified if a storm threatens their
community. Volunteer fire department members in rural areas can be paged to deal with a
specific fire threat. Companies can send email to representatives or dealers within a
certain drive time of a proposed new product tour. The possibilities are endless.
Send Email requires Microsoft Outlook be installed on the
machine. Detail (left): We've selected all agents in the buffer
zone to receive a special email regarding activities within the Flood Zone in their
region.
Ever have difficulty keeping your mass emailings organized?
Place your email address lists into an abstract Manifold map and then use Send
Email to send mass mailings to whatever groups you select. Once the data is
in Manifold, you can use visual selection with the mouse, SQL selection or any other
method. See the visual email
organizer case study for an example. Note:
this is an advanced use example.
Two new Case Studies on sending
mass email from
Manifold
provide
practical examples of using this Business Tools solver.
Join
the Customer
Care Caravan on its North-South tour: all customers within 50 miles of the
tour have been emailed so they can take advantage of this opportunity to get free visits
from the Customer Care specialists.
Check out the use of Manifold as a visual email organizer. This is an advanced topic showing how to apply the infinite database and selection power of Manifold in non-geographic settings to organize email campaigns. Our Case Study adds Associated Press emails to our Media Contacts workspace.
See the Case Studies page for other case studies.
Closest Facilities - Given a set of objects called facilities, this simple solver finds the closest facilities to a given start point. Straight line distance or distance through the road network may be used. When distance through the road network is specified, the solver also finds the shortest distance route from the starting point to each of the closest facilities found. Closest Facilities finds the nearest given number of facilities to the starting point. Set the number of facilities to be found in this step by dialing the Number of Facilities value up or down using the spin buttons. Providing the value 3 for example will find the nearest three facilities to the starting point.
Straight line distance is handy when computing Closest Facilities in applications such as antenna siting, where the road network is irrelevant to radio wave propagation. The straight line distance is computed using a simple planar Euclidean computation on whatever map projection is currently in use. For greatest accuracy, use a map projection and projection origin that preserves linear scale within the map area of interest.
Distance through the road network is computed using the distance parameter for the length of each road link as specified in the Distance input box. The input box for Distance is a "combo box" and allows the selection of a numeric field to use, the direct entry of a number, or entry of a formula that will be computed "on the fly." Note that formulas may be used to achieve unit conversions, if desired.
Decision Support System
- Features a really easy-to-use
means of making "fuzzy logic" queries to select items from database where the
criteria need to be flexible. "Fuzzy logic"queries are the best way to
approach many real-world selections, but fuzzy logic systems have so far been too
difficult and too academic to use in real life business. Leave it to the math gods
at manifold.net to encapsulate the complex math of fuzzy logic in to
point-and-click mouse manuevers that anyone can handle with ease!
Any field in the database can have an unlimited number of profiles
specified, with numerous single-click presets available to automatically
characterize what you are seeking in that field as high, low,
average and so on. The system will calculate what a sensible high
or average range might be given the histogram of various values that
actually occur in that data field. Or, you can name your own profile by drawing a
curve or by simply providing two confidence intervals for the values you see ("Uh...
I'm 90% sure that $500K is too much for the location we seek....) and the system will
calculate a reasonable profile for you. The thumbnail shows some profiles
defined using demographic fields. The profile preview diagram shows
the "average" provide for 1989 Household Median income, togther with a schematic
histogram in background of what's in the database. The preview snaps on whenever a
profile is highlighted to remind us what that profile looks like graphically compared to
the data that's actually in the database. [very cool]
To find data using the profiles, just drag and drop profiles into the query box to build a query. The system will let you combine any profile in a query using AND, OR, AND NOT and the other usual Boolean query words we all know and love. In the illustration at left, we've built a query that seeks for a target profile of Black income AND for a desired profile of overall household median income.
Better still, Decision Support lets you "hedge" the use of a profile in a query. For example, instead of seeking 1989 Black per capita income that Is in the profile "High", we double-clicked into the Hedge field to change the default "Is" to Is Very. This will automatically nudge the "High" profile upwards in the Selection process to search for those records where Black per capita income is very high.
For more information on Business Tools, read the complete User Manual online.
Buy Online for Immediate Delivery
To buy Manifold Business Tools
and download it right now, jump on over to the Manifold.net Online Store.
Questions? Send Email or Telephone
Email sales@manifold.net at any time, or call 800-556-5919 during business hours if you have any questions regarding products, purchasing, or shipping information. Check out the Miscellaneous Info page for more details regarding purchasing and shipping, and visit the Online Store's information pages. Visit the Manifold.net Online Store right now to order your Manifold Data Set products.
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