This example demonstrates how to use MileCharter to report the route distances from each customer to the three closest stores. The demonstration map can be found in the MileCharter examples file:
http://www.milecharter.com/downloads/examples.zip
The map is called chicago_customers.ptm, and requires MapPoint 2006 North America. The map looks like this:
The roads have been switched off for clarity. The map contains two pushpin sets (groups of pushpins). Sales Offices contains pushpins for a series of sales offices in Illinois and Indiana. Most are in the Chicago area. Customers contains pushpins for each of the customers. We wish to find our three closest sales offices for each customer. Do this by setting MileCharter's options as follows:
We want routes that start at our customers and finish at our sales offices. This will result in MileCharter reporting the closest Sales Offices for each Customer, and not the other way around. We also wish to see the distances and travel times for each sales office, so check Distances and Travel Times. We also want to see the shortest (rather than fastest) routes, so select Shortest Routes.
To find the closest stores only, check the Only report shortest/quickest routes checkbox. We want the three closest sales offices, so enter '3' in the Find the closest locations box. We also restrict the distance and travel times to 50 miles and 70 minutes, respectively. We also want to list the closest sales offices in order closest-first, so check Rank routes in ascending order.
Press Compute to start processing. The resulting chart of the closest sales offices will look like this:
Notice that the customer 'David Brown' only has one sales office within the specified criteria of 50 miles and 70 minutes.