Guided Tour: Business Applications
As well as finding distances between a group of locations, MileCharter can find the distances from a group of locations to a new location. For example, it can calculate the distances, times, and costs for routes from a group of offices to a new customer.
Finding Multiple Distances to a Customer
This example has a number of company offices spread across the UK and Ireland. There is a new customer in Stratford-upon-Avon. Which is the closest office?
This map of office locations was created from an Excel® spreadsheet that listed the office addresses. This was imported by using Microsoft® MapPoint®'s Data Import wizard. The office locations are all in the same pushpin set, and the new customer is in a separate pushpin set. The roads are not displayed for clarity.
The customer pushpin is selected, and MileCharter is started. In the MileCharter panel, the offices pushpin set are selected as the starting locations. The customer is selected as the destination. Output in the form of distances, travel times, and route costs are selected. Compute is pressed to start the computation process.
These are the distance results in miles. Distances have been calculated from every office to the new customer. The Peterborough office is the closest.
These are the travel time results. Note that the Reading office has a shorter travel time than the Peterborough office. This is because the route from Peterborough is cross-country and uses slower roads.
Also notice that the travel time from the Dublin office is much longer than any of the other times. This is because the route from Dublin includes a ferry crossing.
These are the route costs. They are calculated using Microsoft MapPoint's own cost estimates. These estimates are based on a simple "per mile" calculation, so the short Peterborough route is the cheapest. MileCharter can also use rate tables that assign different cost rates according to the distance.
Next, we look at a business application with multiple depots and customers.