Introduction
- Project
Proposal
- Project
Objectives
-
References
1
Project Proposal
This project explores the use of GIS in facilitating the common
decision process made by a business when it decides to locate in
a certain region. More specifically, this project will focus on
the decision making process that a "made-up" fast food
restaurant, Burger Place, will come across in deciding to
locate its new restaurant site in Burnaby, British Columbia. Although
this project simulates the decision making process that a made-up
restaurant would go through in locating its site, one can see how
this process can easily be applied to the real world where some
businesses must consider similar scenarios. Idrisi32 will
be the GIS used in this project to perform spatial analysis, manage
data, perform database querying, allow decision support, and finally
generate visual outputs in the form of maps, histograms, and text.
I was interested in this issue because it is a common issue in the
business world and that there is an enormous potential for using
GIS to facilitate the management decision making process. One of
the keys to locating a potential site for a new business is location.
Within the location consideration, there is also the market characteristics(potential
and growth, labor, area), proximity to customer and competition,
traffic volume, visibility, demographics, land lease values, and
so forth. These are all related directly or indirectly to location
and so GIS is the logical route to take because GIS can integrate
these muliple data layers together and perform spatial operations
and analysis on them.
2 Project
Objectives
Burger Place is a successful franchise in Washington state which
wants to expand its operations into British Columbia. The restaurant
caters to all customers but also has a target market of families
with children (i.e. it has a variety of children's menus and gives
away toys with special children's menus). Burger Place has chosen
Burnaby as a suitable location to launch its Canadian operations.
Some general key factors to a potential site is a location with
high visibility, a large customer base, near proximity to customers,
suitable demographics, high potential market area, high traffic
flow (both vehicle and pedestrian), and close proximity from other
competiting businesses. From these key factors, the management of
Burger Palace has laid down several criterias. The criterias are
as follows:
- restaurant must be accessed by a major road (enhances visibility
and traffic flow)
- restaurant must be situated in a highly populated census region
(demographic criteria)
- restaurant must be within a small distance of its competitors
(access to available market)
- restaurant should be close to a bus route (generates traffic
flow, visibility)
- restaurant must be within or near designated commercial districts
(convenience, traffic, visibility)
- restaurant should be in area with high proportion of families
with children (demographic criteria)
- resstaurant should be within or near areas of middle to high
income (reflects their menu prices)
The management realizes that not all the criterias are neccesarrily
equal in importance. They also do not know exactly which criterias
should be put ahead of another since they are unfamiliar with this
region and so they require more understanding of where other competiting
fast food restaurants decide to locate. Therefore part of this project
will look at various factors which will help to decide on the weight
of each criteria.
The analysis is limited to these general criterias, however the
management feels that this is a good starting point for considering
a potential site. The analysis might help to narrow down potential
regions that might be suitable. In most cases GIS is a stepping
stone that gives more understanding to a problem but not always
the final solution to the problem. In this case a more detailed
followup of customer surveys, indepth market analysis, and so forth,
must be done once the potential regions are indicated.
3 References
A query on Yahoo came up with several sources of information on
certain criterias to consider for locating a restaurant, or in general
a business. Here is a list of some of the good sources of information
using the following query: [+restaurant
+location +criteria franchise].
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