Introduction to Benchmarks

In this introduction to working with benchmarks, you will see how to:

• Select an object and look at its data
• Compare the data with the US Summary benchmark
• Export data, to an Excel workbook, or to a printer
• Create a new study area focused on a small area
• Create a group based on ZIPs, and save the demographics as a benchmark
• Create a 10-minute drivetime area
• Compare the drivetime area to the ZIP-based trade area which you have saved as a benchmark.
• Zoom in and out using the zoom slider or the framing mode.

Show object data

From the Scan/US Data menu choose Quicklook..

Demographic data is shown for the current object.

Make sure you are in select object mode:

Now, when you click any object in the map, you can see the data for that object.

What if you want to compare the current object to a Benchmark?

Click the show benchmarks button to expand Quicklook.

The Quicklook dialog expands to show benchmark data for the United States.

Clicking the "hollow triangle" next to a data item will make the percentage variable display. Both count and percentage are shown below, comparing the population of Illinois to the US Benchmark value.

Exporting Benchmark Data

We will show other types of benchmark comparisons, and how to create and save your own benchmarks. First, here is how you can export benchmark data out of Scan/US.

At the bottom of the Quicklook dialog are two icons, a printer icon and a save documents icon:

The Print Quicklook button can be used to print a report, while the Save Quicklook button exports data directly to an Excel workbook.

Here is what an example of what a report looks like when you press the Print Quicklook button:

Notice that the lines expanded to show percentage are also expanded in the Quicklook report.

The Save Quicklook button brings up a link that shows where the file is saved. Click the blue link to open the Excel file:

The data is shown in Excel, in a similar form to the way you saw it printed, except now in an Excel spreadsheet:

The key column on the left shows the internal data item names Scan/US uses to identify the origin of each variable. The index column on the far right is the index of that row's data item against, in this case, the United States summary value.

It's possible to make a benchmark based on other summaries besides the US Summary, too. Let's do that now.

Object Lists and Groupings

You can make your own benchmarks, and print benchmark reports based on your own benchmark groupings, as well as lists of objects that you "check off" in the Scan/US object manager. In order to understand some of the menu options that you will see, we need to take a brief detour and create some groups.

Let's work through a plausible scenario. Your food store in suburban Chicago has done well in its trade area, and you wish to expand.

You know the boundaries of your trade area, based on ZIP codes, because you have collected ZIP data from people entering your store over the past year.

You will make a group of ZIP codes, representing the baseline demographics of your trade area. This group will be your benchmark.

Step by step: create an example group based on ZIPs

With Cook County selected, from the Map Menu choose New Study Area

The New Study Area dialog will appear: Type in the name "Suburban Chicago" and underneath "Select theme:" choose "Standard Metro(with streets, Zips)".

In the more-detailed map that appears, make sure you have selected Framing mode, so that you may zoom in to the area of your store.

Next you will draw a rectangle on the map, and click Zoom to frame.

Now that you have a more-detailed map with Zip Polygons as the current layer, click the Assign Object to Group mode, and select one of the grouping sub-modes to use a grouping tool. Shown is Group by radius.

Also, make sure the current layer is Zip Polygons. Otherwise you will be making a group of some other geographic layer, which is not what we want for this ZIP-based trade area example.

Click in the center of the area, and draw out a circle. When you release the mouse button, the New Group dialog will come up. Enter the name of the store ("Downers Grove Store") as the Group name, and "Suburban Chicago Trade Areas" as the name of the Grouping. This will help you later, in selecting the group you have created.

When you click "OK", it will color in the map with the orange-ish color of the first group.

Notice we have opened the Quicklook dialog again (from the Data menu choose Quicklook..), and the Show groups button is selected. The "[8]" shown next to the group name in the Quicklook and in the Group legend indicates that there are eight ZIP codes in the area you have grouped. The data values shown are the group's demographics, summing (and calculating medians) for the aggregate of the eight ZIPs in this group.

We will use this group as a NAMED BENCHMARK. In order to save the group as a named benchmark, click the Save object as named benchmark button, which is the otherdiskette icon directly to the left of the "close" button:

You will see the Save Benchmark dialog box, and if you wish you may give it a different name. If you started by giving your group and grouping a good name to begin with, the benchmark is already well filled out, and you may decide to leave it alone, and simply click "OK".

Now, with this benchmark safely saved, let's do a comparison with a candidate site on the north shore of Chicago.

Click the zoom to topbutton to give yourself an overview of the map at about 100 miles:

An area to compare

The next thing to do, is to create an area in the same study area, to compare with our benchmark, that we have just saved. You will probably be much more methodic about this -- we are just going to create a drivetime contour around a point, by "clicking it into the map".

To create a new 10-minute drivetime area in Palatine. Click the Choose edit mode of the edit locations button and select Edit Areas.

You will click in the map near Palatine (red circle below)

When the "Create Layer - Areas" dialog appears, give it a layer name of "Ten-minute drivetimes", Click the DriveTime tab so that you will be able to enter a time into it, and enter "10", so that you will create a ten-minute drivetime wherever you click in the map. The red-circled area, above, is where we will click for this example.

You will give the area a name like "Palatine Area" or "Palatine Eval Area", and click Create.

Scan/US creates an area so that when you select Quicklook, and expand it as before, you will able to select the ZIP-group based benchmark "Downers Grove Store: Suburban Chicago" to compare directly with your new 10-minute drivetime trade area.

When you scroll Quicklook down (green arrow at right below), you can compare median incomes for that area, and see whether it meets the demographic criteria for the type of food store you are currently running in Downers Grove Store.

Also, notice that it's possible to Zoom the map in to 24 miles using the zoom slider on the left, from where it had been located before. At the zoomed-in level, more-detailed streets appear.

Changing Benchmarks to another layer

Suppose you want to compare your county to a benchmark other than the US summary? First, you can change the benchmark layer.

Change the benchmark layer by choosing "Select benchmark layer" at the top right of Quicklook (red rectangle above left). A selection menu of many different benchmark layer possibilities will pop out to the right. Choose Counties.

Then, you will notice the "Benchmark" selection will have changed to a list of counties. When you click the drop-down (red rectangle, above), you will be able to scroll down, select a different county, and compare county-to-county.

If you have saved a group of seven counties as a benchmark to use repeatedly, then you do not need to do this: your saved benchmark will already appear directly beneath "US Summary" as a named benchmark.