Christopher Robert Carter
Assessing the Digital Approach to the Study of Business Geography: An Evaluation of ESRI's Business Analyst 10.1 © 2013
This research paper investigates the digitalization of site selection, trade area delineation, and sales potential estimate models within ESRI's Business Analyst software from both a theoretical and a user's perspective in order to assess the effectiveness, limitations, and improvements that have been made by digitalizing the site selection, trade area delineation, and sales potential models. A theoretical understanding of each model is garnered from academic literature, and the models are run and evaluated in ESRI Business Analyst. The study reveals that ESRI's Business Analyst 10.1 effectively digitalizes numerous spatial analysis models, but contains few site selection or sales potential estimate models. Business Analyst 10.1 is best suited to solving trade area delineation issues. The study also reveals that the software program best serves non-GIS users and is not an effective tool for educational purposes.