Customising your geographical reports in SAS VA for superior insights

In visual analytics, too, one size does not fit all. That is why SAS allows you to customise, among others, your geographical reports. And one way of doing that is by creating your very own custom polygons. A custom polygon, in simple layman’s terms, is a type of geographic variable supported by SAS Visual Analytics (SAS VA), along with custom coordinates and a number of predefined geographic variables.

Using predefined geographic variables, as listed here, you can easily visualise your business data to create, for instance, an insightful map of the countries, regions, provinces, etc. you are operating in. But what if your business is not organised according to these predefined variables? What if (part of) your sales organisation is specifically geared towards, say, South-West Flanders, the Kempen or the Rhine area? Then those custom polygons sure come in handy!

When creating maps in SAS VA, there are multiple object types to choose from:

Each of these object types requires a geographic variable, which is a variable with extra information attached to it. Sometimes longitude and latitude values serve as such, in other cases a polygon does. (You can find out more about geographic variables in this SAS blog about geo maps)

When we talk about custom polygons, we are referring to regions, sectors or other geographic variables that are not available as a standard feature or function in SAS Visual Analytics. Lots of businesses and industries in fact have their own specific map divisions, such as the regions in which their stores or agents operate, to give but one example. The polygons for these are not available for download. They are, however, very easy to build yourself. You really don’t have to be a techie at all to do so successfully.

First things first: to create your own custom polygons, you need a good point to start off from. Fortunately, there are always shape files you can find, retrieve or buy which contain standard polygon information about a nation’s geography, such as regions, provinces, municipalities and communes. Based on those polygons, you can now start to create your own custom polygons by grouping some of the aforementioned shape files together.

SAS has provided several functions you can use for this:

When finished, the new polygons need to be loaded into the system.

Suppose you have organised your activities based on a number of regions in Belgium that are specific to your business. The map on the left below presents you with a standard overview of your business activities in all Belgian municipalities. It probably won’t take you long to realise that it will be fairly hard, if not downright impossible, to gain actionable insights from the way those activities are represented here.

Now take a look at the map on the right. It contains the same information about your business activities from the same Belgian municipalities. Only now they are grouped by region: those regions, to be precise, that are specific to your business. A colour range, indicating high and low values, now clearly shows you – in the blink of an eye, so to speak – how your different regions are performing. Since the polygons used to achieve this are nowhere available, they had to be custom-made.

As this example of custom regions created from lower-level existing regions also shows, polygons can be used in hierarchies, allowing you to go from a lower level (e.g. Municipality) to a higher level (e.g. Region) – and vice versa. Very often custom polygons fit in some middle layer, where they will open up to the lower structures from which they were created.

In this particular use case we stayed within one country. Another benefit of deploying custom polygons is that it is easily possible to create regions while not looking at country borders.

Did we spark your interest in custom polygons? Great! In deploying them whenever required, your reports are guaranteed to be more adapted to the specific (business) needs of your company or client.