Brick data lets you describe territories in the codes your company already uses. If your sales plans, targets, and reports are built around your own territorial grid, you can bring that grid into the system and apply it to GeoForce balancing results.

Brick data is managed in Admin Tool, in the Datasets section, and is available to administrators only.

What a brick is in Datasets

A brick in Datasets is not a shape on the map. It has no borders and no coordinates — only an identifier, a name, and a type.

A brick becomes meaningful through the organizations linked to it. The list of linked organizations is what defines where the brick is: the system knows the coordinates of every organization, so it can place the brick on the map through them.

This is why brick data is always created in three steps, in a fixed order:

1. Brick type — the codification the bricks belong to, for example your company name or the name of the data provider.
2. Bricks — the individual bricks, each assigned to a type.
3. Links Bricks w Organization — the organizations that belong to each brick.

Where to find brick data

1. Go to Admin Tool.
2. Open the Datasets section.
3. In the system list, select GeoForce.

The left pane contains two groups of brick datasets: Bricks and Brick collection. Each group contains the same three datasets.

Step 1. Create a brick type

1. Open Bricks → Bricks type.
2. Click Add.

      3. In the Name field, enter the name of the codification.

      4. Click Save, or Save and add another to continue adding types.

The ID and Modified (UTC time) fields are filled in by the system and cannot be edited. Modified records the time of the last change to the record; use it to check when the data was last updated.

Step 2. Create the bricks

1. Open Bricks → Bricks.
2. Click Add.
3. In Brick name, enter the code or name used in your company, for example District 33.
4. In Brick type, select the type created in the previous step.
5. Click Save.

The dataset then lists every brick with its name, type, and the time it was last modified.

Step 3. Link organizations to the bricks

This step tells the system which organizations belong to which brick.

1. Open Bricks → Links Bricks w Organization.
2. Click Add, or select an existing row and click the pencil icon to edit it.
3. In Brick, select the brick.
4. In HCO, select the organization. Use the search field — the list contains every organization in the system.
5. Click Save.

Each row links one organization to one brick. Repeat for every organization that belongs to the brick.

Brick collection

A brick collection is a named set of bricks loaded into the project from the reference geography databases — for example a country's brick layer or a grid supplied by a data provider. Use it when the project works with more than one brick codification and they have to be kept apart.

The Brick collection group contains the same three datasets: the collection itself, its bricks, and the links between those bricks and organizations. They are filled in the same order as described above.

What happens next

Once the three datasets are filled, the brick type becomes available in GeoForce as a grouping option for balancing results. See Balancing Territories with Brick Data.