After determining the performance of an article for the entire company, it may be necessary to determine how the article isselling in different areas within the company. The article may be selling very well in the Northeast, while in the Southeast youmay not be able to give the merchandise away. This type of analysis breaks down the sales of a particular article into theoperational hierarchy. The operational hierarchy is typically divided into such groupings as company, region, district, area, andstore. When data is maintained down to the store level, another hierarchy could be used just as easily. This analysis allows theretailer to compare the sales of an article for each region, district, area, and store, thereby helping the merchant to betterunderstand the demographic selling patterns of the article. From this information a merchant can better allocate the initialshipment, better allocate new merchandise, remove or add goods to different areas, better determine if there is an operationaldifference in the selling, better determine the season of an article by geography, and so on. For a more dynamic approach togeographic analysis, see the section entitled "Store and Article Grouping" later in this chapter.