Gain insights into leveraging data visualisations as a tool for making informed business decisions.
This programme was found on Forage website, for more information, please check the Forage website.
The CEO of the retail store wants to analyze the revenue data for the year 2011. They need a detailed breakdown of the revenue for each month to understand the seasonal trends and the factors influencing them. This analysis will help the CEO forecast for the next year accurately.
Recommend Readings
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PRSA - Article on how to think from the perspective of a CEO
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Datapine - Article on how to think from the perspective of a CEO
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CEO Dashboard
A CEO dashboard is a management reporting tool used to track, analyze, and visualize data. It's a brids-eye overview of the most prominent metrics that will help making the best possible decision in order to improve outcomes.
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CEO Report
A CEO report is a critical analytical tool that serves up historical trends, and real time insights in a way that's visual, digestible, and easy to navigate. These reports can be delivered in the form of an interactive dashboard or pdf file.
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Benefits of CEO Reporting & Dashboard
- Confidence, validation & trust
- Decision making
- Extensive data access
- Flexibility & adaptability
- Panoramic vision & BI
- Performance review
- Communication & innovation
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What info does CEO need in a Dashboard
- The right KPIs & metrics
- The right design & visualisations
- Management, marketing, finance & sales in one
- Performance data
- Growth insights
- Human resources (HR) information
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Tips for effective CEO reports
- Concentrate on the big picture
- Define performance targets
- Consider your audience
- Take appropriate time intervals
- Don't concentrate only on past performance
- Integrate all core areas of your business
- Explore story-telling potential
- Prioritize form & function over aesthetics
- Learn from the bad and the good results
- Keep evolving
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Article on how to measure business performance
- Improving sales and profitability is not a one-time task; it requires a continuous effort from all departments and operations over an extended period of time.
- Business performance management (BPM)
- also known as corporate performance management (CPM)
- enterprise performance management (EPM)
- refers to the methods, processes, and workflow that companines use to manage their performance.
- BPM standard processes:
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Business Modeling
- Dashboarding
- Scorecards
- Data Consolidation
- Management Systems
- Financial and Management Reporting
- Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Internal Control
- Rish Management
- Business and Predictive analytics
- Crucial BPM activities:
- Select business goals and identify which systems and policies impact the company's progression towards the objectives
- Gather and monitor information to analyze progression
- Revie results and make adjustments where necessary to improve efficiency
- BPM could enhances decision-making, increases efficiency, unites departments, identifies risks.
Sample Solution
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Which region is generating the highest revenue, and which region is generating the lowest?
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What is the monthly trend of revenue, which months have faced the biggest increase/decrease?
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Which months generated the most revenue? Is there a seasonality in sales?
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Who are the top customers and how much do they contribute to the total revenue?
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Is the business dependent on these customers or is the customer base diversified?
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What is the percentage of customers who are repeating their orders? Are they ordering the same products or different?
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For the repeat customers, how long does it take them to place the next order after being delivered the previous one?
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What revenue is being generated from the customers who have ordered more than once?
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Who are the customers that have repeated the most? How much are they contributing to revenue?
Reflection
It's important to think from the CEO/CMO position. Considering you are running your own company, figure out what the most important KPIs are to help you increase the company's profitability. Also, a good company should have a good retention rate, so as a data analyist, you should discover the consumer behaviors. How loyal customers help our business, how much money we make from them, and how to keep their interest so they can create more value for us.
The CMO wants to identify the top 10 revenue-generating countries, excluding the United Kingdom. They also want to visualize the quantity sold along with the revenue generated for each country. This information will provide insights into the most profitable markets and guide marketing strategies.
Questions
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The CEO of the retail store is interested to view the time series of the revenue data for the entire year. The CEO is interested in viewing the seasonal trends and wants to dig deeper into why these trends occur. This analysis will be helpful for the CEO to forecast for the next year. Which visual would most likely help the CEO analyse the data?
Line chart. A line chart is used to represent repeated measurements taken over regular time intervals. Time always displayed on the horizontal axis and values on the vertical axis. The line chart would enable the CEO to see important changes in the data, like seasonality or cyclic behaviour, which will provide a better understanding of the revenue and help forecast better.
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The CMO is interested in viewing the top 10 countries which are generating the highest revenue. Additionally, as a subcomponent, they would also like to see which products are contributing to the total revenue being generated by each country. Which visual would enable the CMO to view the revenue for each country and the breakdown by products on a single chart?
Stacked bar chart. A stakced bar chart would be used here as the chart allows users to compare subcomponent pieces across different cateogries. The height or length of the bars will represent the total revenue generated by each country. Each bar will be divided into the products sold, where the major portion will be allocated to the products that are generating more revenue. This will allow the CMO to view the total revenue data as well as the renuve for each individual product.
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The CEO of the online retail store wants to see how much average revenue is generated by each country. They are interested in viewing the following metrics on the visual:
- Mnimum value
- First quartile value
- Median value
- Third quartile value
- Maximum value
Which char would you create to show the above metrics for the average revenue generated by each country?
Boxplot. The CEO's request would best be fulfilled using a box plot. The box plot would show the distribution of data based on five number summary. Boxplots are used to graphically demonstrate the locality, spread and skewness groups of numerical data. Boxplots are used to graphically demonostrate the locality, spread and skewness groups of numerical data. By using the boxplot, we can easily spot outliers and the distribution of the plot.
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The CMO of the online retail store wants to view the information on the top 10 customers by revenue. They are interested in a visual that shows the greatest revenue-generating customer at the start and gradually declines to the lower revenue-generating customers. The CMO wants to target the higher revenue-generating customers and ensure that they remain satisfied with their products. Which visuals would help the CMO understand the data on revenue generated by the top 10 customers.
Column chart. The CMO's request would best be fulfilled by using a column chart. Column charts are used to display comparisons between different items. Alternatively, you can view a comparison of items over time. In this case, the column chart would display the top 10 customers who are contributing the most to revenue. The first bar on the left would be the longest one and would display information for the customer who bought the most goods from the online store. The revenue contributed by each customer would graduately decline as the bars move to the right.
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The CEO is looking to gain insights on the demand for their products. They want to look at all countries and see which regions have the greatest demand for their products. Once the CEO gets an idea of the regions that have high demand, they will initiate an expansion strategy which will allow the company to target these areas and generate more business from these regions. He wants to view the entire data on a single view without the need to scroll or hover over the data points to identify the demand. Which chart would be most useful to provide the CEO information on the demand in each region?
Map chart. A map chart would be the best option for visuals here as it will allow the CEO to view the demand information on a single view. The map chart will have all the countries on a single map and the demand will be displayed by highlighting the area of each country. Dark highlights would mean that the countries have high demand for products whereas the countries that are highlighted light colour are the ones that have low demand. Geographical data is best visualised using map charts as they are very easy to view and the underlying values are also easy to analyse.
The CMO of the online retail store needs to analyze the top 10 customers based on revenue. They want a visual representation that highlights the highest revenue-generating customer at the beginning and gradually shows the lower revenue-generating customers. This analysis will help the CMO focus on retaining and satisfying the high-value customers.
Your job
In this task, you will create the visuals around four of the questions that CEO and CMO have requested. You can use either Tableau or PowerBI to create the visuals and we've provided the data in resources below.
Data cleanup
Before you can begin the analysis, make sure that the data is cleaned properly. You have noticed that the data contains some returns to the store which are provided in negative quantities and there are unit prices which were input in error. You will need to perform the following steps to clean this data.
- Create a check that the quantity should not below 1 unit
- Create a check that the unit price not be below 0
Please note that in order to apply the checks that have been mentioned above, you would need to use conditional formulas where the logic would state that if the conditions are met then the tool should exclude the data from the analysis. You can also use data transformation methods to get rid of the bad data. Both these methods are provided in the resources section. Once this is done, the data will be good to used for further analysis. Please note that this data should be cleaned up before attempting any question.
Create each visual on a separate tab with the name of the tab displaying the question number. Once the visuals are created, save the files and upload them below. For Tableau users, you would need to upload in .twbx format where as PowerBI files need to be saved in .pbix format.
Questions
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The CEO of the retail store is interested to view the time series of the revenue data for the year 2011 only. He would like to view granular data by looking into revenue for each month. The CEO is interested in viewing the seasonal trends and wants to dig deeper into why these trends occur. This analysis will be helpful for the CEO to forecast for the next year.
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The CMO is interested in viewing the top 10 countries which are generating the highest revenue. Additionally, the CMO is also interested in viewing the quantity sold along with the revenue generated. The CMO does not want to have the United Kingdom in this visual.
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The CMO of the online retail store wants to view the information on the top 10 customers by revenue. He is interested in a visual that shows the greatest revenue generating customer at the start and gradually declines to the lower revenue generating customers. The CMO wants to target the higher revenue generating customers and ensure that they remain satisfied with their products.
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The CEO is looking to gain insights on the demand for their products. He wants to look at all countries and see which regions have the greatest demand for their products. Once the CEO gets an idea of the regions that have high demand, he will initiate an expansion strategy which will allow the company to target these areas and generate more business from these regions. He wants to view the entire data on a single view without the need to scroll or hover over the data points to identify the demand. There is no need to show data for the United Kingdom as the CEO is more interested in viewing the countries that have expansion opportunities.
The CEO wants to gain insights into the demand for their products across different countries. They need to identify the regions with the highest product demand for potential expansion opportunities. The CEO requires a comprehensive view of the data, without the need to scroll or hover over data points, excluding the United Kingdom. This analysis will inform the company's expansion strategy to target lucrative markets.
Tasks
Develop a script and record a video presenting your findings to the CEO and CMO based on the four questions they asked and the visuals you created in the previous tasks.
You can use your work or the model answer from the previous task to develop your presentation.
When writing your script, you should speak about your entire process, including the initial data load and clean-up steps so that your leaders know you’ve done your due diligence in providing error-free analysis. Data analysis provides heaps of information but remember to focus on the information that is most important to your leaders.
Your video should be approximately 5 minutes in length. You can record your video in the browser or upload a video from your device below.
Remember, this is not just a read out of your visuals, you’re presenting to the CEO and CMO and need to provide context for each scenario and how it relates to their questioning.