Sales Insights Data Analysis Project Using Tableau
Sales Insights Data Analysis Project Using Tableau
The purpose of the project was to unlock sales insights which were not visible before
the sales team for decision support and automate them to reduce manual time spent
in data gathering.
Problem statement: The case study was based on a computer hardware business
which was facing challenges in dynamically changing market. Sales director decided
to invest in data analysis project and he wanted to build Tableau dashboard that
could then give him real time sales insights.
Project planning and data discovery aspect: After the sales directory of atliQ
hardware had decided to invest in data analysis project he did a meeting with IT
director, data analytics team to come up with a plan. They used the AIMS grid to
define the purpose and success criteria of this project. Once AIMS grid was defined,
next step was data discovery. In this step, data analyst team approached IT team
(within the organization) who owns the software system that kept the track of sales
records. These records were stored in MySQL database. Tableau was then plugged
to this database to pull necessary information required for data analysis. We often
need separate data warehouse or OLAP system to run our data analytics queries but
in this project we directly used MySQL database.
MySQL database and ETL in Tableau: This database had all the sales transactions,
customers, products and markets information. We analyzed this database and then
tied it up with Tableau. In the Tableau software we performed ETL (extract transform
load). This process is also known as data munging or data wrangling. We also
performed data cleaning operations like currency normalization, handling invalid
values etc. to make it ready for our dashboard.
Dashboard building: I then finally build the tableau dashboard for our sales insights
project and published the dashboard to tableau online.