Introduction
Kevin Cookie Company (fictional) conducts business in five countries, selling a variety of delicious cookies which include chocolate chip, fortune cookies, and oatmeal raisin. The company has lately been keeping records of sales, profits, and other metrics by country and product in Excel spreadsheets. They want me, as a data analyst, to make sense of their performance information and draw some useful insights for the business. For this project, I utilised the company’s 2019 and 2020 performance information. The company board has instructed me to answer and visualise the most burning questions: Which product and market is most profitable? Which product and market has the highest sales volumes? Which year and month are we getting most sales? What about profits? Are there any differences in seasonal performance by different products and/or markets?
To answer these many, many questions, I decided to use an excel dashboard displaying the results, while adding interactivity to ensure that executives can filter and drill down to really explore the company’s performance metrics to the bottom.
A brief description of the solution
The data were pre-cleaned prior to the commencement of the project, hence, no further cleaning operations were implemented. Actions taken included combining different data tables to merge data for different years, developing individual Pivot Tables, and introducing of data Slicers for filtering. The purpose of the project was to visualise company performance in terms of sales and profitability, looking at the number of units sold, total expenses incurred, and profits realised. The ‘country’ slicer allows a user to filter data by country, while the ‘product’ slicer’ allows the user to filter performance by each product offered by the Kevin Cookie company. Users can also filter data to explore performance by months and years. The types of questions that can be answered by the dashboard include:
- Which country is the least/most profitable?
- What is the total profit made over the period?
- In which market (country) do Fortune Cookies perform best?
- In which month did the Kevin Cookie Company sell the highest units of Chocolate Chip Cookies?