Creating an automated dashboard using Power BI for Rapid Hardware to track their sales

Problem Statement

Rapid Hardware is a company which supplies computer hardware and peripherals to clients who have hardware stores across India. They have a head office in Delhi and a lot of regional offices throughout the country.

Now, Rafin, the sales director for this company is facing issues in terms of tracking the sales in this dynamically growing market. When he calls his regional managers over phone for insights, the regional managers gives him insights like > "this was the sales last quarter and we are going to grow by this much in the next quarter " but the problem is the conversation which are happening they're all verbal and we know that sometimes there is this habit that the managers try to paint a rosy picture which they don't want to look bad so sometimes they will lie or even if they are not lying they will try to sugarcoat the actual facts.

So, Rafin is extremely frustrated with this because he sees that the overall sales are declining but when he is talking with his regional managers he's not getting a complete picture. Also when he asked for numbers, these managers gave him a lot of Excel files which made him frustrated. He wants to know in a simplistic manner how the business is doing, what are the biggest areas where it is needed to focus, like if there is a region where the sales numbers are declining maybe they can start some promotion offer or maybe can engage with customers in a more better way so that there is an increase in sales.

Project Planning

Rafin now calls a meeting with other departments and following the AIMS grid they did a project planning.

AIMS Grid ( a project management tool)

Project Execution

The APPASA steps are followed by the Data Analyst team to execute the project.

Ask- First they asked about the problem, pupose and outcome of the project which has been defined in the AIMS Grid.

Prepare- Then with the help of the IT team who has all the records of the sales, the data analyst team started preparing for the objective.

Process- During this step a lot of data cleaning has been done, like- removing the duplicated data, removing the inputs which has negative or zero amount in sales, converting currencies which were in USD and formating some column.

Analyze- Then the analyze step started. Here the data analyst team noted what the sales dirtector needed in the dashboard and accordingly built the dashboard in an unbiased and objective way. Also after analyzing the data there were some problems like- the no. 01 selling product has a blank product code, such problems are shared with the IT team for identifying and solving those problems with the existing data.

Share- Finally, the completed dashboard is created and shared with all the stakeholders for their review.

Act- After finalizing the dashboard, it was then used to observe the data-driven insights to decide the steps to act for solving the desried problem.