Should the store in Monterrey consider expansion?

The Maven toy store is a business franchise that sells different products and is spread around various cities in North America. This is a summarized report on the performance of all toy stores in the city of Monterrey. What is the business problem? The business problem this analysis hopes to answer and provide solutions to is whether the business in Monterrey is doing well to consider possible expansion.

What were the possible questions asked to aid analysis? Some of the questions that helped to carry out efficient analysis in a bid to answer the business question are? • How many units were sold in total and across all toy stores in Monterrey in 2018 compared to 2017? • Was there a growth or decrease in units sold in the recent year and by how much • What store had the best performance among all stores in Monterrary in profit, revenue and total units sold, and how was this performance compared to the previous year. • How was the total revenue performance compared to last year • What are some of the factors that might influence revenue, profit and total units sold? • What location had the best performance and why?

How was the analysis carried out?

In order to ensure accurate analysis, a check was done to ensure the data was clean. I checked for inconsistencies, outliers, missing values, white spaces, incorrect data type etc. after cleaning the data, exploratory data analysis was done in a bid to answer the questions raised. The data was spread across four sheets; the sales sheet, stores sheet, product sheet and product details sheet. Formulas and functions were used to calculate necessary values. Since I was using an older version of Excel that doesn’t support power query I used Vlookup to get all the data I need to perform the analysis in one spreadsheet and created pivot tables from that spreadsheet. Pivot tables were created and charts were plotted to visualize information for a better understanding

What were the results and findings?

All product category except Arts and craft and Games seems to have had poorer revenue in 2018 compared to 2017 but this is probably due to the deficit of three months of data which seems to not have been available at the time of the data collection. A valid conclusion cannot be made about the performance due to the absence of a full year's worth of data but Games and arts and crafts seem to be doing better in 2018 despite this factor.

The profit margin for each product category is; • Sports and outdoor with 2.53 • Games with 3.64 • Arts and crafts with 2.44 • Electronics with 7.51 • Toys with 4.06 The overall profit margin for the Maven toy store in the city of Monterrey is 3.70 The art and craft product category sold the most units but didn't bring in the most profit or revenue. This is due to the low-profit margin of 2.44 compared to others. Electronics had the least unit sold in both years but not the least profit because of its high-profit margin of 7.51

Store 1 needs a better marketing strategy to increase performance because it saw a drastic decline in both revenue and sales in 2018 compared to an okay performance in 2017. Store 1 is located in a residential area and it seems from the analysis that that location had the worst performance compared to other locations so I would not advise opening up another store in a residential location without proper planning. Stores in the airport are slowly becoming a great location for business as it rose from the worst performance in 2017 to second best in 2018. The downtown located store still maintains a good location for business.

Expansion is possible for stores in Monterrey but with proper planning. overall 2018 seems to have been a better year performance wise but a more in-depth look shows that there has been poorer performance for some stores and products in 2018 compared to 2017. These are some factors to consider when expanding. location to place new stores should be considered based on performance from previous years and better marketing strategies to help poor-performing stores and products do better.