Northwind Traders KPI Dashboard

Business Case : For the Maven Northwind Challenge, you'll be working as a BI Developer for Northwind Traders, a global import and export company that specializes in supplying high-quality gourmet food products to restaurants, cafes, and specialty food retailers around the world.

As part of your role, you've been tasked with building a top-level KPI dashboard for the executive team. Its purpose should be to allow them to quickly understand the company's performance in key areas, including:

• Sales trends
• Product performance
• Key customers
• Shipping costs

Introduction : The Dashboard must include all the KPI's that are important to measure company performance and we can identify this by analyzing given data and generate some insights on areas where company is performing well and the areas where improvement can be made. The dashboard must include KPI such as Gross Sales, Net Sales, Total Order, Total Qty Sold, Average Shipment days, Average Order Value, Average Shipping Cost and insights on Customers and Product by Gross and Net Sales, % Discounts given to customer or on particular product, Best Category as per gross sales, Total Shipment Cost, Top 10 products and customers and Gross sales by Months.

Here are some insights I gained from the dashboard:

Product - At Product Level, there are two category - Continued and Discontinued. Continued Product accounts for a total of $1.15M Gross Sales and discontinued product accounts for a total of $200.34 K gross Sales. The total gross sales including both category is $1.35M. The top 3 products as per Gross are "Cote de Blaye ($1,49,94.20)", "Raclette Courdavaul ($76,296)" and "Camambert Pierrot ($50,286)". All these products are from continued category.

Customer - At Customer Level, The top 3 customer as per Gross Sales are Quick Stop ($106.731.79), Ernst Handel ($97,436.20) and Save a lot Market ($85,709). The Bottom 3 customer as per Gross sales are Centro Commercial Moctezuma ($100.80), Lazy K Kountry Store ($357.00) and Grosella Restaurante ($498.70).

Shipping Cost - There are 3 companies shipping products for company. The Shipping Cost is highest for United Package ($28,244.85) and Lowest for Speedy Express ($16,185).

Category Wise Sales - The categories where company is getting most of their sales are Beverages (24.41%), Dairy Products (21.78%) and Confections (15.34%). These 3 category accounts for a total of (61.53%) of total sales. The category where the sales are lowest is Meat & Poultry (2.13%).

Sales Trend - The Gross Sales is highest in April 2015 amounted to ($1,07,999.18) up by 140.5 % from last year same month i.e April 2014 amounted to ($44,902.05). The Gross Sales by country is highest for USA ($2,63566.98) and the lowest if for Poland ($3,531.95).

Employees Contribution - The top 3 employees as per Gross sales are Nancy Davolio ($73,663.30), Janet Leverling ($66,922.79) and Andrew Fuller ($60,487,50).

Areas to be Focused:

Discount % - There are some customers to whom the company is providing more the 10 % discounts on products resulting reduction in Gross sales and Net Sales. They are as follows : Queen Cozinha (15.27%), Hungry Owl All Night Grocers (12.77%), Piccolo and Mehr (12.26%) and Let's Stop and Shop (11.85%).

Average Shipment Days - It took around 8.5 days in order to process an order and deliver it to customer. The company can take some steps to reduce the average shipment days which will result in stronger brand value, larger customer base thereby resulting in more sales.