Maven Northwind Challenge

Overview

Considering the seasonality of sales, I decided not to use a single reporting month as a standard (or KPI) for measuring the performances of other months. This, I strongly believe, could distort objective measurements as various factors affect sales volume and revenue in different months and seasons of the year. Therefore, my measures spanned the entire 2 full years (3 calendar years).

I also believe that top-level executives may be looking at the trends of the past 3 years in order to make projections (and set targets) for the next 3 years.

Approach

• single page
• VP level reporting (employee/HR related matters can be left for mid-level dashboards)
• complete history (considering that a distilled 2 year report is not too detailed for top-level management)
• comparing globally acceptable standards against divisional performances
• areas covered: sales, products, customers, and shipping

KPIs

I employed the use of globally accepted KPIs. They include:

• Gross Profit Margin
• Average Revenue
• Average Order Quantity
• Revenue Growth
• Order Quantity Growth
• Average Shipping Cost
• On-Time Delivery (OTD) rate
• Shipping Cost per Region
• Standard Mean Deviation of Revenue

KPI Cards

KPI cards were built in Power BI using standard Power BI Cards, with results generated in DAX.

Modelling and DAX Creation

I mastered Power Query from onset as well the design of relationships and connections of data models.

A long list of DAX measures were created to make analysis and comparison easy and practicable.

Date Table with several useful columns was also created using DAX.

General Design

I implemented a flat-screen design, akin to a table-top television or a stand-alone all-in-one work station.

Colour themes include a blend of black and white backgrounds with white, red, green and dark-grey fonts and charts. This was colourfully and aesthetically designed to enhance visualization.

Bar charts were mostly used to support simplicity and ease of comparison.

Icons (similar to conditional formatting icons) were used to show directional relationships between measures and KPIs.

Overall design could have been better and more streamlined, but my my PBI subscription is Pro. More features could have been accessed if I had Premium PBI subscription.

Follow Up Dashboard

I intend to explore this rich datasets to build other operational dashboards. This would afford me the opportunity to look into other key performances indices as well as employees and other HR related matters.