Power BI Project For Beginners | Sales Insights Data Analysis Project - 1 - Problem Statement

Summary

This video introduces a data analysis project aimed at aspiring data analysts and data scientists. The project simulates a real-world corporate environment, focusing on solving sales challenges for a computer hardware company, AtliQ Hardware. It covers key steps like problem definition, data discovery, cleaning, merging, and creating visualizations in Power BI. Participants will act as stakeholders, providing feedback on a dynamic dashboard. The goal is to offer hands-on experience with practical data insights, leading to more effective, data-driven decisions that can improve business performance.

Takeaways

• 🧑‍💻 This data analysis project focuses on generating sales insights, designed for aspiring data analysts or data scientists.
• 🏢 The project aims to simulate real-world data analysis projects in corporate environments, giving practical experience.
• 📊 Unlike standard tutorials, this project emphasizes the end goal and approach, not just tools like Power BI.
• 🛠️ The project breakdown includes multiple steps: problem definition, data discovery, cleaning, merging, and dashboard creation.
• 💼 The scenario involves AtliQ Hardware, a company struggling with sales insights and growth in a dynamic market.
• 📞 The current method of gathering sales data relies on verbal reports from regional managers, which are often inaccurate or incomplete.
• 🧾 Regional managers provide too many Excel files, frustrating Bhavan Patel, the sales director, who prefers concise insights.
• 📈 The goal is to create a dashboard using Power BI (or Tableau), providing clear sales trends, revenue breakdowns, and data-driven insights.
• 💡 The dashboard will allow Bhavan Patel to make informed, data-driven decisions, avoiding reliance on subjective reports.
• 🎯 At the end of the project, participants will act as stakeholders, providing feedback on the dashboard, simulating real-world project evolution.

Q & A

What is the purpose of this data analysis project?

The purpose of this project is to provide experience in executing data analysis projects similar to those conducted in corporate environments, particularly for those pursuing careers as data analysts or data scientists.

What makes this project different from typical Power BI tutorials?

This project focuses on the end goal and the approach to solving real-world business problems, rather than just teaching how to use Power BI tools. It emphasizes how data projects are handled in large corporations.

What specific company problem does the project address?

The project revolves around AtliQ Hardware, a company that is facing issues with tracking and analyzing sales performance in a dynamically growing market. Their sales director is struggling to get clear insights due to incomplete or sugar-coated information from regional managers.

Who is Bhavan Patel, and what challenges is he facing?

Bhavan Patel is the sales director of AtliQ Hardware. He is frustrated because he receives inconsistent and overly optimistic reports from his regional managers, making it hard for him to track real sales performance and make data-driven decisions.

How will Power BI help solve AtliQ Hardware’s problem?

Power BI will allow Bhavan Patel to visualize the actual sales data in an easy-to-understand dashboard, giving him real-time insights. This will help him make better decisions and address the declining sales more effectively.

What are some key components of the dashboard created in this project?

The dashboard will include features like tracking revenue and sales quantity year over year, breaking down revenue by regions and products, and identifying revenue trends. It will provide actionable insights for Bhavan Patel.

What is the role of feedback from stakeholders in this project?

Participants will act as stakeholders by providing feedback on the dashboard, simulating a real-life scenario where data analysts receive feedback from company executives, which helps evolve the dashboard based on the needs of the business.

How does the project simulate a corporate work environment?

The project involves defining a problem, performing data discovery and cleaning, building visualizations, and then incorporating stakeholder feedback. This mirrors how data analysis projects are executed in a real corporate setting.

Who is Hemanand, and what is his contribution to the project?

Hemanand is a senior data analyst who has recently been promoted to data analyst manager in the UK. He, along with the speaker, has contributed his experience and efforts to designing this project based on their collective knowledge from working in the field.

What is the structure of the project’s tutorial series?

The project is broken down into six or seven parts, starting with defining the problem, moving through data discovery, cleaning, and merging, and then building dashboards in Power BI. It will conclude with handing over the dashboard to participants for feedback and improvements.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Starting a Sales Insight Data Analysis Project

The video introduces a data analysis project focused on generating sales insights, ideal for aspiring data analysts or data scientists. The project is designed to provide real-world experience, mirroring how large companies execute data analysis projects. Unlike basic tutorials, the emphasis is on goal-oriented approaches, giving viewers insight into how projects are handled in a corporate setting. The presenter, along with a senior data analyst named Hemanand, shares their combined expertise of over 10 years in the field. The project is broken into a multi-part series, beginning with a problem statement involving a computer hardware manufacturer. The steps include problem definition, data discovery, cleaning, merging, and dashboard creation in Power BI (though Tableau is an alternative). The final outcome will be a dynamic dashboard with sales insights, and viewers will have the opportunity to act as stakeholders, providing feedback for dashboard improvements.

05:02

💼 Challenges of Sales Management in a Dynamic Market

AtliQ Hardware, a supplier of computer hardware, is facing challenges in tracking sales in a rapidly growing market. Bhavin Patel, the Sales Director, relies on regional managers for insights but often gets incomplete or overly optimistic reports. The process is inefficient, with verbal reports and multiple Excel files that overwhelm Bhavin. He is frustrated by the lack of clear, digestible insights into sales performance and areas needing attention, such as regions with declining sales. Bhavin seeks a streamlined dashboard that can offer him accurate, visual insights into sales trends, allowing him to make informed, data-driven decisions to boost company sales. The video introduces Power BI as the solution for building this actionable, real-time dashboard.

Keywords

💡Data Analysis Project

A structured initiative aimed at analyzing data to extract insights. In this video, the project focuses on generating sales insights for a company, which helps develop skills relevant for aspiring data analysts and data scientists. The speaker emphasizes the practical approach of this project, which mirrors real corporate environments.

💡Power BI

A business analytics tool used to visualize data and share insights through interactive dashboards. In the project, Power BI is used to create a dashboard that tracks key sales metrics like revenue and sales quantities. While the speaker uses Power BI, they note that the same could be done with Tableau, highlighting its flexibility.

💡Stakeholder Feedback

Input from people who have an interest or role in a project, in this case, people who will use the dashboard to make business decisions. The speaker explains that after building the Power BI dashboard, viewers will act as stakeholders to give feedback, mimicking a real-world corporate process where data analysts refine their work based on feedback from decision-makers.

💡Sales Insights

Actionable information derived from analyzing sales data. The video project aims to generate these insights to help a sales director understand performance trends, identify problem areas, and make data-driven decisions. Sales insights are critical to the goal of improving business outcomes in a dynamic market environment.

💡Bhavan Patel

A fictional character who serves as the sales director of AtliQ Hardware. He represents a common business problem: receiving fragmented, unclear sales data from regional managers and seeking more transparent, data-driven insights. Bhavan Patel’s frustrations with verbal reports and Excel sheets motivate the need for the dashboard solution.

💡AtliQ Hardware

A fictional company specializing in computer hardware and peripherals. The company's sales challenges form the basis of the data analysis project. The project involves analyzing the sales data of AtliQ Hardware to provide solutions that will help its sales director get clearer insights into sales performance.

💡Dashboard

A visual representation of key data points, often used in business to monitor performance and trends. In this project, the dashboard created in Power BI will allow Bhavan Patel to track sales and revenue trends, enabling him to make informed decisions. Dashboards are emphasized as effective tools for simplifying complex data into digestible insights.

💡Data-Driven Decisions

Business decisions that are informed by data analytics rather than intuition or personal opinions. Bhavan Patel, frustrated by verbal reports from managers, seeks to make decisions based on accurate sales data presented in the dashboard, which is a key goal of the project.

💡Regional Managers

Managers responsible for overseeing sales in specific regions, such as North, South, and Central India. In the video, these managers provide verbal sales reports to Bhavan Patel, often painting an overly optimistic picture. The dashboard will help bypass this verbal reporting by presenting the actual sales data directly.

💡Excel Files

Traditional data formats often used in business reporting. In the video, Bhavan Patel is frustrated by the overwhelming number of Excel files containing large amounts of sales data. The project seeks to replace these cumbersome files with a more streamlined and visual approach using a Power BI dashboard.

Highlights

Introduction to a data analysis project focused on generating sales insights for a computer hardware manufacturer.

The project is aimed at individuals pursuing careers as data analysts or data scientists, providing real-world experience.

Emphasis on understanding the end goal of the project and the approach to achieve it, beyond just learning Power BI tools.

The project simulates how data analysis is executed in corporate environments, providing a valuable experience for resumes.

Collaboration with Hemanand, a senior data analyst with over 10 years of experience, who shares his insights in the project.

The project will be broken down into a 6-7 part tutorial series, starting with the problem statement and ending with a Power BI dashboard.

The case study focuses on AtliQ Hardware, a company facing issues with sales tracking in a dynamically growing market.

Bhavan Patel, the Sales Director, struggles to get accurate insights due to verbal updates from regional managers and excessive Excel files.

The goal is to create a dashboard that provides simple, digestible insights, allowing Bhavan Patel to make data-driven decisions.

Power BI dashboards will be built to track sales by region, product, and revenue trends, offering a clear view of the business.

The final project deliverable includes a Power BI dashboard, which users can provide feedback on, simulating a real-world stakeholder scenario.

Incorporating stakeholder feedback is a key element, mimicking how dashboards evolve in corporate settings based on user input.

Bhavan Patel wants to replace manual reports with an automated dashboard that sends email summaries with key business metrics.

The project will emphasize the importance of using accurate data for decision-making, helping to increase sales for AtliQ Hardware.

The dashboard is expected to simplify Bhavan's decision-making process by providing actionable insights directly from the data.

Transcripts

with this video we are starting a data analysis project on generating sales 

insight now this project is perfect for anyone who wants to pursue their career 

as a data analyst or a data scientist my whole intention of doing this project is 

to give you an experience of how data analysis projects are executed in big 

forms so this is not just a simple like power bi tutorial where they teach you 

how to do XYZ thing because those things are just the instruments but there is an 

end goal and there is an approach to achieve that end goal and I'll be 

focusing more on those aspects so that do you get a real experience of you know 

how these projects get executed in a corporate environment and this kind of 

having experience with this kind of projects will look pretty good on your 

resume as well as it will give you a very good exposure as well now I want to 

thank you my friend Hemanand who is a senior data analyst he is working for a 

company in a Germany he's recently promoted as a data analyst manager in 

the UK so he has put a lot of afford I also have more than 10 years of 

experience in the field of data science so we both have put a lot of hard work 

and all the experience we have gained through years we have tried to convey a 

share that experience or via this project now in terms of the project 

breakdown it will be maybe six seven part of tutorial series and what we'll 

do is we'll start with the problem statement where we'll discuss how a 

computer hardware manufacturer is facing issues in terms of their sales and then 

how they hire a team of data analysts and how data analysts will first use the 

Ames grid to define a problem and define strategy to tackle that problem and then 

how the work on data discovery the next step would be data cleaning and data 

merging and the next step will be generating those dashboards 

in in power bi now you can do the same thing in tableau as well doesn't matter 

I'm just going to use power bi for this project so once this project is done and 

once we have built this a power bi dashboard what you will get as an end 

product is this powerful dashboard where you can track revenue numbers and sales 

quantity numbers year over year you can also track the revenue breakdown by 

regions by different products and so on and you can also track the revenue 

trends and one very interesting thing we are going to do is I will hand over this 

dashboard to you so at the end of this these videos you will get this power bi 

dashboard but then I will ask you to act as a stakeholder and give us me and 

Haman on the feedback on that dashboard so because what happens in real life is 

a data analyst will build a dashboard they will give it to stakeholders who 

could be sales director or marketing head and after that those people start 

consuming the dashboard they give the feedback and based on the feedback these 

dashboards evolved so for us you all will be acting 

as that stakeholder and then you give us a feedback and then we will make 

improvements into it at some point I will also invite Hammond for a 

conversation on this project it will be one of the videos where we will discuss 

you know as if we are working in a company and we both are data analysts so 

we will discuss what are the next steps and you know how we can evolve this 

project further with that let's discuss the problem statement first

AtliQ Hardware is a company which supplies computer hardware and peripherals to 

many of the clients they have this client called Excel stores normal stores 

across India and they supply all these equipments to them now ethnic Hardware 

has a head office in Delhi and Delhi India and then they have a lot of 

regional offices throughout the india now bhavan patel is a sales director 

for this company and he's facing a lot of challenges so the challenge is this 

the market is growing dynamically and then he's facing issues in terms of 

tracking the sales in this dynamically growing market and he's having issues 

with the insights of his business so he has this Regional Managers for North 

India South India and Central India whenever he wants to get insights in 

these three regions he would call these people and on the phone 

this local regional manager will give him some insights that okay 

this was the sales last quarter and we are going to grow by this much in the 

next quarter the problem is the conversation which are happening they're 

all verbal and you know there is this habit that all the managers have which 

is they try to paint a rosy picture you know 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 facts so bhavan patel who is a sales director is extremely frustrated with 

this because he sees that overall the sales are declining but when he is 

talking with his regional managers he's not getting a complete picture when he 

asked for our numbers what these people will do is they will give him a lot of 

Excel files okay and this AtliQ hardware is a pretty big business and 

they have so many clients so that these Excel files that you get there are so 

many Excel files with so many rows in it okay and behind put it is very 

frustrated he's like why are giving me the 69 Excel files just tell me in 

simplistic terms how our business is doing what are the biggest areas where 

we need to focus you know so if there is a region where the sales numbers are 

declining maybe we can start some promotion offer or maybe we can engage 

with customers in a more better way so that we can increase of ourselves so he 

is interested in getting a simple understandable digestible insights but 

what these guys are giving is so many suffice and you know we as humans cannot 

consume so much numbers actually so there is a saying which says a picture 

is worth a thousand words so he's more interested in a dashboard 

which he can go and he can look at the real data because data will speak the 

truth okay so if the data is coming from a correct source and if you build a 

visualization such as shown in this image for buying Patel it becomes very 

easy now he can lately he can come to office and he can open this chart you 

know and he can see what how the numbers are trending he can also set monthly 

email reminders where you know at the end of the month power bi will send him 

an email saying that this is how the business looks basically in terms of 

revenues customers and so on so that way now bhavin doesn't have to call these 

managers and whatever information he's getting from power bi will be the actual 

information it will be telling him the truth and then as a sales director he 

can make data-driven decisions and this data-driven decisions will help him 

increase the sales for his company so that's all I have for this introduction 

video in the next video we'll be talking about ins grid and data discovery