Hello there! This is my very first post and what made me write this title is the essence of running in the race too fast without knowing the fundamentals or concepts. Keep things simple and see the miracle.
My name is Keyur Joshi, having keen interest in product and business analytics and enhancements. There are plenty of incidents where I found people too much involved into critical thinking while doing the analysis using any of those trending tools. And this brought me here to write up and keep things simple for those who are finding it difficult in analysis. Especially, the new bees, freshers, entrants, enthusiasts or the ones who are having interest in “How to read and understand the data?” this could be a thoughtful post for easier productivity and standing out uncommon.
I understand there are many perspectives to each business and every individual is eager to contribute some or the other way. Please park all those perspectives for a while and try to see what data is trying to tell you. Lets listen to or observe it carefully.
Most of us are aware of Ecommerce due to its vast acceptance and ease of operations at finger tips. Thus, choosing this case study for easier understanding and reach.
Lets dive in……
The screenshot below has information about sales.
Note: Picked this from Kaggle https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/aungpyaeap/supermarket-sales
Lets divide the whole process into segments now. This is just like a strategy play what we have heard Divide and Conquer! We know it & now its the time to apply it. The below points entails the process on reading the datasets.
1. KNOW THE PROBLEM STATEMENT OR THE PURPOSE WELL!
Consider the data in the spreadsheet, there could be several challenges that the business is struggling like, which product lines are not fruitful, what is the overhead cost,
customers likely purchases,
which products are having most margin but not adding up to revenue due to lower sales,
customer spend ability,
sustainability of product,
improvements in the product required,
how much inventory to be maintained,
number of average orders placed for a product etc. etc.
Right?
Always remember this first step is very important and crucial. Not all challenges can be targeted with the data provided. So focus on the problem statement and the data to identify which challenges you can cover in this analysis.
2. IDENTIFY THE RELEVANT DATA AND JUSTIFIED MEANING TO IT.
Once you identify the challenges it becomes easier to focus on the dataset. In other words, it is simple to relate the challenged topic and the available data to get some results.
Remember most of the time, you will have your best friend to rely and that is “assumption”. But don’t go for results with blind trust, unless you have someone to walkthrough all the definitions and meanings, which are inline with your assumptions.
Here, I am adding few heads from the spreadsheet that can be the relevant data for the challenges mentioned above.
Product Line — simply a parent category of the actual products being sold.
Gender — to understand and categorize your customers.
Quantity — the ordered quantity for the products.
Gross Income — the income from each product line.
3. START RELATING THE DATA.
Now comes the actual job relating the data to our challenge and showing the result. Say, you want to target the first challenge: Which product lines are not fruitful?
The simplest way is to understand the sales of all categories or product lines. You don’t need much of coding here, just add Excel charts or use Pivot tables to know the product line business.
You can plot in multiple ways — that gives respective meaning to the data. Example
— Plot Product Line (X axis) with Total (Y axis)
— Plot Product Line (X axis) with Gross Income (Y axis)
— Plot Product Line (X axis) with Quantity (Y axis)
Each of these are possible and hold meaning for business. The most relevant could be Gross Income as this gives direct picture of Product Line Income and thus makes it easier to decide which are fruitful!
But hold on…! a small tip: Business User or Stakeholders have there own methods to derive such reports or analytics, so always take a discussion and confirm on your findings with them. Before finalizing the results on your own. ;)
4. SEE THE QUICK RESULTS.
This could be a bonus, as you all now know the first three steps. This step is to ensure what are the other easy pickings from the data.
What we can produce from the spreadsheet is:
— Sales by Branch
— Sales by City
— Sales by Customer Type or Gender
— Per Day Sales utilizing the Date.
— Hourly Sales utilizing the Time.
— Average Rating for each product line.
— Most used Payment option by customers.
Voila!! a lot of results for quick business overview. And we have not yet even entered into complexity.
You can do an advancement to these quick results too. Like, Average Rating for each Product Line can be further diagnosed with added parameter of Customer Type. This will help identify whether Members are giving high ratings or even Normal customers or Non Members are also happy with the product. There’s a lot you can think off here. And I leave it to you as an assignment to brainstorm and develop the ability.
5. CREATE BASELINE FOR YOUR ADVANCE ANALYTICS.
Now you are ready for the big picture implementation and presentation. As you have well communicated with the data and understood what it was trying to tell. You can do wonders with advanced analytics.
Make effective use of several libraries, packages within Machine learning, Forecasts and derive greater results that will amaze your Client.
Just to touch upon the fact here. Ofcourse the data is having date and time, you can do the Year to Year comparison to check whether the business is progressing or declining.
Forecasting the overall sales OR for a product line for the next month or quarter.
Do the customer segmentation and provide this information to the marketing team to help reach customers with better and desirable offers.
Optimizing discounts or product prices to know customer reactions.
Recommendation of the products. Likely bought together, to add relevant upsell or cross sell items.
Improved Supply chain to lower the risk of loosing business by keeping your customers waiting.
So many things to do with this same information that you have. With a topic of interest, tie up your shoes and then be ready for the race. This way you will have a focused goal to reach and you can run better with equipment and gadgets knowing the comfort of its use!!
6. USE THE PRO TOOLS AND DELIVER MORE!
This is the last step where you will make use of many marketed trending tools. I am not going to name any of them here as these are preferential choices for each individual.
But the motive to stick to basics, concepts and fundamentals which will definitely help you achieve the scenarios in any industry and business.
Most likely, you will end up using trending tools and technology to achieve the results but what matters most is the thinking ability, big picture vision, understanding of the data and the implementation for the purposed goal.
I’ll write some other time on point 5 and 6 as these are today’s trending hot topics. And enthusiasts are looking forward to develop skills in it. The belief is to learn the process and details, you’ll end up having skills and implementation knowledge, directly or indirectly adding value to your high note career.
Hope this article was helpful. And you will adapt the things and share the experiences on “keeping it simple yet effective” technique. Thank you for being patient reader. I’ll look forward to add more articles on experiences and learnings here. Keep visiting and supporting.
