The Superstore dataset from Tableau public contains information about products, sales, and profits that you can use to identify key areas of improvement within a fictitious big box superstore retail company. The purpose of the analysis was to produce a profitability dashboard to uncover insights into the profitability of the business across states, regions, categories and subcategories and identify general areas of improvement. Further, the dashboard is intended as a tool for managers to access data in a self-service, visual format to allow for individual investigation on their own time.
The company is trying to increase its operating profit margin. Senior management believes that area managers and merchandising teams lack visibility into how individual product and category decisions fit into the national profitability picture for the company. Further, they believe management is slow to react to trends that negatively affect profitability and they suspect access to timely profit and sales data is a major cause of the issue. Several states and product categories have negative profitability results and senior management want to identify areas of improvement.
Primary data source is the Superstore dataset from Tableau public. Tableau is used to create a dashboard. The dashboard is segmented into State, Regional, Category, Sub-Category, and Brand level data by Gross Margin Profit to identify negatively profitable performing segments. Further, tooltips including top and bottom cities, products, etc as well as sales trends are included so area managers and category managers have better drill down visibility into the data.
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Overall there are several factors that are dragging down profitability. The below are key states and categories with negative profitability that must be the focus of efforts to improve performance.
State-level:
Texas (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas), Illinois (Chicago), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), North Carolina (Burlington), and Colorado (Louisville) in particular are severely negatively profitable, in some cases with state level Gross Margin at -40% in the most recent calendar year of analysis.
Category level:
The furniture category is the worst performing of the three product categories. Tables and Bookcases are both negatively profitable. These are the areas to focus initially.