ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Project Team 11 - Project Proposal
Project A - The Non-Conventional Sales Dashboard for Company A
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Background
Company A is a mid-size SME with a history of about 30 years in Singapore. The company provides materials and installation services of interior furnishing products such as Wallcovering, Flooring, Carpet, and Fabrics to both local and overseas markets.
Challenges in Business
Similar to many SMEs, the management of company A tends to make business decisions based on past experiences and "gut feeling", which often may not be aligned with the current market trends and opportunities. For instance, marketing campaigns are designed based on historical sales performance and past experiences, with no visibility on current market opportunities - which can be inferred from external data, such as recent transaction of new sales / resales of real estate.
Also, the company has collected much data from the current work processes and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) System. These data are shared with most of the departments, but with each department working in its own silo. The data analysis is thus isolated and function-specified, therefore, they might be interpreted or used differently across departments. This may result in conflicting business analysis and decisions. For example, with reference to the same project data, the product department tends to select data that measure the performance of this project based on the product's gross margin only, without considering other variable costs that the sales department will take into account when measuring the performance of the same project, such as the installation cost. Therefore, both departments may arrive at different conclusions on the same project.
Furthermore, much of the business performance are analyzed based on highly aggregated figures, reported on traditional tools such as MS PowerPoint and MS Excel. When further breakdown of analysis is required on the fly, information may not be available easily as it is tedious to compile the required information.
Project Objectives
With the above challenges, the team sees the opportunity to design an integrated performance dashboard with the following objectives in mind:
- To benchmark the company's actual performance with the market potential; by comparing internal data with external data
- To provide a centralize and interactive analytic business platform, integrating analysis on customers, products, and sales performance
- To apply Shneiderman’s mantra of "Overview first,zoom and filter, then details-on-demand" in developing user-oriented dashboard.
Motivation
With this project, we hope that it will help company A to:
- Realize the benefits of comparing internal with external data in business decision-making
- Provide a single and integrated platform for key management members
- Reduce the time and effort to compile reports and analysis
Also, this will provide a concept to other businesses, especially SMEs, in how analysis can be simplified and yet insightful using visual analytics.
Visualization Modeling Strategy
The overview of our modelling strategy is as below:
Data Sources
External Data -
These data are downloaded from the various external sources of data, as below:
- Realis : Sales Transactions data on private residential estates & commerical estates
- Singstats : Singapore Residents by Planning Area/Subzone, Age Group and Sex, June 2000 - 2016, and Type of Dwelling, June 2000 - 2016
- Data.gov.sg: HDB's resales price by geographical area
- List of Hotels: To Be Confirmed
Internal Data -
These data are downloaded from the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System of Company A. The tables/datasets in used as below:
- Sales Transactional data from Company A from Year N to N + 2
- Customer Master
- Item Master
Potential Project Risk
The expected potential project risk as below;
- Quality of internal and external data that can be retrieved
- Technical challenges in building dashboard with interactive visualization using java scripts such as d3.js, dc.js, and Crossfilter.
