Power BI Project (DIY)
One of the objectives of the Power BI project is to give students an opportunity to learn and apply Power BI, a business intelligence tool, to analyzing “BIG DATA”. The application is to evaluate the financial performance of a fictitious company with transaction data given in the EXCEL worksheet, Power BI Financial Sample modified.xlsx.
Please find below some suggestions for working on the project:
1. Take a quick look at the data to gain a general understanding of the variables (columns), such as Product, Segment, etc.
2. Decide on the variables (columns) of interest for your assessment of the company’s financial performance, such as Sales units, Revenue, etc.
3. Decide on the type of visuals, e.g., clustered column chart, pie chart, gauge, etc., that are relevant in presenting the company’s financial performance.
4. Create the dashboard (at most three Exhibits (dashboards)) with a few visuals.
5. Prepare a two-page report evaluating the company’s financial performance based on the dashboard(s) and visual(s) developed.
-Please note that there is no “perfect” solution to the Power BI project. Each team will choose their own visuals and their report will be based on the selected visuals.
-Me and my teammate are splitting up #5, I am in charge of introduction, dashboard 3 analysis, and conclusion. See the document “INSTRUCTIONS” for more details.
Q: Can we get more context to the assignment?
A: You must create the context. You have been given data on companies. That is where you add value. You must change the data to information and give a write up. You can talk about patterns or trends you observe in evaluating the organization and in the introduction you can highlight the scope of the body of the write-up. You can comment on the industry you think these companies belong to: manufacturing, service, healthcare, etc. What do you think from the data given? Bring this data to Power BI, convert it to information by observing patterns and trends and exceptions. What would you do if your supervisor provided you with credit card data of 200,000 clients and told you to convert it to information. What context would you need? Just observe trends and patters and comment upon it. It is open ended by design. The context is cost data analysis. You are welcome to make qualitative comments too on the costs.
-The excel file I attached contains background information about the company, and contains the information that you see in the dashboards/visuals.
-the analysis and the dashboards/visuals should make sense when looked at in conjunction with
each other.
Q: What does evaluation of financial performance mean? Do I need to do a lot of calculations? Does this mean I have to focus on (specific financial metric)?
A: Not necessarily. The assignment is designed to be open -ended and as such, you can choose the topics your group would like to evaluate. What’s important is that you answer the “so what?” of your observations- the report should not just be a summary of what can be seen in the dashboards (i.e. “sales was the highest in this month at $XX and the lowest in this month at $XX” would be considered a summary and not the purpose of this evaluation). Along these lines, if you decide to include calculations outside of the scope of the assignment that requires multiple assumptions, state your assumptions in your final submission.
Power BI Project (DIY)
One of the objectives of the Power BI project is to give