Worldwide Commerce Performance

Date:  November 3, 2016

TO:  Vice President of Marketing

CC:  Chief Financial Officer

Subject:  Worldwide Commerce Performance

Good morning VP of Operations:

I have been realizing that there are problems with the current business approach of Worldwide Commerce. I have been using the software system Tableau to help me investigate the current business operations and to assess the quality impacts of the several changes I have in mind. I am using Tableau to create a detailed plan for the changes in business to improve revenue and reduce costs. Tableau is a data visualization software that easily connects with data sources. It allows me to transform data into visually appealing dashboards. After exploring different scenarios, I am now able to make a recommendation about my specific marketing and operations improvements.

I explored five different business questions using the Tableau software. I attached my Tableau file so you can follow along with my findings and have hard numbers to refer back to.  I also attached my Tableau dashboard directly to this memo so that you can easily refer to it. When using the file, you are able to scroll across the data to see more information on it and also use the filters on the right side of the data to minimize or broaden the data. This allows you to look more closely at a certain year or category or look at the information as a whole.

 The first question I explored was looking at the profits of Worldwide Commerce by category, the categories including furniture, office supplies, and technology. I realized there was a product sub-category that is being sold frequently, yet bringing Worldwide Commerce poor profits. That product sub-category is tables, which is making almost $800,000 in sales, yet is bringing in a negative profit of $64,083. Tableau giving me options to color coat made it prominent to me where there was a product with negative profits. Refer to the dashboard to see that Tables, in red, is yielding negative profits and to see the other categories and where they lie on the scale.

The next trend I studied was sales by month. I created a line graph for each year, 2011-2014, by month to show the sales amount. July and October have downward spikes in sales. The line graph I created in Tableau makes it very easy to look at the trends of each year individually and as a whole. If you refer to the dashboard, you can see which sales have downward and upward spikes, and that June was a month with increasing number of sales for every year.

I then investigated furniture sales margins. I noticed that tables, a furniture sub-category, has the worst sales margin, and within this sub-category June’s profits were the lowest. I did this by creating a heat map which allowed me to easily identify which month had the lowest profits and which sub-category had the worst sales margin. If you scroll over the different boxes in the heat map, in the Tableau file, it will give you more information on the data, including profit and margin.

        I then wanted to perform a market analysis. I used a bar chart to look at the data. I was able to compare quantities of each country by category and segment. In viewing this I noticed that Canada is a current emerging market for Worldwide Commerce. Every other country seems to be established, besides Africa and EMEA which are growing more slowly. Refer to the dashboard again to see the market analysis and each countries quantity by category.

        The fifth and final individual piece I viewed from the data was the profit by country. I used fillable maps for this to be able to see on a color coated map where each countries lays on the spectrum of highest to lowest profits. The country with the lowest profits is the Netherlands.