Assessment 3 - Business Analytics Project (Due 03 )
/
1
1
/
2
0
2
4
Description
The Insight Toys Company is an organization that manufactures toys at different production sites
worldwide. We are trying to find ways to be more competitive and are striving to increase customer
satisfaction. Managers of finance department need to better understand profitability and sales issues.
Data
The INSIGHT_TOY_DEMO data set, contains 57 variables and 1,600,000 observations. It represents the
historic transactional data from the company.
Data Dictionary
Field Description
Customer Customer No.
Facility Facility (99) - sales office, or manufacturing location.
Facility City City where the facility is located.
Facility Continent Continent where the facility is located.
Facility Country Country where the facility is located.
Facility Opening Date Used to calculate the Facility Age
Facility Region Region (within a country) where the facility is located.
Geography Hierarchy A hierarchy made up of Continents, Countries, Regions, Cities and
Customers
Product Brand 2 product brands: “Novelty” and “Toy”.
Product Line 8 product lines. A line belongs to one product brand (see above)
Product Make 71 product makes. A make belongs to one product line (see above).
Product Style 335 product styles. A style belongs to one product make (see above).
Products Hierarchy A hierarchy that was created to drill down from product brands to
line, make, style and product ID.
Sales Rep ID of the sales representative that made the sale.
Order Order No.
page 1
Field Description
Transaction Date Date of the sale, from January 1 st, 1998 to September 7th, 2005.
Transaction Month Month and year of the sale, from January 1998 to September 2005.
Transaction Weekday Day of the week when the sale happened (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc).
Transaction Year Year of the sale, from 1998 to 2005.
Unit Manufacturing unit that was used to assemble that product. There
are 166 units in total.
Unit Status Status of the manufacturing unit (eg. “Active”, Failure”, etc). There
are 5 possible status.
Customer Distance Distance from the customer address to the nearest sales facility.
Anywhere from 100 meters to 50 kilometers.
Customer Satisfaction An evaluation of the customer satisfaction, at the time of the sale.
Scores vary from about 20% (very low satisfaction) all the way to
100%.
Facility Age Age of the facility, from 0 (brand new) to about 32 years old.
Facility Efficiency An evaluation of the efficiency of the facility’s operations, based on
multiple management factors. Scores vary from 30% to 100%.
Gross Margin Product Sale minus Product Cost of Sale
Gross Margin Ratio A percentage of gross margin, calculated by dividing Gross Margin
by Product Sale for each transaction.
Product Cost of Sale Product Cost of Sale. The purchase and production cost of the
product sold.
Product Material Cost The raw material component of the Cost of Sale.
Product Price (target) The standard ideal product price – if the product was deemed
100% quality and the market conditions were ideal, this is what
the Product Sale price would be set at.
Product Quality An evaluation of the manufacturing quality of the product. Scores
vary from 60% to 100%.
Product Sale The actual revenue of the sale of that product.
Sales Rep Customer Amount of potential revenue for all possible customers in a given
Base sales representative’s region.
Sales Rep Customers Number of customers a sales representative is responsible for at a
given date.
Sales Rep ID ID of the sales representative who made that sale.
Sales Rep Rating The internal organization’s evaluation of the performance of a sales
representative.
page 2
Field Description
Unit Actual Products produced from a given manufacturing unit at that point in
time.
Unit Age Age of a manufacturing unit.
Unit Capacity Maximum production capacity of a given unit for a given period.
Unit Discard Rate A percentage representing the number of products discarded for
quality reason, divided by the unit target (see below).
Unit Lifespan A ratio represented by 100% minus (age of the manufacturing unit
divided by its theoretical lifespan).
Unit Lifespan Limit The Unit Lifespan (see above) point at which a facility replaces
manufacturing units.
Unit Reliability A ratio representing how reliable a manufacturing unit is. It is made
up of products discarded for quality reasons, divided by total amount
of products assembled by the unit, for a given time period.
Unit Target Products that should be produced from a given manufacturing unit
at that point in time.
Unit Yield Rate A ratio of products produced (‘Unit Actual’) vs. that should be
produced (‘Unit Target’).
xyCustomer Lat Latitude where the customer is located
xyCustomer Lon Longitude where the customer is located
xyFacility Lat Latitude where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Lon Longitude where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Continent Lat Latitude of the continent where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Continent Lon Longitude of the continent where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Country Lat Latitude of the country where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Country Lon Longitude of the country where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Region Lat Latitude of the region where the selling facility is located
xyFacility Region Lon Longitude of the region where the selling facility is located
xyFacility City Lat Latitude of the city where the selling facility is located
xyFacility City Lon Longitude of the city where the selling facility is located
Product Product ID included in the order.
page 3
Assessment 3 - Business Analytics Project
Part 1: Analytics Reports (50%)
Business intelligence (BI) reports are very important communication tools in managerial
decision-making and are targeted to a variety of audiences that include accountants, finance
professionals, marketers, salespeople, product managers, among others. The relevance, utility
and timeliness of presented information are critical for effective and efficient decision-making.
Business Case:
You are the manager of the business intelligence department at Insight Toys Corporation, one of
the world’s largest toy manufacturers with operations across the globe. As a member of cross-
functional committee, three departments managers have asked you for help in developing a
case study (a visual story line) that will help the executive team for better and faster
understanding of the presented information. They want to go over some facts about current
business performance and then use that data to collectively make the case for a new strategy.
The managers are not sure what type of data/numbers will ultimately be used, and therefore,
they have asked you to make the business report as flexible as possible in order to allow for
further explorations, e.g., filtering, slicing and dicing.
Instructions for report creation and marking criteria:
• Use at least six different Descriptive analytics objects (e.g. from Tables, Graphs, Controls,
Containers, Content, etc).
• Use at least two Advanced Predictive Analytics objects (e.g. from Decision Tree,
Forecasting, Text Analytics, Clustering, etc)
• Create a Business Intelligence (BI) report with at least three sections on operations (10%),
marketing (10%) and finance (10%). This BI report should include key facts about
company’s performance on a global and regional level. These facts should include both
financial and marketing related data.
• Presentation and storytelling criteria (20%):
o Decide on the appropriate visualization tool/type to use based on the data you
choose, and information you intend to portray. How will these charts be perceived
by a non-technical user? What questions he/she may ask and answer with it?
(10%)
o Make use of interactive feature such as global and local filters, text inputs, text
content displays and images. (10%)
• Your final BI report should be submitted as a recorded presentation (7 minutes max.)
Part 2: Investigation (50%)
You are to write a short research report [2000 words maximum, excluding illustrations (tables,
charts, graphs), references and appendices] on
“Critically evaluate the role of big data and business analytics in supporting business decision-
making and gaining competitive advantage.”
for one of the following sectors:
• Social Media Services
• Online Retail Business / Online Services Business
• Human Resources Management
• Banking and Financial Management
page 4
• Automotive (e.g. cars, planes, ships, rails, drones)
• Transports Logistics (e.g. aviation, shipping, rails, trucking, pipelines, warehousing,
postal)
• Manufacturing
• Hospitality (e.g. hotels, restaurants, catering)
• Retail (Bricks and Mortar)
• Utility (e.g. electricity, water, gas)
• Energy (e.g. hydro, coal, solar, wind, biomass, gas, nuclear)
• Risks Management (e.g. insurance, any security)
• Real Estate, Building and Construction Management
• Infrastructure Management
• Healthcare
page 5
