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PROJECT OVERVIEW

Steps
  1. 01PROJECT OVERVIEW
  2. 02DATASET REQUIREMENTS
  3. 03PROJECT ROADMAP
  4. 04STEP-BY-STEP IMPLEMENTATION
  5. 05EXPECTED OUTPUT AFTER EVERY MAJOR STEP — SUMMARY TABLE
  6. 06VISUALIZATION AND DASHBOARD
  7. 07INSIGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
  8. 08FINAL PROJECT DELIVERABLES
  9. 09FURTHER READING & REFERENCES
  10. 10FINAL PROJECT CHECKLIST

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Project Title: Executive Sales & Operations Dashboard (Power BI)

Business Scenario: You are working as a Data Analyst supporting the executive team at BrightCart, a US retailer selling furniture, office supplies, and technology products (2014–2017 order history, ~5,000 orders). Every month, four Regional Managers — Elena Ruiz (West), Marcus Chen (East), Priya Nair (Central), and Jordan Blake (South) — present separate spreadsheets to the executive team, each formatted differently. The CEO wants one single dashboard that shows revenue growth and operational health (are we shipping on time?) side by side, so leadership can run the whole monthly review from one screen.

(Note: the Regional Manager names are a scenario overlay added for this project so you can practice building a “manager scorecard” — they are not part of the original dataset, which only contains a Region field. Everything else in this guide is a real, computed number from the actual file.)

Company / Industry Context: BrightCart promises customers a shipping speed based on the Ship Mode they pay for (e.g. “First Class” should ship faster than “Standard Class”). Whether the company actually hits those promises is an operations question that’s just as important to the CEO as revenue growth.

Business Problem: Leadership can see total revenue is growing, but has no single view that combines growth (is the business getting bigger?) with operations (are we actually delivering what we promise?). Nobody currently tracks whether paid, faster shipping tiers are even meeting their own targets.

Project Objective: Build a Power BI dashboard combining sales growth trends, regional performance, and shipping-SLA compliance into one executive view — and turn the findings into a specific operations recommendation.

Key Stakeholders: - CEO (main sponsor — wants one dashboard, not four separate spreadsheets) - The four Regional Managers (want their own performance visible and comparable) - Operations Director (wants shipping SLA compliance by ship mode) - Finance (wants revenue growth and profit margin trends)

Final Business Goal: Give leadership one recurring view that answers “are we growing?” and “are we operationally reliable?” in the same meeting, and identify the single biggest operational fix available.

What Will the Student Finally Build?

  1. A cleaned, dashboard-ready sales & operations dataset

  2. A documented data-cleaning process (Power Query steps)

  3. A Power BI data model with calculated columns, time-intelligence, and DAX measures

  4. A multi-page interactive Power BI dashboard combining growth KPIs and SLA KPIs

  5. A set of written business insights (Finding → Insight → Business Impact → Recommendation)

  6. A short final presentation / summary report of findings

Tools used in this project: Microsoft Power BI Desktop, Excel/CSV (as the data source), Power Query, DAX.