Samsung Sales Status Dashboard - Case Study Example

BUSINESS INTELIGENCE Student’s name Course &Code Professor’s name University City Date List of Figures Picture 1: Overview of Dashboard Picture 2: Comparison With competitors Picture 3: Annual Sales Contents 1.0 Challenges of developing the Dashboard 2 2.0 The Type of BI Users Intended Audience 4 3.0 Data Used and its Importance for the BI intended Audience 5 4.0 Recommendations 8 4.1 Benefits of Investing further in Business Intelligence 8 4.2 Recommendations for the Easier Implementation of Business Intelligence 9 5.0 The Next Dashboard 10 Samsung Sales Status Dashboard 1.0 Challenges of developing the Dashboard Content displaying Among fundamental challenges of creating dashboard, the displaying of Samsung sales status board in a single screen proved to be challenging. As such, the content is posing too much destruction, poor clarity, complicated to examined and understood. The content displayed indicated the challenge of visual monitoring since the power BI designer does not provide sequential moves to support the visual monitoring. Additionally, the difficulties arise on how to create an overview of the Samsung sell products and how to speedily identify sales problem requiring too much attention. The power BI design poses complications on how to design automated responses such as sending, receiving & retrieval of emails hence limited information sharing with suppliers, producers and customers. As such, the sale status dashboard provides flashy visual effects yet the information within is so much condensed hence during analysis complications arise. Analyzing contents through colored charts and graphs pose some challenges. As such, the majority of the audience might experience colorblind biological situation hence picking up the simple color to fit the ease understanding of the targeted audience. The designing of the dashboards become complicated since it is not only supposed to look flashy but also to give the right information viewed at a glance. Additionally, adding text boxes, the label, and calculation needed is problematic. The ability to connect the dashboard to an existing Excel powerpoint pivot data models and swapping between EPV and power business intelligent designer data model is problematic. As such, if any changes are done on the power pivot, the only solution is to add the changes to the report hence time-consuming or forgetfulness that might contribute towards wrong data interpretation. Disable & Enable Reports During the development of the above dashboard, it is a realization that once a report enables in the power BI it cannot be disabled. As such, the mistake done on the report cannot be edited but rather it needs to be deleted are restructures again hence taking too much time to do a new Samsung sales status report. 2.0 The Type of BI Users Intended Audience The development of the power BI specifically targets the company’s management, prospective investors for the company and financial analysts. The management of Samsung Company will utilize the power BI to make important and influential decisions for the company. In addition, the decisions made will be informed since they will be provided form a resource that is timely, accurate and relevant. The dashboard created contains imperative information that can be quickly accessed and the platform can be navigated singly (Angelo et al., 2011). The statistics and information on the dashboard can be analyzed and further interpreted through comparisons by the viewer. As such the user can gain new insight from the data given. The analysis of the data will enable managers to discover root causes of problems not perceived earlier and additionally identify opportunities available. Power BI is the solution for Samsung to gain a competitive edge over its competitors in the market. With consumers gaining adverse familiarity with the Web, the company will get a larger audience with less effort from the use of the power BI. Dashboards provide an accessible platform to enterprise data and help prospective investors to track the performance of organizations that they would love to invest in (Mohanty, 2013). The dashboard created for Samsung will enable potential investors to understand the health of Samsung as an organization. Essential data such as key performance indicators, trend indicators, graphs and tables presented on the sales of the company provide further insight, and if the levels are satisfactory, then the interest parties will be assured of a return on their investment. The power BI has broadened the sources of data which financial analysts can use to assess an organization’s data (Angelo et al., 2011). Analysts will currently be able to query the data that has been stored in the various departments of Samsung Company without being virtually on the company ground. The navigation through reports is easier as there are no dissimilar interfaces or multiple tools to access. The architecture of the dashboard is such that all the data is available on a single platform. 3.0 Data Used and its Importance for the BI intended Audience Data that has been input in the dashboard is inclusive of balance sheets analysis, income statement analysis, cash flow analysis and several others that are discussed as follows in this segment. The report of the balance sheet of Samsung aids accountants in closing the books by providing a direct analysis of the summary provided to the data. The figures are linked to accounts where the user can derive further information simply by clicking on the respective figure. The income statement is an important component for and understanding of the operations of a business (Collier, 2015). Managers can view revenue, profitability, and loss and additionally compare the previous statements the current one. BI allows for the development of performance analysis that is more accurate and timely. Navigation that is detailed is permitted, and a more refined margin is produced for the company. A cash flow statement summarizes the activities of operation of an organization (Collier, 2015). This further provides insight into the aptitude of an organization to generate cash. The management of Samsung relies on the statement of the cash flow to decide on financial and operational procedures. Investors also depend on this information to make investment decisions. The Power BI will provide automatic and real-time generation of the cash flow statement. The BI will be able to integrate analysis that is sophisticated such as exposure to foreign currency and forecasts of the cash flow. For the financial budgeting and forecasting, the BI allows an analysis that is detailed, specifically showing the actual performance of Samsung against its budget and predicting the future performance so that operations can be strategically planned, and performance monitored (De Leon et al., 2012 ). The management of risk is enabled through the power BI the risk analysis will show the rate of exposure to risk and forecasts of possible risks. The assessment can deduce a pattern that shows activities that could result in the occurrence of a risk. This will in consequence assist management to mitigate the possible forms of risk. Through the analysis of the channels that are used in the promotion of products to customers, the company management is able to understand the effective capabilities of its different channels. As such the management can retain the effective ones and eliminate channels that are not productive. The channel analysis furthermore provides the performance by sales margin and enables comparison of the sales channel to the consumer segment. The ability of the power BI to provide analysis that is more advanced enables the assessment of individual channels, channel pricing and matching of the channel supply to the demand by the respective channel. The power BI will assist Samsung in analyzing its competitors. Competition is imperative in its effect on the revenue of an organization (Collier, 2015; Ranjan, 2015). There are also implications for the development of products and application of company strategies to deal with competition. The competitive performance can be invoked from the dashboard and success against competitors rated. Further analysis can assess how effective a competitive situation can be and plan for strategies to gain a competitive edge. A report of the sales performance of the power BI will enable Samsung as a company to view the achievements or the failures of its sales department and provide a summary of various financial periods vis-à-vis the sales performance. The assessment of sales performance will assist the management in making plans for improvement in the department of sales (Viers and Christian, 2015). Picture 1: Overview of Dashboard Picture 2: Comparison With competitors Picture 3: Annual Sales 4.0 Recommendations The following are some recommendations for the use of the power BI 4.1 Benefits of Investing further in Business Intelligence BI possesses the ability to consolidate mega data on categories such as client information (Derksen & Luftman, 2013). In such an instance, the business can personalize sales and marketing to suit a particular consumer based on the information available to the particular consumer (Stackowiak et al., 2015). Customer information is currently the major focus of business management and to be able to manage all customer data in one platform would be a remarkable achievement for Samsung. BI combines data from sales, the products and service and the customer to assess profitability information and the revenue potential of customers in different segments. The integration of all useful and related data on the product, customer and sales allows comparison of variables that affect the productivity of the company and thus necessitate for the review of operations to maximize performance (Ballard et al., 2014). Analyses of the business trend of the company in comparison with that of other companies through the BI gives accurate information on the particular trends and provides for the predicting of future reports and consequently act on the present situation in terms of change or consistency (Derksen & Luftman, 2013; Cue et al., 2015). The use of BI enables the understanding of which products are selling in every aspect such as the location, the time and the reason for the revenue for the respective product and such influence the stocking which in turn results in maximization of sales. The interface of the BI is easy to use as it depicts a comprehensive yet understandable picture of the trends and patterns of sales. 4.2 Recommendations for the Easier Implementation of Business Intelligence In order to predict the profitability of customers and avoid second guessing, the customer value can be calculated on the power BI and strategic decisions made to provide products for customers with a higher value for the company. Consequently, their loyalty will be achieved thus the retention of loyal customers. The management of sales and the sales department requires a complex understanding of its overall and specific operations. The duties and information sometimes get mixed up with personnel doing excessive or less work. With the introduction of the power BI, information is systematically organized with allocation specified and this information is further protected from unauthorized users (Ballard et al., 2014). There is the need to develop strategies that are useful in detection and prevention of fraud. It is relatively easy to discover fraud through the use of business intelligence. Aside from detecting fraud through the analysis of statistics, BI can establish the areas that could probably result in fraud and help avoid the occurrence before is transpires. Management requires looking into the drivers of revenue and costing using a deeper method that narrows down to the entries in the journals. With the use of the Power BI, the management can access detailed information from the single platform and compare it with transaction details, still on the same platform. This is recommended as it saves time and enables a direct comparison that elevates the chances of accuracy (Ballard et al., 2014). The transactions can also be directly linked to the persons who performed them and thus accountability and responsibility are achieved. 5.0 The Next Dashboard The proposition for the next dashboard would be one that includes information on segmentation analysis of customers. This would be helpful in identification of groups on the basis of their behavioral patterns to assess their potential and give products relevant to each segment. An inclusion of the analysis of customer retention and attrition into the dashboard would additionally be imperative in the improvement of programs for customer retention and enable forecasts of potential customers for the company. Reference List Angelo, R. F., Azmi, A., Bajpai, C., Britton, C. P., Kaufman, N. W., Kumar, A., & Raybourn, D. (2011). U.S. Patent No. 7,890,517. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Ballard, C., Compert, C., Jesionowski, T., Milman, I., Plants, B., Rosen, B., & Smith, H. (2014). Information Governance Principles and Practices for a Big Data Landscape. IBM Redbooks. Collier, P. M. (2015). Accounting for Managers: Interpreting accounting information for decision making. John Wiley & Sons. Cui, Z., Damiani, E. & Leida, M. (2015). Benefits of Ontologism in Real Time Data Access. Digital Ecosystems and Technologies Conference, DEST '07.pp. 392-397. De Leon, L., Rafferty, P. D., & Herschel, R. (2012). Replacing the Annual Budget with Business Intelligence Driver-Based Forecasts. Derksen, B., & Luftman, J. (2013). Management and Technology Trends for IT Executives. Compact_2013-4 pp, 7-16. Mohanty, S., Jagadeesh, M., & Srivatsa, H. (2013). Big Data Imperatives: Enterprise ‘Big Data’Warehouse,‘BI’Implementations and Analytics. Apress. Ranjan, J. (2015). Business Intelligence: Concepts, Components, Techniques and Benefits. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Stackowiak, R., Rayman, J. & Greenwald, R. (2015). Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions. International Technological Business Journal vol. 6. Viers, K., Presson, E. & Christian, J. (2015). Dashboards and Audit Tools for Quality Management and Performance Improvement. Harvard Business Journal vol. 3 pp.45 Read More