A global big box retailer, Big Deals (BD), has asked you to assist in optimizing their product line and revenue stream. BD was one of the first major players in its industry and has grown into a market leader, typically with at least 50% of the market share. BD offers products in the following categories:

• Audio: car stereos and receivers
• Cameras: point and shoot, single-lens reflex (SLR) and video
• Computers: desktops, monitors, notebooks and tablets
• TV: LCD, LED, plasma and projection
• Video players: Blu-ray and DVD

BD operates in most countries around the world including: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela. BD is headquartered in the United States and management gathers competitive information by product type at the domestic level in the US and then collectively for all remaining countries internationally. The US is BDs largest market by about six fold. Below is an overview of global and US sales for the last three years.

	2012 sales	2013 sales	Decrease	2014 sales	(Decrease)/ increase
Global	$1,627,597,055	$1,625,075,446	(0.15)%	$1,507,540,941	(7.23)%
US	333,072,449	329,679,511	(1.02)%	356,662,846	8.18%

With the entry of numerous on-line retailers, BD is losing market share and its margins are shrinking. While the symptoms of this market dynamic are very evident to BD, their response strategies have only slightly changed their course.

BD would like you to analyze their situation and recommend a strategy to get them back on track. Over the next few weeks, you worked closely to interview key company personnel, analyze operations and gather data (both corporate and competitive) for further analysis. At the conclusion of this assessment, you determined there are two primary strategies that could drive significant improvements for BD and respond to the companys needs.

1. Reduce inventory of slow-moving and obsolete products
2. Enhance the marketing strategy by product type

While everyone feels confident that the strategies are sound, it is also understood that you still need to provide BDs management with good insights and action steps supported by data analytics to achieve true value.

For each of the strategies, you need to determine some key questions to ask before you can look at the data to help give you the insights you need to help management make decisions to support their strategies.

After thinking about this you came up with a series of questions to ask to gain insights from company data:

1. Reduce inventory of slow-moving and obsolete products
   1. How do the sales of each product compare with forecasts?
   2. How do the sales of each product compare with prior year sales?
   3. How are the sales of each product compared with the competition?
   4. How are the sales of each product compared with other product sales?
   5. If there is a particular product not selling well, is this specific to any particular region?
2. Enhance the marketing strategy by product type
   1. Are there any poorly performing products in high-performing countries?
   2. If there is a poorly performing product in a high-performing country, how is this product performing compared with the sales in other countries and the competition?

Data Sets

You are given the following data sets: (which are also posted in this module).

1. Big Deals Country Sales
2. Big Deals Project Sales

Note: You may not have to use all the data provided but you will be using a majority of it.

To-Do

Part A

• Review all data sets.
• Understand the data provided and its layout.

Part B

Using Tableau, create your own analytical visualization such as a worksheet or dashboard to analyze the data and present it to Big Deals based on the questions above.

Tableau (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. (Links to an external site.) is offered free to academics and full-time students. Tableau provides many training videos (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. (Links to an external site.) to help you get started. Each video and transcript can be downloaded. Watch and review the videos you feel will help you prepare a tableau visual (either a worksheet or dashboard):

• Getting Started (3 Videos)
• Visual Analytics (22 Videos)
• Dashboards and Stories (7 videos)

Deliverables:

Submit your completed file in a tableau format (.twbx) format. In a separate word document, explain your visual as if you were addressing Big Deals. This should be a short 1-2 explanatory paragraph of your data findings.