You have been hired by the CFO of Dillard’s Department Store to help with some holiday season data analysis.  Your boss is concerned that the stores and divisions as a whole may not be on track for their sales targets, and that even if they are, they don’t currently have the visibility they need to understand their progress.  Each division is led by a divisional manager and consists of multiple stores.  Division managers are interested in the performance of their division and individual stores. 

You are in the Christmas Holiday season of 2015, which starts Thanksgiving day and runs through 12/31.  Each store and division has sales targets that they are responsible for hitting for the entirety of the season.  Note that this target is for the total actual sales (that is “SALE_PRICE” in the TRANSACT table) not counting returns.   Generally speaking, another target is that 10-day sales should be 25% of your total target for the holiday season.  (Actually, the firm has daily targets for the entire Christmas season and your dashboard should reflect the idea of daily updates).  Additionally, mark down percentage is a key target.  Your firm typically encounters 30% marked down (that is (original – actual)/original) expressed as a %).  In addition to these, there are certainly other relevant metrics you should consider producing that would help address questions that store and/or district managers would be asking (think in terms of what information would be useful to you if you were in their shoes and trying to achieve the goals stated above). 

Your boss has asked you to create a dashboard for your group of stores as well as a dashboard specific to one store with performance indicators that divisional managers can use in talking with their Store managers.  Populate your dashboard as of the end of the 10 day sales window that begins Thanksgiving day (through 12/5/2015). Store assignments are 145, 335, 512, to find the Division your stores are in you'll want to look at the Store table in your data.  Your overall goal is to submit one primary dashboard, one for one specific store that you select from your group, along with one or more supporting views with additional detail in the form of relevant tables and other more detailed information.  Design the appearance of your dashboards, to reflect that the data will be updated daily through the rest of the season, i.e. generated with the assumption that the day they are generated is the last available day of data.

Prepare a concise, no more than 7-page memo, dated 12/6/2015 – written to your store managers based on the data.  It should speak to both the general dashboard as well as have a section specifically directed at the store you select for the store specific dashboard, each covering specific information relevant to the target audience.  Clearly explain what Key Performance Indicators the dashboard shows, how they can be used day by day as the Christmas season progresses to manage the store, and what trends you believe they are showing that your managers should be trying to either address/resolve or take advantage.  Consider including one or more screen shots with professional-looking annotations to help draw attention to or explain key pieces of your dashboard.

There are really four parts to this assignment – understand the data you’ve been provided, evaluate your assigned stores, build your dashboards, and write a memo outlining the use of the dashboard and the relevance of the metrics you chose.  You should also include prospective suggestions on how to improve sales based on the data in your dashboard.  Submit your Tableau file along with your memo (in Word format) in Canvas. 

Minimum technical requirements:

1. You must limit your reporting to your assigned dates and stores.  
2. Your dashboard needs interactive capability.

Note: The expected deliverables for this assignment are (1) your Tableau file(s) containing your dashboard and supporting information, and (2) the memo outlining usage of the dashboard and relevance of the data you've selected.