Case Study: Best Bike Ever (BBE) Company
1. The Case
Best Bike Ever (BBE) is a company started as a local family business more than 40 years ago in North
America. The company sells a wide range of bikes, bike parts and accessories, as well as sport clothing
and equipment related to biking. BBE grew rapidly in its first decade and soon expanded to an
international business after few years with a dozen branches across several countries.
Figure 1 below presents the dashboard created from
the data to portray how BBE has been performing from 2018 to 2020. The purpose
of a dashboard is to give the company's management a quick overview of the
current state of affairs. The focus of the dashboard was to portray BBE sales
trends and figures. The dashboard is not primarily designed for data
exploration, where it makes it possible to make selections and analyze the
results. The dashboard was made using the BBE Dataset 2022.xlsx dataset in an
excel file. The data contained BBE's internet sales information regarding
products, customers, orders, and promotions.
The CEO of BBE has recently been to a conference about Business Analytics where several companies
shared their fantastic experiences and stories on how analytics help them to achieve business value
and enhance competitive advantages. The BBE CEO was amazed to see how data-driven fact-based
insights from analytics can improve decision-making in organisations which in turn increase
profitability, performance and success. Upon returning from the conference, he placed a high priority
on initiating an analytics project in BBE. As a graduate from Massey University who has successfully
completed an Analytics course and learnt how to use relevant tools and techniques, you are assigned
to the project team and your job is to embark BBE on Analytics!
2. Your Task
As a business analytics specialist, your job is to use Qlik Sense product to create a visual dashboard
for BBE, analyse existing data, and write a report for BBE management providing them with your
analysis on sales data.
Download BBE dataset (BBE Dataset 2022.xlsx) from Stream (under Assessment 2 tab). It containsfour
Excel tables holding the Internet sales information of BBE between 2018 to 2020. Then use what you
learnt in lectures and Qlik Sense workshops to create a useful, informative, insightful and rich
dashboard for BBE management to use.
Think about what diagrams/visualisations would be useful
for the managers of BBE (so should be on the dashboard). Then use your dashboard to analyse the
BBE sales data and write your report for BBE top management.
The intention of the report is to provide a good and informative summary of data to BBE management
and bring the important and interesting highlights to their attention. Think about it this way:
How
would you write the report if you were really a staff of BBE and were asked to analyse the sales data
and write a report for the top management?
Bring in your judgment, imagination and creativity.
Creativity is the spice!
What to include and discuss in your report (and your dashboard) is ultimately your choice. But as a
guideline, your report, at least, should address the following points:
1- Screenshot of the ENTIRE dashboard that you have produced with Qlik Sense platform for BBE
management(i.e., one screenshot of the whole dashboard so we can see what you have built).
Instead of screenshot, you can also create a PDF of the dashboard and submit it as an appendix
to your report (as a separate file). Make sure to refer to the appendix in an appropriate place
in your main report.
a. At least 7 visualisations (graphs) are required to be included in your dashboard.
b. One of the visualisations (graphs) should be a trend of sales amount for the entire
company over the years of 2018 to 2020.
c. If the dashboard sheet extent further down your screen (which is likely to happen),
take several screenshots (from top and bottom of the sheet) and include them all in
your report.
2- Analysis of status of sales from the perspective of product categories and sub-categories,
location of sales, timing of sales, customers, and similar (both in dashboard and the report)
3- Discuss some of the most interesting graphs that you have created. What do they inform?
4- Identify and discuss any interesting insight you can find in the salesinformation that you would
like to bring to the attention of the managers, e.g., any interesting patterns?
5- An addition to above, include a specific dedicated section in your report to answer the below
three questions:
• Question 1: What was the bestselling product category in 2018, and for this bestselling
product category, what is the trend of Sales in 2018?
• Question 2: What was the bestselling country in 2019?
• Question 3: How much was the total sales amount in January 2020?
No specific discussion is needed when you are answering the above three questions. Just tell the
answer briefly and include clear screenshots from relevant graphs in your dashboard to
support/evident your answers.
Remember, it is a data-driven report. Everything that you say in the report should be backed-up by
data. For example, if you say that product X was sold most in 2018, you should provide a screenshot
of the relevant graph (from dashboard) in your report to support your finding/statement.
There is No need to have a recommendation section in your report. This assignment is more about
providing a good analysis of data, rather than giving recommendations to the managers.
3. Access to Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense is a paid platform, but they allow academic access for students for free.
Do you Need Help With Data Analysis and Visualization? Don’t Be Shy To Ask.
