My first Encounter | Assignment 1

During my first Digital Research Methods class I encountered a new programme, which I had never heard of before. Something called Tableau. It looked pretty cool and I could already envision using it for my thesis to create some amazing visuals and tables. However, the whole programme looked to me like some high-tech futuristic NASA certified software, and I wondered how in the world I would ever grasp it. So I decided to create this blog, documenting my journey in discovering Tableau. starting with this post I will be posting my explorations through each of the assignments I have to make for class, and hopefully at the end of this term I can say that I understand at least a little bit of this daunting software.

Assignment 1

For this assignment, I decided to look at the Global Superstore 5Kdataset.

Step 1 

Firstly, I wanted to know how people choose to have their products shipped in different markets and different market segments, based on how much discount they receive.

Dimensions are the categories by which we can divide the data for analysis. For example in the Superstore dataset I decided by using a tutorial to look at the shipping mode of products per  market segments (which I put in rows), and analyze these two dimensions by comparing them for different country markets and BY the quantity of products sold, these two measures were put in the columns section.  

 (Tableau Sheet 1) 

From the visualization I deducted the following:

1. For each customer segment, Standard shipping is the most preferred method of shipping, especially when the discount amount is higher. The consumer segment, which sees the highest amount of discounts, also has the most sales and the highest amount of standard shipped products.

2. There is a huge market gap in Canada, as there are no shipments at all for the corporate and home office segments, and only a very small amount of shipments for the consumer segments, I deduct that Canada is an uncharted market which can offer opportunities for the company.

3. Sales in the EMEA market is behind on the other markets, which can mean 2 things:

- The market recently opened and the company is still gaining foot - The company is not doing well in this market and should look into reasons as to why this could be happening.

I figured out that by analyzing one thing, can lead to the discovery of other facts, which is quite interesting.

Step 2 

This discovery about the markets led me to want to research more about the lack of sales in both Canada as EMEA. Thus I opened a new sheet and did the following:

1. I added Market and order date to the columns

2. I added Segments and Sum of sales to the rows. This is because I still wanted to see how the sales performances were per each customer segment. 

(Tableau Sheet 2)

From the results I can see that data for all markets go back to 2011. When looking more closely at the 2 markets that are behind on performance I saw that EMEA has been improving over the years in all three customer segments. Additionally, the consumer segment is the biggest segment with approximately 200k total sales in 2014. Somehow in 2013 the sales in the consumer and Home office segments underwent a slight increase in growth rate, whilst the corporate segment maintained a steady linear growth. Indicating that whatever factor caused the growth increase in the Consumer and Home office markets did not influence the corporate market.  Additionally when comparing it to the other markets, we see that the factor which brought on this change impacted a few other markets as well. EU, LATAM and US markets all saw a similar increase in sales growth in the same period. Interestingly enough, Africa saw a mix of sales growth increase as well as decrease in the similar period, varying per customer segment.  

Step 3 

The change in growth rates leads me to question what factor could have led to this. I wondered if there was a relationship between the discount and the sales.

To analyze this I put the Market and the Year in the columns, the Segments and the sum of all discounts in the rows section. Additionally I put the sum of all products sold (quantity) as a label so I could compare the height of the discounts with that of the quantity of products sold.  

(See Tableau Sheet 3)

From this table I see that between 2013 and 2014, the exact period in which most markets saw a growth rate increase, we also see an increase in discounts offered which lead to an increase in total products sold. Ultimately, looking back at Canada which is the market that performs the worst, I see that the company is not offering any discounts unlike in the other markets. This could be the reason why there are so little sales in Canada.

Final Thoughts 

This assignment got me acquainted with the Tableau programme and showed me that it is quite a useful programme to use especially for my thesis later on. However, I did need the help of a YouTube tutorial to understand what I was doing and what I was looking at. I have to say that because of the many functionalities that this software has it is quite difficult to get acquainted with and to master. Follow me through my discovery of this software over the next 9 weeks. For more information on Tableau and an easy to follow tutorial click here.

X,

Dee