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INFS 2036 Business Intelligence Study Period 5 2019

Practical – Week 2

The BI Process + Introduction to Tableau

Priority: To start practicing the Business Intelligence process to identify priorities and supporting questions for an organisation.

Learning focus: by the end of class you should be able to:

ü Identify a Priority for an organisation [Assign. Part 1] ü Write questions to support this priority from specific degree perspectives. [Assign. Part 1] ü Open a file in Tableau and create your first views J

SUPERMARKET CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR

Customers are demanding more from supermarkets and are on the lookout for great shopping deals. In order to remain competitive, major supermarkets now analyse vast amounts of daily data generated using business intelligence software – a major supermarket chain can easily collect approximately 2.5 petabytes of data every hour from customer transactions. This is about 1,250 billion pages of printed text to give you an idea how much data there is each hour!

Analysing this volume of data would be impossible without data warehouses and business intelligence. Supermarkets analyse loyalty card and order data to provide significant insight into customer purchasing habits. This drives targeted customer communications aimed at particular groups and has also fed into marketing, forecasting and budgeting.

The new store manager at a 24-hour supermarket in charge of operational decision-making needs to understand the performance of, and potential issues, with sales volume, how to maintain adequate staffing levels and stock control and inventory to ensure shelves are stocked and all produce are fresh daily.

We will look at a real supermarket dataset to better understand customer behaviour.

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GETTING STARTED WITH THE BI PROCESS This week’s case study will give you practice with Assignment Part 1 (Steps 1-3, Figure 1 below). Specifically you will need to identify and discuss:

1. An organisation of interest – done for you (see below); 2. One priority for this supermarket chain; 3. Three questions that would give insight into this priority; and 4. Data to visualise these insights – collectively the visualisations will form a working

dashboard.

For this practical class the organisation is a supermarket chain so Step 1 is completed J Now you have to do steps 2 + 3!

Figure 1: the inter-relationship between the components needed to build a working dashboard

Steps 1 + 2:

Organisation

___________________________________________________________________________

Priority from your degree perspective ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

Organisation + priority from your degree perspective

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

Supporting Question

SupportingQuestion

Data

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

Step 3

Assignment Parts 1 + 2

Steps 1 + 2

Priority Organisation + priority from your degree perspective

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

SupportingQuestion

Data

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

Step 3

Assignment Parts 1 + 2

Steps 1 + 2

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Step 3:

Two supporting questions for your identified priority

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________

Questions InformationOrganisation + priority from your degree perspective

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

SupportingQuestion

Data

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

Step 3

Assignment Parts 1 + 2

Steps 1 + 2

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GETTING STARTED WITH TABLEAU – Creating Views Visualising data is an important part of the Business Intelligence process and you will need to do this in Assignment Part 2. Doing this well can take time – it’s more than being able to create a visualisation, but making sure this visualisation does a good job of providing insights. This might feel really far away right now … but you have to learn the skills to make sure you get there – so this is your starting point for the data part of the BI process (Figure 2) J

Figure 2: Data in the BI process for visualisation Tableau can be installed on your own computer – I know how good is that?!? J The instructions are on the Practicals page on the course website. In this prac you’re going to produce 1-2 visualisations (depending on how fast you are J) from the dashboard below:

Data Visualisation Data QualityOrganisation + priority from your degree perspective

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

SupportingQuestion

Data

SupportingQuestion

Data Data

Step 3

Assignment Parts 1 + 2

Steps 1 + 2

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Note: if using Tableau in the computer pools, the version installed is 2018.3. If installing Tableau yourself the version is 2019.1. The instructions are the same for both versions.

1. Download the spreadsheet supermarket purchases.csv from the Practicals page.

2. Connect: open Tableau and on the Start Screen choose Text file

3. Tableau will prompt you to go to a worksheet however before you do take a look at the data first (it will be like the screenshot below). The first few columns correspond to the order — the ID of the order, the day of the week (Order Dow) of the order which goes from 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday) and the hour of the day (24-hour clock) meaning 0 corresponds to midnight while 23 corresponds to 11pm. The days since the prior order indicate the last time an order was made by the same customer — the remaining fields indicate the number of products purchased per product types.

Head to the worksheet by clicking on Sheet 1 as indicated (red arrow).

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4. Create: in Sheet 1 you’ll find the data on your left split into Dimensions and Measures. Under Dimensions you’ll see Order Id and Order Hour of Day however Order Dow is missing (below left). In Measures, scroll down until you find Order Dow. Click on it and move it up to Dimensions (below right).

5. Set up aliases: now that Order Dow has been converted to a Dimension, we can edit the data

further so that instead of using numbers for days of the week, we can set up an alias to use the actual names of the days. Go back to Data Source

Then for Order Dow click on the arrow as shown below and select Aliases.

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Click on the 0 in the Value (Alias) column and type in the day of the week as shown.

Repeat for every day of the week to produce the full list of aliased days. Click OK when done then go back to the Worksheet (Sheet 1).

6. Create your first view!: click on Order Dow and move to Rows and click on Bread and move to

Columns as shown below. You should get a bar chart indicating the total number of bread purchases (SUM) by day of the week.

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7. Add more data: keep Bread in the column and now click and drag Coffee, Dog Food Care, Fresh Vegetables, Meat Counter, Milk, Seafood Counter and White Wines into Columns as well. You should have a graphic like the one below:

Now we just re-colour by the day of the week and we’re done! Select Order Dow under Dimensions (below left). Drag and drop it on to the Colour Shelf (below middle) and you will see Order Dow has been added to the Marks Card (below right circled). The graphs will change colour according to day of the week J

The final product is below! Are your bars mostly grey and only one product is colour-coded? L If so see the troubleshooting section at the end of this prac J

If you’ve finished these steps early and are waiting on everyone else in the class to finish then do steps 7-9, however your tutor will show you the second graph for discussion so don’t stress J

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8. Duplicate the worksheet: Duplicate the worksheet by right-clicking on Sheet 1 (below left) so that you have a copy of your visualisation but can easily add to it too. If you click on Sheet 1 (2) this will take you to your duplicated graph (below right).

9. Swap the Row and Column entries: You can easily swap the Row and Column entries. In the Sheet 1 (2) worksheet the duplicated sheet should look as below (left). Click on Swap Rows and Columns and your worksheet should look as below (right).

10. Add another Dimension to the duplicated visualisation: Since we have Order Hour of Day let’s add

this to the visualisation in Columns. In the Marks Card click on the graph type as shown below and select Area. You should have area graphs as shown in the very last picture. You’re done! J

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IN-CLASS DISCUSSION: SUPERMARKET

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

For both visualisations and the dashboard in general discuss the following: Q1: What general insights can you see from the dashboard about shopping behaviour across the week? What about across the day? Q2: What advice would you give on ordering products to ensure

• Freshness • Availability

Q3: If the supermarket wanted to introduce a ‘market day’ with guaranteed lower prices which day of the week would you recommend? Typically Wednesday is market day – would this be appropriate for this supermarket?

Q4: What is a limitation of this analysis from the dashboard?

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Week 2 - Tableau Troubleshooting PROBLEM: My bar chart looks something like this!!!

This happens because a particular product is selected. In the image above coffee has been clicked on and so Tableau colour codes coffee only. We can see this in the Marks card (circled) which shows SUM(Coffee) in this case. You want this to say ALL. SOLUTION: just click on the blue pill (Order Dow). This will unselect the green pill that was selected. The change can be seen below in the Marks card (circled) which now says All J Now drag Order Dow onto the colour shelf once again as in Step 7 and your bar charts should behave better J