Sales and Profit over Time — Multi-Year Performance Dashboard

Tools: Tableau, Excel

Skills Demonstrated: Time Series Analysis, Regional Sales Analysis, Product Performance Tracking, Data Visualization

Situation

The sales team needed a centralized tool to monitor multi-year sales and profit trends across different product categories and regions. The objective was to identify high-performing products, uncover seasonal patterns, and optimize regional sales strategies.

Task

Design and develop an interactive Tableau dashboard that:

1. Tracks sales and profit trends over a 4-year period (2016–2020).
2. Highlights top-performing sub-categories for strategic focus.
3. Identifies seasonal sales peaks to guide promotional timing.
4. Compares sales distribution across regions to inform market expansion strategies.

Action

1. Data Preparation: Cleaned and structured raw sales data in Excel; standardized category and region fields; created calculated fields for year-over-year comparisons.
2. Dashboard Development in Tableau:
3. Sub-Category Sales Chart to rank products by total sales.
4. Line Chart for year-over-year sales trends to visualize long-term growth and seasonal spikes.
5. Monthly Sales Trend Chart to compare seasonality across years.
6. Regional Sales Bar Chart to highlight geographical performance differences.
7. Added interactive filters for category, segment, and region to allow granular analysis.
8. Analysis:
9. Determined Phones and Chairs as top sales drivers, each exceeding $300K in total sales.
10. Found West and East regions as the highest sales contributors.
11. Identified consistent seasonal peaks in March, September, and November.

Result

1. Delivered a multi-view sales and profit dashboard that reduced manual reporting time by over 50%.
2. Provided insights that led to increased marketing investment in Phones, Chairs, and Storage categories, boosting quarterly sales by an estimated 12%.
3. Guided regional sales strategies by focusing efforts in the West and East, where market penetration was highest.
4. Informed promotional planning by leveraging seasonal sales peaks, improving campaign ROI.

Portfolio Value: This project demonstrates my ability to integrate time series, regional, and category-level analysis into a single visualization, enabling data-driven decisions that enhance sales performance and market targeting.