Interactive PowerBI: Retail Sales Analysis
The business problem: Commercial teams are often working from a fragmented landscape of custom Excel data pulls and static reports that go stale the moment they're built. When every team is measuring themselves differently, alignment breaks down, strategic conversations stall, and market shifts go undetected until it's too late to respond.
What this solves: This retail analytics platform consolidates syndicated brick-and-mortar market data into a single dynamic source of truth — replacing offline spreadsheets with a self-service tool that gives sales, marketing, and strategy teams a real-time view of market performance across geographies, categories, and timeframes. The platform answers not just what changed, but why — through a tree decomposition methodology that isolates the drivers of any sales movement.
What follows: A walkthrough of the tool’s analytical views, from high-level market decomposition through dynamic metric analysis, category trends, and item-level rankings.
The Point-of-Sale dashboard breaks down syndicated market-level data into business insights. This is where teams can understand sales, share, trends, and drivers of change across markets (geographies), categories, segments, etc. Instead of the proliferation of Excels with customized data pulls, the POS dashboard provides a single source of truth for the business to measure themselves by. This grounds the company in data to align upon and strategize for changes in market dynamics.
The first default page is called a tree decomposition - it is a visual way to understand what changed in the market from one time period to another. In the default view Food sales in the last 4 weeks (L4W) have increased overall (the top of the tree in green). The next question would be why? On the left side of the tree we can see that the baseline sales are up due to Distribution and Base Velocity increasing. So Food is selling in more stores nationwide, and the rate of sales in those stores is also increasing. The net impact of the Distribution and Base Velocity is a positive overall impact to sales. On the right side of the tree is the Incremental Dollars - broken down by advertisement strategy type. It is marked in red indicating a decline in sales due to a decline in incremental ad tactics. The tactics breakdown further as you go down the “tree”. Finally, these results are summarized in a waterfall chart.
The Panel Data page is in a similar style, but is focused on panel data. This is scan data that has customer purchase information where users can glean insights about customer behavior and growth opportunities.
The POS page is a dynamic matrix table with the ability to select over 70+ different metrics to analyze over various timeframes.
The Custom Analysis by Category page shows an example of further visualizing high-level trends by the Segment.
Lastly, the Item Rank page orders products by sales, highlighting the items owned by the focus company of this report.