Reflection—Visualization

Challenge and selection

As an entrepreneur handling the family business, I was always in a position to explain to my father why I  made certain decisions regarding certain customers. We operate a green manufacturing plant that  produces fly ash bricks. I always used excel and its visualization features to get a better understanding of  the company sales. I used pivot tables and made bar charts and pie diagrams to analyze the sales. In  year 2009, I noticed that nearly 40 percent of the sales were contributed by three customers. I decided  to knock the price down a notch for these three parties upon request. I also noticed that they were  consistently doing it since the establishment of the unit. (2007). In order to better equip myself while  making an explanation, I decided to use the visualization tools in excel.

Application

I took the raw sales data and created pivot tables out of it. Using pivots and visualization features, I put  together a presentation for my father and our partner in the firm. I made bar charts, pie charts and also  plot charts to represent the sales from 2007.

Insight

My goal was to show the stakeholders that 40% of sales were a significant amount and that the three  customers would still account for nearly 40% of the sales when projected into the next three years as  well. The customers were established builders and they had ongoing projects for the next three years in  the same vicinity. The three customers had booked 40% of the capacity of our unit by 2012. Their  payments always came in on time and were good customers and hence they deserved a small cut in the  price of our bricks. More demand for the bricks meant higher production and a subsequent reduction of  our overheads. Even after I cut the price a little we were still making the same amount of profit.

Approach

This approach to help the stakeholders visualize the information worked for me. I thought that the pie  charts were key, because the stakeholders were clearly able to see the chunk of sales that belonged to  these three customers, and that we would still bring in the same amounts of profit. I plan to use  visualization in all of my decision making process as it puts things into perspective.

