Executive Overview Dashboard

Comprehensive year-over-year business performance analysis

Executive Overview Dashboard

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Business Value

This dashboard enables executives to:

  • Monitor KPIs - Track revenue, costs, profit, and order metrics in real-time
  • Identify Trends - Visualize performance patterns across time periods
  • Compare Performance - Analyze year-over-year growth and decline
  • Geographic Analysis - Understand market performance by country
  • Data-Driven Decisions - Access key metrics without manual report generation

Key Features

1. Year-over-Year Comparison

  • Dynamic year selection via parameter
  • Side-by-side comparison of current year (CY) vs. previous year (PY)
  • Automatic calculation of growth percentages
  • Visual indicators for performance trends (highest/lowest months highlighted)

2. Financial KPIs Dashboard

Four critical business metrics displayed prominently:

  • Revenue: Total sales amount with PY comparison
  • COGS (Cost of Goods Sold): Total product costs
  • Gross Profit: Revenue minus COGS
  • Average Order Value: Revenue per transaction

Each KPI shows:

  • Current year value
  • Previous year value
  • Absolute change
  • Percentage growth (with directional indicators)

3. Interactive Proportional Brushing with Set Actions

What is Proportional Brushing?

Proportional brushing is an advanced interactive technique that allows users to explore relationships between different data dimensions while maintaining visual context.

How It Works:

  1. Click on any bar in the “Revenue by Country” chart
  2. The “Revenue by Month” chart automatically updates to show:
    • Blue stacked bars: Revenue from the selected country
    • Gray stacked bars: Revenue from all other countries
  3. Proportional comparison: Users can immediately see how the selected country contributes to monthly revenue alongside other countries

Technical Implementation:

  • Country Set created as a dimension-based set
  • Set Action captures user clicks on the Country chart and updates the set
  • Color shelf uses the set to differentiate selected (blue) vs. unselected (gray) countries
  • Highlight Action with dummy calculation disables Tableau’s default highlighting behavior
  • Automatic stacking shows proportional contribution in the Revenue by Month chart

Business Impact:

  • Executives can drill down into specific markets without losing sight of overall performance
  • Immediate understanding of market contribution to total revenue
  • Part-to-whole analysis at a glance
  • Enhanced decision-making through contextual data exploration

4. Trend Analysis

  • Revenue Trend Line: Monthly revenue progression with trend indicators
  • Gross Profit Trend Line: Profitability tracking over time
  • Comparative Lines: Current year vs. previous year overlays
  • Seasonal Patterns: Identify peak and low-performance periods

5. Geographic Revenue Distribution

  • Horizontal bar chart ranking countries by revenue contribution
  • Interactive selection for proportional brushing
  • Clear visual hierarchy of market importance

6. Monthly Performance Breakdown

  • Stacked bar chart showing revenue composition by country
  • Month-by-month performance tracking
  • Easy identification of seasonal trends and anomalies

Project Context

This Tableau dashboard is the visualization layer of a comprehensive data engineering and analytics project:

Project Ecosystem

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  1. SQL Data Warehouse Project                              │
│     └─ Bronze → Silver → Gold Layer Architecture            │
│     └─ Star Schema (Fact & Dimension Tables)                │
│                                                             │
│  2. SQL Data Analyst Project                                │
│     └─ Advanced Analytics: Trends, Cohorts, Segmentation    │
│     └─ SQL Views for Reporting                              │
│                                                             │
│  3. Tableau Executive Overview Dashboard (This Project)     │
│     └─ Interactive Visualizations                           │
│     └─ Business Intelligence Layer                          │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  1. SQL Data Warehouse Project

    • Data ingestion and transformation (Bronze → Silver → Gold)
    • Star schema dimensional modeling
    • Data quality and cleansing

  2. SQL Data Analyst Projec

    • Advanced analytics queries
    • Time-series analysis, cumulative calculations
    • Customer and product segmentation

This dashboard connects directly to the Gold layer views created in the data warehouse project, ensuring data consistency and reliability.

Dashboard Components

Data Sources

The dashboard connects to three optimized data sources from the SQL Server data warehouse:

  1. gold.fact_sales - Transaction-level sales data
  2. gold.dim_customers - Customer dimension with demographics
  3. gold.dim_products - Product dimension with category hierarchy

Calculated Fields

Financial Metrics:

Revenue CY = SUM(IF YEAR([order_date]) = [Select Year] THEN [sales_amount] END)
COGS CY = SUM(IF YEAR([order_date]) = [Select Year] THEN [quantity] * [cost] END)
Gross Profit CY = [Revenue CY] - [COGS CY]
Profit Margin % CY = [Gross Profit CY] / [Revenue CY]
AOV CY = [Revenue CY] / COUNTD(IF YEAR([order_date]) = [Select Year] THEN [order_number] END)

Year-over-Year Comparisons:

Revenue PY = SUM(IF YEAR([order_date]) = [Select Year] - 1 THEN [sales_amount] END)
Revenue Growth % = ([Revenue CY] - [Revenue PY]) / [Revenue PY]

Proportional Brushing Implementation:

  • Country Set: Created from Country dimension (right-click → Create → Set)
  • Set Action: Updates Country Set when user clicks on Revenue by Country chart
  • Dehighlight Calculation: 'Dummy' - Used to disable default Tableau highlighting
  • Color Application: Country Set placed on Color shelf in both charts

Usage

Interacting with the Dashboard

Year Selection:

  • Use the Select Year parameter dropdown to switch between available years
  • All KPIs and charts update automatically

Country Selection (Proportional Brushing):

  1. Click on any country bar in “Revenue by Country, 2013” chart
  2. Observe how “Revenue by Month, 2013” shows:
    • Blue bars = Selected country revenue
    • Gray bars = Total revenue (all countries)
  3. Click elsewhere to deselect and return to full view

Trend Analysis:

  • Hover over trend line points to see exact values
  • Colored circles indicate highest (blue) and lowest (red) performing months

Key Insights Delivered

This dashboard answers critical business questions:

How did we perform this year compared to last year?

  • Immediate visibility of YoY growth across all KPIs

Which markets drive our revenue?

  • Country-level revenue contribution and ranking
  • Monthly performance patterns and peak periods

Is our profitability improving?

  • Gross profit trends and margin analysis

How does a specific market perform relative to total business?

  • Proportional brushing reveals market contribution context

Acknowledgments

  • Data sourced from simulated bicycle retail sales (ERP and CRM systems)
  • Dashboard design follows industry best practices for executive reporting
  • Proportional brushing technique inspired by visual analytics research