1. Putting your Alteryx knowledge to the test
Welcome to the Case Study: Analyzing Sales Data in Alteryx! My name is Kim, and I will be your guide throughout the course.
2. You are nearing the summit
You have been on a journey developing core Alteryx knowledge. This course is the culmination of that path. You will review and revisit key skills you have acquired in previous courses. These include data importing and blending, analytics and aggregation techniques, data parsing and cleansing, and workflow documentation.
3. You are nearing the summit
Before taking this course, you should have completed the following courses: Introduction to Alteryx, Data Preparation in Alteryx, Data Transformation in Alteryx, and Data Manipulation in Alteryx. These courses put you on a path toward the Alteryx Core Certification. You are nearly ready to take that test!
4. What is a case study?
This course is a case study that will review concepts from previous lessons. But what is a case study? A case study allows you to apply the knowledge you've gained to solve a real-world problem. No new concepts will be introduced; instead it will focus on applying skills you've already acquired.
5. Why an Alteryx case study?
As you have already learned, Alteryx can be used for a wide variety of analyses across any department or organization. Companies use Alteryx to speed up and automate their data practices, from simple data cleansing and prep to sophisticated statistical modeling. Working through a case study will give you the opportunity to apply some of those practices in a comprehensive project.
6. Introducing DC Industries
Your case study revolves around a ficticious company called DC Industries. DC Industries is a retail department store offering a wide variety of products throughout three regions in the U.S. The company has recently started working with a new analytics platform, Alteryx, and you have been asked to use Alteryx to conduct some analysis.
7. Case study: DC Industries
You have been tasked with pulling together customer and order data, cleaning it up, and then analyzing the data to answer the following questions: "What were the top 25 most profitable orders?", "What day of the week is most profitable?", "How do the profits vary by category and region??" and "What sub-categories contributed to the most profit in each category?".
You've also been asked to prepare a master data set that can be exported for use in a visualization platform outside of Alteryx.
8. The data
You have been provided with four files for the analysis. Two customer files contain orders by region: Customer Orders-West and Customer Orders-East. One file details the company regions by state: Regions. One file contains the details of each order: Order details. This data will need to be cleaned up, combined and analyzed in order to answer the questions put before you.
9. One last thing...
One last thing before we begin. By now, you've probably realized there are many ways to achieve the same result in Alteryx. Two people can be given the same problem and develop very different workflows, yet both arrive at the same solution. Neither is "wrong"...each just approached the task from a different direction and a different skill set. Keep this in mind as you work through this case study. We will offer one solution, but you may come up with a different approach!
10. Let's get started!
Now that we've reviewed our task, let's get to work answering those questions for DC Industries!