1. Ready, set, analyze
Congratulations! You have worked hard to get your data ready for analysis. Now, let's work on answering those questions for your boss.
2. A look back
In the first chapter, you focused on combining and cleaning up the customer order data files by removing duplicates and adding additional data. In the second chapter, your focus shifted to the Order Details file, transforming its structure and calculating some new fields before joining it to the customer data. You then output this combined data to a master and individual regional files.
3. The data
Your combined data set contains three different areas of information:
4. The data
order data - which includes things like the order number, order date, and quantity ordered;
5. The data
customer data - which includes the customer name, state, and region;
6. The data
and the cost/profit data - which includes things like price, profit and the profitability categorization you calculated in Chapter 2. You now have all of the data in place to perform your analytics.
7. Applying Alteryx in the real world
Before you proceed, let's take a minute to talk about the application of Alteryx in the real world. Alteryx is a very flexible platform with broad-reaching capabilities. You just completed several steps to clean and combine different data sets. You now have a workflow to complete that process in seconds. That may be all you need to do in a real-life application, and that is okay! Automating data processes in Alteryx can greatly alleviate repetitive tasks and improve your work day. This is also the point where you may take that master data file and push it to a visualization platform for dashboard development. The flexibility of Alteryx is endless!
8. DC Industries analysis
You, however, will not be stopping there because you still have to answer some questions. With your data preparations complete, you are ready to address the questions your boss first proposed: "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?"
9. Let the analysis begin!
You have your questions, and you have your data. DC Industries is waiting for answers, so it's time to finish this analysis.