SALES DISTRIBUTION ANALYSIS

Mission Statement

Our client is a leading manufacturer of natural healthcare products. They sell their products to three main distributors who then sell the products to various retail outlets, approximately 20,000 in total across all three distributors.

The three distributors produce sales reports for the client. The client would like to analyse thoroughly and cross reference these sales reports in order to determine which end customers were the same across different distributors.

This will allow the client to adjust and improve their business strategy.

However, as the three sales reports come in different formats, and customers were named differently. In addition, with a large quantity of data to analyse, doing this by manual process was extremely time-consuming and open to human error. In addition, the reports were received every quarter so the manual process was being repeated each time.

Tools Used

Alteryx

- Alteryx Designer

- Fuzzy Match

Detailed Solution

We began by building an Alteryx workflow bringing in the three different datasets from the three distributors.

The data was then prepared and cleansed to ensure 3 clean datasets.

Now the complicated part was to establish common customers across the different distributors datasets. For example, one distributor might call the customer “Walmart” and another distributor names them “Walmart Inc”. So we applied the Fuzzy Match tool in Alteryx to match up these customers.

Once we were confident that the Fuzzy Matching had done its job, we created an Output to Excel, with the joined, matched data. This combined sales report gave our client a clear understanding of which distributor was selling to which end customer and allowed the client to analyse the data to improve their business strategy.

Our client now runs this every month (compared to quarterly when running it manually) and has seen clear business benefits and a significant reduction in time spent on analysing these distributor reports.