Business Intelligence and Analytics - Project specification report

1. National College of Ireland
Project Submission Sheet – 2019/2020
School of Computing
Student Name: Yash Mehta, Sarthak Khare, Donovan, Naval Suvarna.
Student ID: x18179916, x18180485, x18181562, x18183654.
Programme: MSc. Data Analytics Year: 2019-20
Module: Business Intelligence & Business Analytics
Lecturer: Prof. Vikas Sahni
Submission Due
Date:
08-12-2019
Project Title: PowerBI analytics system for Sudha.
I hereby certify that the information contained in this (my submission) is information
pertaining to research I conducted for this project. All information other than my own
contribution will be fully referenced and listed in the relevant bibliography section at the
rear of the project.
ALL internet material must be referenced in the bibliography section. Students are
encouraged to use the Harvard Referencing Standard supplied by the Library. To use
other author's written or electronic work is illegal (plagiarism) and may result in
disciplinary action. Students may be required to undergo a viva (oral examination) if
there is suspicion about the validity of their submitted work.
Signature: Yash, Sarthak, Donovan, Naval
Date: 08-12-2019
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Please attach a completed copy of this sheet to each project (including multiple copies).
2. You must ensure that you retain a HARD COPY of ALL projects, both for your own reference and
in case a project is lost or mislaid. It is not sufficient to keep a copy on computer.
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2. 1
PowerBI Analytics
System for Sudha
Specification Report
ABSTRACT
Designing an analytics system using PowerBI for Sudha
to help it achieve its organisational goals.

3. 2
Table of Contents
1. Organisation Background .........................................................................................................3
1.1. Balanced Scorecard ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….4
1.2. Porter’s Framework ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….5
2. System Design ...........................................................................................................................6
2.1 Process Diagram of the Organisation .................................................................................6
2.2 Analytical Requirements .....................................................................................................7
2.3 Rationale for Selecting PowerBI ……………………………………………………………………….………..…..7
2.4 Risks of Selecting PowerBI ………………………………………………………………………………………..…….8
3. Database Design .........................................................................................................................9
3.1 Entity-Relationship diagrams ...............................................................................................9
3.2 Data Dictionary ………………………………………………………………………………….……………………………9
4. References ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….…………………..12

4. 3
1. Organisation Background
The Bihar State Milk Co-Operative Federation Ltd. (COMFED) is a dairy production organisation involved
with procuring, processing, and marketing of its dairy products. It was founded in 1983 with just over 1000
cooperatives. In 2012, this number had risen to 11,400. For the 2011 to 2012 year, the milk production was
11 lakh litres per day, with the annual turnover being Rs. 1503 crores. At present COMFED sends bulk milk
to main cities from states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and the NCR, where
it is sold by dairy cooperatives like Mother Dairy and Amul under their own brand name.
Sudha is COMFED’s line of milk and milk products that COMFED wants to introduce into other popular
cities. This would mean that they would have to compete with the likes of popular dairy brands like Hatsun,
Aavin, Amul, and Mother Dairy who have already established their market share in these cities through a
suite of milk and milk products. For this reason, COMFED needs to know about potential competitors to
Sudha as a dairy product manufacturing organisation as they decide to launch Sudha to popular markets in
India.
Sudha offers products that can generally be classified into milk and milk products. Inclined to encourage
its customers who follow health-conscious lifestyle, Sudha has introduced different qualities of milk such
as Sudha Shakti, Sudha Gold, and Sudha Healthy and this has been diversified on the sold content and solid
not content (SNF) attributes of the milk. Its milk products include those such as ice cream, yoghurt, paneer,
ghee, and various Indian sweets (like Mishti Dahi, Peda, Paneer, Sudha Special, Kalakand, Rasogulla, Gulab
Jamun, Plain Curd, Balusahi).
For this reason, Sudha requires a business analytics solution to be deployed which would assist the
organisation and especially their analysis team to make more accurate and evidence-based analysis
facilitating the archaically structured and inadequate BI solutions that are in use.
Link to Case Study [1]:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EEMCS-09-2016-0188/full/html

5. 4
1.1 Balanced Scorecard:
Figure 1: Balanced Scorecard of Sudha
A Balanced scorecard is very useful aspect to be considered and implemented by an organisation for
efficient strategic planning and management. Sudha can use the balanced scorecard to determine its
long-term goal and define the action plans accordingly in order to achieve the goal. There are four key
parts of a balanced scorecard:
a) Financial Focus: -
Sudha’s major focus will be on increasing profitability. This can be achieved by following various
actions such as reducing the cost of production and optimizing channels to maximize sales.
b) Customer Focus: -
To achieve the goal of acquiring market hold in new markets Sudha will have to focus on developing
and maintaining customer base and loyalty. This can be achieved by making product value for money
for customers, increasing product availability and competitive pricing.
c) Process Focus: -
To optimize the efficiency of supply chain and production management, Sudha has to focus on
inventory management ensuring the timely delivery and reducing the loss barred at different
warehouses.
d) Learning Focus: -
Sudha has to focus on its internal growth and environment in organisation. It needs to invest a lot in
research and development, ensure collaborative and engaging environment, and also training and
recruiting quality talent.

6. 5
1.2 Porter’s Five Forces Model:
The Porter’s Five Forces Model is a framework to analyse the competition of a business, and in this case,
the dairy production company Sudha. Explained below are the factors that influence the competition or
rivalry among the Sudha’s competitors. The stronger the influence of the factors, the more pronounced is
the competition with the other businesses [1].
FIGURE 2: PORTER'S 5 FORCES MODEL
1.2.1 Threat of New Entrants:
• Dairy industry being a stable market it is very easy for new entrant to acquire the market hold
and customer base due to low investment requirement and cheaper pricing. Hence big
companies like Sudha always has huge threat from new entrants.
• Sudha needs to establish brand loyalty among its new customers which will mitigate this threat
of new entrants.
• Stringent government policies could be a hurdle to new potential new competitors, although
Sudha’s parent company COMFED has been involved in the milk production business for a
significant amount of time.
1.2.2 Threat of Substitute Products:
• One of the more concerning threats is that milk substitutes such as almond milk and soy milk as
healthy alternatives are gaining popularity among customers interested in a health-conscious
lifestyle.
• Although, the substitute products are sold at a higher rate, they are becoming increasingly cost-
effective.

7. 6
1.2.3 Bargaining Power of Suppliers:
• The suppliers of milk to Sudha are native farmers who also sell their product to Sudha’s
competitors like Amul, Aavin, and Mother Dairy due to competitive purchasing strategies
deployed by the competition.
• Sudha’s carefully selected milk suppliers are one of the main reasons for its success with its milk
products. This makes it vital for it to maintain the quality of milk being purchased.
1.2.4 Bargaining Power of Buyers:
• The retail supermarkets make up most of Sudha’s customers who purchase their milk and milk
products.
• Supermarkets are increasingly moving towards providing healthier milk alternatives like almond
milk and soy milk to their customers thereby decreasing the purchase of milk from Sudha and its
competitors.
1.2.5 Rivalry Among Existing Competitors:
• Sudha has a fairly large number of competitors that compete for the lion’s share of the market.
Amul, Aavin, and Mother Dairy are some of its closest rivals.
• Sudha’s Competitors have established brand loyalty among its loyal customers which could prove
to be a problem since Sudha is wanting to expand into other markets.
2. System Design
2.1 Process Diagram of system:

8. 7
2.2 Analytical Requirements:
The type of data that the users interact with on a regular basis, and the methods by which they are sourced
into the business intelligence solution (PowerBI) will dictate the analytical requirements as part of this
system design. The users who are intended to use the solution will also form a component of the analytical
requirements [4].
FIGURE 2: PICTURE SOURCED FROM DATACAMP BLOG POST [3].
Key Analytical requirements that are needed for SUDHA would be:
• Implementation of BI solutions in the form of dashboards for each the key departments of the
company such as Sales, Marketing and Inventory, which would provide insights on the trends,
performance in each of these areas, thereby helping them to improve their existing strategies and
infrastructure.
• As the Dairy industry has a lot of competition, implementing a dashboard to measure the
performance of the key competitors in the zones where Sudha operates can help them with
coming up with new strategies to improve their market share in the region.
• Keeping in the mind the organization hierarchy, not everyone can have access to all the
dashboards and reports, so Role-based security needs to be implemented in our BI Solution.
2.3 Rationale for Selecting PowerBI:
In order to assist COMFED in improving their sales, marketing, and production capabilities, we are providing
them with an application to facilitate their business analytics. PowerBI is a business analytics solution that
will provide COMFED the ability to analyse trends in existing organisational and transactional data and will
draw attention to key patterns that would indicate the business areas that need improvement and those
that are performing in agreement with performance standards.
Access to a large amount of data from various sources:
PowerBI can be integrated with existing storage management solutions that COMFED uses for its data
storage, whether from excel sheets or CSV files to databases like Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, and IBM’s BD2
to name a few. PowerBI provides access to other major online cloud storage services like Microsoft Azure,
SharePoint, and Access which is very helpful to COMFED, as the culmination of data from different sources
is a noticeable challenge for COMFED. Also, there would be no necessity to alter COMFED’s existing data
storage solutions, and instead only read the data and provide a business intelligence solution via PowerBI.

9. 8
Data Visualization through Interactive Reports and Dashboards:
The ability of PowerBI to access cloud data or locally located data is focused so that the more data is
available, the more accurately can we analyse patterns in business data. The main objective for a Business
Intelligence solution is to provide actionable insights, and PowerBI does just that. PowerBI’s Interactive
dashboards are what helps us achieve this. Dashboards are customized to meet the business’s growing
needs. Providing a seamless user experience, the dashboards can be customized accordingly to the needs
of the employees of COMFED. Dashboards can be shared across teams which make for a more transparent
workflow. The interactive reports in PowerBI allow for a drill-down analysis that can assist in more accurate
regional business decisions. These dashboards and reports can be published securely and ensures safety
from data tampering.
Efficient Cloud Features on Various Devices:
Using PowerBI Service, the COMFED users are given access to published data with the help of just a
connection to the internet. The problems that plague synchronisation of data on servers are eliminated
with the use of the PowerBI service which is a service hosted by Microsoft. This service allows for a more
streamlined and synchronised workflow among the teams that use the solution. This provides COMFED
employees the ability to access the interactive dashboards and reports on the go using PowerBI’s mobile
application.
2.4 Risks of Selecting PowerBI:
There are always certain concerns and risks when migrating from solutions that have been in use for a long
period of time. This stands true for COMFED which would be on the verge of moving to a more efficient
Business Intelligence solution. Below are the reasons or impediments [2] as to why this migration would
not be too simple.
Resistance to Change by Internal Organisation:
Migrating the usage of a new business intelligence suite requires time, effort, and patience. The
organisation’s employees would always prefer an easier yet comfortable process of data reporting. If the
existing method of data reporting is still available to the employees, this could lead to them using the legacy
tool they are comfortable with rather than the efficient new BI solution which might have a slight learning
curve but is more efficient in the overall development of the organisation’s business intelligence process.
Deficient Data Quality:
Once the PowerBI analytics solution is deployed there might be certain issues with the data quality. There
is usually a high likelihood of the data not being properly normalized in the legacy analytics system but still
manages to work. This usually means that the data will need to be cleaned and ensured that there is no
data redundancy as this may lead to inaccurate reports, and will make it more effective to be used in a data
warehouse and be efficiently utilized by the new analytics solution, PowerBI.

10. 9
The Magnitude of Data:
When the size of the data increases with respect to the various sources the data is being extracted from,
the complexity of the analytics solution increases. This drastically increases the data modelling stage which
is one of the most crucial stages of creating and customizing a BI solution like PowerBI for COMFED. It is
almost impossible to attempt to model and load the entire data collections of the organisation as this would
tremendously increase the time taken for data modelling. This is why only the data most required and
crucial for analysis should be cleaned and loaded first followed by the less influential data collections from
the organisations different data storage facilities.
3. Database Design
3.1 ER Diagram:
3.2 Data Dictionary:
(i) Master Tables:
PRODUCT
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
ID_PRODUCT VARCHAR(10) Primary Key Product ID
CATEGORY VARCHAR(50) Product Category
COST_PRICE FLOAT Cost Price

11. 10
PRODUCT VARCHAR(50) Product Name
SELL_PRICE FLOAT Selling Price
CITY
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
CITY_ID VARCHAR(10) Primary Key City ID
CITY_NAME VARCHAR(30) City Name
STATE VARCHAR(30) State
ZONE VARCHAR(30) Zone
(ii) Transactional Tables:
TRANSACTIONAL_DATA (Sales)
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
CITY_ID VARCHAR(10)
References
(CITY_ID from
CITY) City ID
DATE DATE Date of Transaction
ORDER_ID VARCHAR(50) Order ID
PRODUCT_ID VARCHAR(10)
References
(ID_PRODUCT
from PRODUCT) Product ID of sold Product
PROFIT FLOAT Amount profited from Sale
QUANTITY INTEGER Number of Products
SALES FLOAT Amount of Order
SCM (Warehouse Inventory)
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
DATE DATE Date Product leaves Warehouse
ID_PRODUCT VARCHAR(10)
References
(ID_PRODUCT
from PRODUCT) Product ID
INFLOW INTEGER Units received into the Warehouse
INVENTORY_VALUE INTEGER Total Price of Units in Inventory
OUTFLOW INTEGER
Units departed from the
Warehouse
PRODUCT VARCHAR(50) Product Name
QTY INTEGER No. Of Units
RETURN QNTY INTEGER Quantity Returned
VALUE_PER_UNIT FLOAT Price Per Unit

12. 11
WAREHOUSE VARCHAR(30) Warehouse Name
WAREHOUSE_ID VARCHAR(10) Warehouse ID
MARKETING (Expense on Marketing)
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
MARKETING_ID VARCHAR(10) Primary Key Marketing ID
AMOUNT_SPENT FLOAT Amount Spent
BUDGET_ALLOCATED FLOAT Allocated Budget
CITY_ID VARCHAR(10)
References
(CITY_ID from
CITY) City ID
DATE DATE
Month for which Amount Spent is
calculated
MARKETING_TYPE VARCHAR(50) Category of Marketing Campaign
POST_MARKETING_SALES FLOAT
Sales generated as result of
Marketing Campaign
COMP_PROD_SALES (Competitors Sales)
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
COMP_SALES CHAR(8) Primary Key Competitor Sales ID
CITY_ID VARCHAR(10)
References
(CITY_ID from CITY) City ID
COMP_NAME VARCHAR(50) Competitor Name
MONTH_YEAR DATE
Month and Year the Sales has
occurred
PROD_NAME VARCHAR(50) Competitiors Product Name
SIMILAR_PROD_ID VARCHAR(10)
References
(SIMILAR_PROD_ID
from
COMP_PRODUCT)
Product ID of Sudha's Similar
Product
TOTAL_SALES FLOAT Sales for the month
(iii) Lookup Tables:
COMP_PRODUCT (Sudha similar product lookup entity)
Column Name Datatype Constraint Description
PROD_NAME VARCHAR(50) Product Name
SIMILAR_PROD_ID VARCHAR(10)
References
(ID_PRODUCT
from PRODUCT)
Product ID of Sudha's Similar
Product

13. 12
References:
[1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EEMCS-09-2016-0188/full/html
[2]http://www.statslice.com/industry-viewpoint-series-avoiding-risk-in-bi-and-analytics-implementations
[3] https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/sql-with-powerbi
[4] https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2013/05/business-intelligence-requirements-gathering/