This Tableau dashboard overviews profits generated by fictional company AdventureWorks 2001-2004 period and present the relevant information for both sales department or executives. Link
Despite rapid growth in sales the profits are lagging behind. There are certain systemic culprits for such situation
Why are profits kept low despite growth in sales? What can be done about it?
Because the data is final and clean, these steps only include creating particular calculated fields and else in Tableau for creation of visualizations.
Despite growing both offline and online revenues, the profits of offline sales are oscillating between loss and profit.
The main reason being that products sold offline are being sold for value either less than list price or even lower than production cost driving the profits down. Considering that there are many more offline sales of the most important products (bikes) the profits stay low for most of the period and starts rising only in the end of the period.
This is clearly show by display of countries by profit where Australia (one of the smallest markets) is making more profit than the US (the biggest market) for most of the years.
This dashboard delves deeper into how come sales don't translate to profits that well and what could be done about it.
The leading cause of this problem is sales people selling discounted products excessively. Out of all sales people there is only one who makes profit every year. However, the tendency is that the last year more sales people turn to make profit from sales.
When comparing online and offline sales it can be seen that online sales are mostly sold for listed price while offline sales are never sold for listed price.
The driving force behind faltering profits are offline sales made by sales people for highly discounted prices.
The only way to change such practice is to stop it. Considering that online sales are growing and are in general successful, there is no reason to believe that stopping the practice of underselling will put a dent into sales and/or profits.
There are couple more things that can be done to increase profits from sales:
Focusing on selling bikes with bigger profit margin
Stopping sales to stores that have historically driven loss to the company through sales and focusing on stores that historically produced profits
Look into the current system of discounting and what can be learned about it. When is it worth applying? Are there locations where rational discounts are driving sales?
Which sales people sell the least profitable bikes in which regions? Discontinuation of some of the products might be necessary
Considering that categories other than bikas do not bring much profit, are still selling all of them bring benefits to the company?