Where To Start Your Visualization Journey?

Though this a very complicated question to answer today we will be talking only about the process and the making behind the Visualizations, if you’re interested to know in detail about the visual aspect of it, you can refer to our Power BI dashboards design guide.

The first step in your visualization journey starts with KPIs. Though it might seem basic, you have to understand as we’ve mentioned above there are multiple types of dashboards and by dividing them further into business functions you can have multiple permutations and combinations.

A few KPIs that CPG industry dashboards can have at an operational and analytical level are:

- Product Sales by stores

- Stock Levels for each store

- Product Margins

- Shelf availability

- Delivery time

- Fulfilment statistics

- Customer retention rate

- Preference data (brand vs self)

- Inventory in hand

Some of the KPIs for strategic and financial teams are:

- Sales revenue vs forecast

- Profit per customer

- Product sales by geographies

- Sales order changes (by quarter or month)

- Delivery costs

- Logistics costs to revenue

- Overstock, understock, and deadstock calculations

These are just a few of the KPIs that are useful for the FMCG or the CPG industry. But the actual KPIs they want to show should be the ones executives already have in their mind or are something they would like to see as per their strategic needs. In case you are not sure about where to start, then one of the best processes would be to identify Acceptable, Advisable, and Admirable KPIs suitable for your CPG business. If you are unsure about the same, drop us a message and our CPG Analytics experts can help you with the same.

Now that you’ve decided on the content or the type of content you want to show, next comes the structure and the placement of the KPIs. Normally, users follow a “Z” pattern in reading therefore the most important KPIs should be placed first and the not-soimportant ones at the bottom, like the one in the dashboard below:

Also, it is important to know which type of chart to use when needed. The usage of Pie charts, bar charts, stacked charts, combination charts, waterfall charts, etc. can create confusion when the user is unaware of how to read the charts. Therefore, it is important to maintain charts as simple as possible but also to convey as much information as possible. Here’s a cheat sheet in case you were looking for one.

Source: Power BI best practices

Here are a few tips for visualizing CPG data (in addition to the data and KPIs that have to be represented) :

• Use clear and simple charts: Opt for clear and simple charts such as bar charts and line charts, or something that your end user is comfortable with.

• Show data trends over time: Use charts to show how CPG data has changed over time to identify trends and patterns in the historic data.

• Use color effectively: Use a consistent color scheme to highlight important data points or trends.

• Use filters and drill-downs: Allow users to filter and drill down into the data to see more granular details.

• Use interactive visualizations: Use tools like hover-over text, zooming, and panning to make the data more accessible. ( Varies with the business intelligence tool you are trying to use)

How Can Analytics Help CPG Industry?

A study by Nielsen found that CPG companies that use data analytics have a 5-6% increase in sales productivity. In another study by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, CPG companies that use big data and analytics have a 3-5% increase in marketing ROI. As such taking even a few steps to reach that “admirable” stage in the analytics journey is important by taking the steps toward acceptable frameworks first. One such step is visualization.

And though the hype around visualizations is increasing over the past years, visualizations are not necessarily new to humankind. Visual imagery has always been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas right from Greek geometry to Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings they have been useful for both technical and scientific purposes.

Though we are not exactly asking you to draw the visuals, visualization analytics has become much easier for both the end user and the analysts. Let’s get into the analytics perspective, and how it helps end users better:

- Top-line reports can be presented in a compelling format to help executives narrow down on actionable items quickly.

- Automation in the entire visualization process reduces time consumed from hours to seconds.

- Weekly charts which require updated data but the same KPIs can be automated.

- Huge amounts of data right from competitor data to internal data can be compared side by side and can be drilled down with ease.

- Send trigger mails with weekly, monthly, or scheduled time data for quick insights.

- Data review for categorical information can be done w.r.t. geographies, product, period, market, salesmen, markets, etc., all under the same dashboard.

And these are the use cases of CPG Visualization that just scratch the surface of the iceberg. A lot more can be done only with access to the right data, for example, advanced analytics. A study by Boston Consulting Group found that CPG companies that use advanced analytics have sales growth that is 2-3 times higher than those that do not. We will not deep dive into advanced analytics today but if you’re interested to know you we have written in detail about predictive analytics use cases

Here are a few examples of CPG Analytics dashboards with their POV.

POV: Operational Dashboard: Overall Equipment Efficiency for Equipment at a weekly data level. You can find the outliers of the machine productivity and overall performance in just one glance.

Now that we’ve seen an operational dashboard that can be useful at a manufacturing plant level, let’s go one step above and look at a distribution summary. You can check the sales level by year, geography, salesmen, distributor, channels, and more.

An executive dashboard like below has an entirely different purpose than the ones mentioned above. These dashboards can be used for strategic purposes for decision making, like understanding the decreasing profit margins and sales at a holistic level rather than at a distribution level.