Data Driven

Decision Making
Contents
1. Introduction of the Project Plan.............................................................................................................4
1.1. Purpose of the Report.......................................................................................................................4
1.2. Project Plan......................................................................................................................................... 4
1.3. Deliverables......................................................................................................................................... 4
1.4. Data Analytics Framework...............................................................................................................4
1.5. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)...............................................................................................5
2. Data Quality: Issues and Remedies......................................................................................................5
2.1. Identification Data Problems..............................................................................................................5
2.2. Solution to aforementioned problems.............................................................................................6
2.3. BIJ’s Dataset problems........................................................................................................................6
2.4. Solution to the problems of BIJ’s dataset.......................................................................................7
3. Data Analysis & Commentary................................................................................................................ 7
3.1. Country-wise data comparison..........................................................................................................7
4. Data Charting and Commentary.......................................................................................................... 11
4.1. Chart A: Sale Value Trend.................................................................................................................11
4.2. Chart B: Performance Comparison................................................................................................ 13
4.3. Chart C: Impact of Marketing Campaign in UK market..............................................................15
5. Conclusion and Recommendations................................................................................................... 17
5.1. Conclusion............................................................................................................................................ 17
5.2. Recommendations.............................................................................................................................. 17
References....................................................................................................................................................... 18
1. Introduction of the Project Plan
1.1. Purpose of the Report
The major purpose of this report is to provide insights into current marketing strategies employed
by BIJ, and how effective are they in terms of profitability. This report contains a thorough data
analytics framework, related to BIJ’s objectives, and discussions on the positives of the data
analytics for BIJ’s achieving its business objectives. The report lists impact of marketing strategy,
KPIs, deliverables, challenges related to data-quality and relative solutions.

1.2. Project Plan

It is imperative for an effective project-plan to have project value and project scope devised.
i) Aims and Objectives
Finding answer to the question that whether the marketing sales increased as a result of
marketing campaign?
ii) BIJ Partnerships
Bangles International Jewellery (BIJ) relies on Wood-from-the-Trees (WFTT), a data analysis
consulting company. WFTT provides critical data insights to its customers including BIJ and help
them succeed by capitalising on the power of data to enhance overall profitability.
iii) Current Business Position
BIJ intends to compete with its bigger competitors such as LVMH, Signet and Cartier. BIJ is a
small organization with major parts of the world such as Africa, Australia and Africa beyond its
reach. BIJ intends to capitalize on the use of data to take on its competitors as well as increase its
current trend of sales as relatively small businesses are likely to fail within five-years of operations
(Gardner, 2019) thus robustness in operations is imperative in all fields of operations.
BIJ operates across some regions in the Europe, Asia and North America. As BIJ has invested in
the UK in the form of products marketing and promotion and thus WFTT has been hired to
analyse the data of marketing efficacy.

1.3. Deliverables
The primary deliverable contains a comprehensive-report for BIJ ascertaining the impact of
marketing efforts on the sales.

1.4. Data Analytics Framework

i) Define
Did marketing campaign increase UK’s sales?
ii) Identification of the data
 The dataset provided contains data for three countries, i.e. Japan, the USA and the UK.
The UK dataset will be used for data analysis as per the requirements.
iii) Data Collection
BIJ has extensively conducted studies in three-countries evident from the data in the
Spreadsheet.
iv) Constraints
The UK data is required to be analysed for the purpose of this report.
v) Analyse
BIJ’s Japan sales seem better than those in UK but are lower when compared to the
USA. The UK team could do well in using effective marketing strategies to reach its true
potential in terms of sales in the UK.
vi) Act
Digital technologies and transformation of the current structure of BIJ is necessary in
order for it to enhance the sales proceeds thereby increasing profits as technological
transformation and knowledge help businesses in both short and long term (Fernandez-
Jardon et al.,2020).. Setting targets, providing incentives for achieving sales-targets and
due forecasting ought to be employed while considesring the customer-satisfaction at
the helm of all the strategies.

1.5. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are very important in helping achieve the organisations achieve strategic-goals
(Klimaitienė et al., 2020). Following are the KPIs for BIJ.
a) Sales Team: - To identify and track key income streams.
b) Marketing Group: - To examine sales lead cooperation and involvement in marketing.
c) Customer Support Team: - To get the most loyal and satisfied customers.
d) Human Resource: - To increase employees’ engagement and involvement in key decision
making processes.
e) BIJ’s other areas: - To examine and track performances and contribution of all involved
processes in delivering value to the customers.

2. Data Quality: Issues and Remedies

2.1. Identification Data Problems
The data-analysts come across a range of issues and problems while gathering, assessing and
refining the data as new technology brings uncertainty (Saleh et al., 2018). There are three major
groupings of the challenges faced by data-analysts which are Data Challenges, such as data
 volume, velocity, veracity and variety etc., Process Challenges, relates to series of steps
undertaken to transform the data into information, and Management challenges relates to the

security, privacy, ethical aspects and governance (Sivarajah et al., 2017). These broad categories
stipulate a list of various challenges faced by data analysts while analyzing the data.
Figure 1: Exhibition of the Data Problems (Sivarajah et al., 2017)

2.2. Solution to aforementioned problems

There are a few solutions to the aforementioned categories of data problems when they are
separated such as data-gathering issues can be tackled with employing automatic-systems of
gathering and arranging the data in a required format. Similarly, focused investments need to be
made in building infrastructure to tackle with the issues of the data head on. A robust system
infrastructure would enable an organization to create one click visuals. Similarly, streamlining the
multitude of processes involved in data-analysis would enable looking at the whole process
holistically and thus issues could be readily resolved when the whole system is streamlined which
needs a one-time thorough effort which needs to be carefully tracked for improvement. The data is
bigger in size than ever and the solution to this issue is in-place processing of data and or
transmitting a portion necessary for analysis (Espinosa et al., 2019).
2.3. BIJ’s Dataset problems
The data is very thorough and thus a huge quantity thereby increasing data collections errors. The
initial observation suggests spelling mistakes in the countries column and the products name
column where US is written both as USA and US while Ring spelling and Hairband spelling is not
consistent and there are mistakes in spelling categories of other products as well. This leads to
miscalculations, and erroneous-observations while transforming data into information.

2.4. Solution to the problems of BIJ’s dataset

BIJ needs to follow some measures put forth for resolving the issues with the dataset and the
overall processes. Knowledge of the data related to specific areas need to be provided. Security
lapses should be tightened. For easy comprehension, the data should be categorized and would
give a first-hand impression of what the data is about. Data spelling causes major issues while
processing it as it provides wrong information thus the spelling of the major categories and
product names should be thoroughly checked. After finding the issues with the spellings in country
and products section, the respective columns are selected and the wrong spellings are replaced
with the correct spellings streamlining the processes. Similarly, the typing mistakes in the year
section are identified and rectified. Updated data collection and management methods should be
employed so that the systems keep pace with the increasing pace of the data.

3. Data Analysis & Commentary

3.1. Country-wise data comparison

Japan
BIJ’s Japan-dataset shows three years’-data of sales of different products. The snapshot below
shows Japan’s Dataset at a glance with related trends and percentage change in the respective
column.
 Bracelet Accessory
Hairband
Maximum 63808 Maximum 1011205 Maximum 43838
Minimum 4519 Minimum 121117 Minimum 0
Range 59288 Range 890088 Range 43838
Average 25032 Average 350458 Average 15259

Necklace Ring
Maximum 121800 Maximum 47400
Minimum 6543 Minimum 885
Range 115256 Range 46515
Average 48431 Average 19161

Figure-2: Japan’s Trends and Percentage-Change

Below small tables are excerpted from the excel calculations of Sales Value of all subtype wherein
Maximum, Minimum and Range is provided.
Standard deviation value is 156466 which is really high and posits a very high variance.
United Kingdom
The marketing-strategy has not produced any results but has negatively affected the sales. The
BIJ’s team needs to urgently address the matter of adopting a more robust marketing strategy
which would result in positive sales. Besides occasional uptick in the sales figure of one or two
products, almost all products exhibited negative trend in sales and sales quantity post May, 2020
and thus warranting immediate remedial practices. The Figure 3 below shows the state of sales in
the UK.

Figure-3: Biggest Subtype Sales Volume in UK

Figure-4 portrays the overall products and their relative changes of sales value in the UK market.
 Figure-4: BIJ’s UK’s Sales Value Trend and Percentage Change
The below small tables include categorized maximum, minimum, range and average of the
subtypes presently being sold in the UK.

Hairband
Accessory Bracelet
Minimum 0
Minimum 1164 Minimu 3912
Maximum 44617
Maximum 23331 m 3
Range 44617
Range 22167 Maxim 2479
Average 11740
Average 9073 um 92
2088
Necklace RangeRing 69
Minimum 3038 Averag
Minimum 1077
1565
Maximum 91094 e
Maximum 80
39091
Range 88056 Range 37526
Average 27874 Average 15023

The standard deviation for the UK is 45894 which does not look good presenting volatile
performance throughout the three years’-data.

USA
The USA projections does not present a good-picture either. Things in the USA are also on the
lower trajectory and the sales-volume are plummeting just like in the United Kingdom although the
sales volume is greater in USA.

Figure-5: BIJ’s USA’s Trends and %Change

Bracelet Accessory Ring

Minimum -167792 Minimum -2129 Minimum 3004
Maximum 301124 Maximum 70119 Maximum 61824
Range 468916 Range 72248 Range 58820
Average 134630 Average 19700 Average 26732

Necklace Hairband
Minimum 20559 Minimum 20060
Maximum 162996 Maximum 198336
Range 142437 Range 178276
The above tables exhibit separate
Average 79931 Average 86924
relative data of the subtypes and
gives an overview of the maximum, minimum, range and average values of the relative subtypes
in the USA market.
 The standard deviation for the USA stands at 62124, the trend shows that the future looks bleak
for BIJ.

4. Data Charting and Commentary

Figures and visualization is a critical point which is used during a scientific process to show the
true extent of the knowledge the learner has (Midway, 2020).

4.1. Chart A: Sale Value Trend

Japan
Bar-Chart
Bar-chart increases readability of the presented data (Kasmana and Adipraja, 2019). Below is a
Japan’s sales bar-chart.

Japan's sales values with overall Moving Average

£600,000

£500,000

£400,000

£300,000

£200,000

£100,000

£-
et ng ce ry nd let ng ce nd let ng ce nd let ng ce nd let ng ce nd let ng ce nd let
el Ri ckla sso rba ace Ri ckla rba ace Ri ckla rba ace Ri ckla rba ace Ri ckla rba ace Ri ckla rba ace
ac e i i i i i i
Br Ne Acc Ha B
r
Ne Ha B
r
Ne Ha B
r
Ne Ha B
r
Ne Ha B
r
Ne Ha B
r

Figure-6: Bar Chart of Sales Value of BIJ in Japan

 The accessory at point-4 has zero sales-value, skewing overall results downward.
 The highest and peak bars is the sales value performance of hairbands in Japan which
skew the overall average of the results upward.
 The rest of the subtypes exhibit almost a similar trajectory, showing a normal increase or
decrease.
  The dotted line shows a moving-average which moves up and down relative to a
corresponding value.

Pie-Chart

Pie-charts illustrates a proportion of population in a specific category (Hooper, 2019), thus

making it for a great relative comparison. The Figure-7 shows the breakout of sales-values of
respective subtype in pie-chart.

Japan's Sales Values

Bracelet Ring
Necklace Accessory
Hairband Bracelet
Ring Necklace
Hairband Bracelet
Ring Necklace
Hairband Bracelet
Ring Necklace
Hairband Bracelet
Ring Necklace
Hairband Bracelet
Ring Necklace
Hairband Bracelet

Figure-7: Pie Chart of Sales Values of BIJ in Japan

 The major sales-value is contributed by hairbands taking more than half of the pie chart.
 The smaller portions are contributed by other subtypes. The hairbands sales value is
phenomenal in Japan and other subtypes need to be re-invigorated in order to for them to
achieve growth.

4.2. Chart B: Performance Comparison

United-Kingdom

The UK’s sales values when compared to Japan are very unfavourable. The marketing-strategy
has failed to progress the sales-value which in reality has been dwindling after the marketing-
strategy proving to be counterproductive. The Figure-8 contains comparative-analysis of the
sales-values of the Japan exhibited by Series-1, and sales values of the UK exhibited by Series b
in the bar-chart.
 Comparison of UK and Japan Sales
£1,200,000

£1,000,000

£800,000

£600,000

£400,000

£200,000

£-
et ng ce ory nd le
t ng ce ory nd le
t ng ce ory nd le
t ng ce ory nd
el Ri kla ess irba ace Ri kla ess irba ace Ri kla ess irba ace Ri kla ess irba
rac c c c c
B Ne Acc Ha Br Ne Acc Ha Br Ne Acc Ha Br Ne Acc Ha

Series1 Moving average (Series1)

Series2 Moving average (Series2)

Figure-8: Comparison of Japan and UK Sales values

 The Series-1 data is of BIJ in Japan coloured Blue, while Series-2 is of UK sales values.
 The moving-averages indicate that Japan market outperforms the UK market in overall
average sales.
 The UK team needs to look at the BIJ marketing team in Japan as to what gives them this
meteoric rise in sales values.

Japan and UK analysis

£1,200,000

£1,000,000

£800,000

£600,000

£400,000

£200,000

£-
et ng ce ory nd let ing lace sory and elet ing lace sory and elet ing lace sory and
el Ri kla ess irba ace R ck R ck R ck
rac c es airb rac es airb rac es airb
B Ne Acc Ha Br Ne Acc H B Ne Acc H B Ne Acc H

Series1 Series2

Figure-9: Comparison of Japan and UK sales values

 The Figure-9 above clearly shows the enhanced sales values of Japan’s comparative to the
holistic series-2 exhibiting UK’s sales values.

4.3. Chart C: Impact of Marketing Campaign in UK market

As in section-3 of this report, we identified that the marketing campaign negatively affected the
sales values of the subtypes in UK, below is the graphical representation of chapter 3.

Bar-Chart

The Figure-10 exhibits the data after employing the new marketing strategy in the UK in the
May, 2020. Figure-10 has taken the relative categories of the subtypes in the UK market to
visually portray the overall results of the marketing strategy.

Sales Values After Marketing Investment in UK

£300,000

£250,000

£200,000

£150,000

£100,000

£50,000

£-
et ce an
d ng ry et ce et ce et ce an
d ng ry et ce an
d ng ry
el kla Ri so el kla el kla el kla Ri so el kla Ri so
rac ec i rb ce
s
rac ec rac ec rac ec i rb ce
s
rac ec i rb ce
s
B N Ha Ac B N B N B N Ha Ac B N Ha Ac

Figure-10: Categorized sales data of Products after Marketing-Investment

 The bracelet visually shows a decrease pattern followed by necklace and other
subtypes.
 The marketing strategy has proved counterproductive in the UK, instead of boosting the
sales values, it has gradually decreased the sales values.
 The moving average is overall decreasing for all relative subtypes in the UK after the
marketing strategy.

Comparison of UK with other Markets after Marketing Strategy

 This analysis looks at all the countries in the dataset for the respective period after
investment in the UK in the marketing-strategy. The figure-11 has the series-1 exhibiting
the UK sales values, the series-2 exhibiting Japan sales values, and series-3 suggesting
the US sales values along with their respective moving-averages in likewise colours to get
a better understanding.

Comparison of US, UK and Japan

£400,000

£350,000

£300,000

£250,000

£200,000

£150,000

£100,000

£50,000

£-
t t t t t t t t
le ing ce ory nd le ing ce ory nd le ing ce ory le ing ce ory le ing ce ory nd le ing ce ory nd le ing ce ory nd le ing ce ory nd
a ce R ckla ess irba ace R ckla ess irba ace R ckla ess ace R ckla ess ace R ckla ess irba ace R ckla ess irba ace R ckla ess irba ace R ckla ess irba
Br Ne Acc Ha B
r
Ne Acc Ha B
r
Ne Acc B
r
Ne Acc B
r
Ne Acc Ha B
r
Ne Acc Ha B
r
Ne Acc Ha B
r
Ne Acc Ha

Series1 Moving average (Series1) Series2

Moving average (Series2) Series3 Moving average (Series3)

Figure-11: Comparison of All countries in the Dataset after May, 2020

 The sales-values and moving averages of the sales values of USA and Japan are competing
and exhibit good sales relatively than those in the UK. Similarly, sales values in all three
countries have decreased after May, 2020 which suggests that the downfall in the sales
values of the UK BIJ may not be because of the marketing strategies and may point to a
global phenomenon
 Between May and December, some months have seen eventual rise in the sales values but
then mitigated at once, strengthening the notion that some external factors may be at play
here.
 The sales after the investment for 1 or two months stayed strong but then in later months,
sales values went down for all countries including UK.
5. Conclusion and Recommendations
5.1. Conclusion
WFTT services are used by BIJ to ascertain the situation around the marketing campaigns The
marketing campaigns are not very effective as these have not produced any meaningful results in
terms of increasing the sales values in the respective region. The marketing strategies need to be
revisited not only in the UK but around the globe where BIJ is present as the sales values are
plummeting while BIJ focuses on competition instead of product developments and decorative
creativity.
Much of the focus is on futile attempt to compete with other companies while relegating focus on
product development, effective planning and efficient marketing.

5.2. Recommendations
BIJ needs professional data-analysis services, provided by competent data-analysts. Along with
employing the best data analysts and consultants, BIJ also needs to digitally transform to match
its competitors around the globe. The Business Intelligence teams need to understand the
financial-costs and opportunity-costs of the investments build systems based on facts.
Businesses need to understand their ultimate customers if they intend to compete in a very
competitive marketplace (Camilleri, 2018). BIJ needs not to expend its energy and resources on
expanding to more markets but it should focus on innovation, creativity and digital transformation
to posit itself a competitive brand which would help consolidate its business-position in the current
markets as well as pave way for expanding to new markets.
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