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Analyst Case Interview - Interviewer Background

Case

This case is inspired by our sales dashboard.

Salesonite is a wholeseller of stationary, books and gifts.

They have 200 clients, where some are bigger supermarkets, and others are individual shops or kiosks. The clients are spread over Benelux and Dach. The distribution of size is typical: There is one dominant client (AutoStop, they run kiosks on Highway stops) that generates about 40% of the turnover. 160 clients just do 20% of the turnover.

They have about 4000 products in 15 categories. Some of them they produce themselves, but mostly they whitelabel bought.

They have about 22 suppliers, most of which are specialised (stationary, gifts, book publishers).

Background Info

You may or may not bring on some of these pieces of information, depending on how good the candidate is. Some of it you can disclose pro-actively if he doesn't ask.

  1. we have moved from a legacy ERP to BC two years ago (-> historical data?)

  2. we have sales conditions from our suppliers: if we reach a certain sales target by the end of the year, we get a discount of 1 or 2%.

  3. we have an external IT company called IT4You. They know everything about our setup, BC, etc.

I have the followign questions:

  • which clients are the best

  • which of our products are the most successful and profitable

  • how we are doing so far this year

Detailed Info

  • Number of transactions in database: 1.6 million

  • Data: we need sales invoices, clients, products, cost price per order line (for margin)

  • Daily Refresh

Guidance

  1. Be nice to the candidate.

  2. The setting is artificial. Don't overdo it with the role play. But also make it clear that the candidate is the driver of the process.

  3. 1 hour is short for this case. Don't spend too much time on a single topic. If the candidate gets stuck, help him and move on.

Gameification Gimmicks (Phone Jokers)

  • Power BI Expert: knows all about DWHs, Power Query, Star Schema, Visualisations, Refreshes, Power BI Service

  • IT Company: It's both ERP consultant and IT. They know if BC is on prem or in the cloud, how to access data, how much data is stored, the number of users, whether it requires a license, etc.

  • Boss: You know everything about estimation, timeline, project risks, design best practices. But you don't know anything about the client, and you don't know a lot about IT, ERP Systems, Star Schemas, etc.)

Levels of Data Analysis

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For this case, we will be mostly with "Descriptive Analytics" and "Diagnostic Analytics".

ADM (Semantic Data Model)

salesonite-star-schema.png

Wireframe

This is just one possibility. Depending on where the case went, this might not even be relevant. And things like sales conditions are not included.

salesonite-dashboard.png