For the final project, you will imagine yourself as a newly contracted junior data specialist. You have been tasked with identifying a business question and
selecting and analyzing the relevant data to aid in answering the question. You will also be required to show your abilities in compiling and cleaning the data for
a future presentation to management in the form of an executive summary.
Question: “What were the total sales by vendor?”
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
I. Identify the Business Question: Explain how you would solve this problem and what sort of data you
would require to do so.
II. Obtaining the Right Data: Using appropriate tools and querying skills, use Excel to begin the data-mining process to obtain the information you will need
to perform your analysis.
A. Review the provided spreadsheets and explain why they are all required to respond to the business question and how they are all related.
B. Explain which areas of data from these spreadsheets you will use and why. For example, which columns would you use?
III. Analysis: In this section, you will analyze the data within the spreadsheets in order to understand what information it will provide and its relation to the
business question.
A. Explain what the data actually is and how the data correlates back to the question you intend to answer.
B. Analyze the data and identify any areas that are not aligned properly. Be sure that you adjust these later to ensure that they are matched up
properly.
C. Describe how you will pull all of the data together in order to make sure it works collectively and will report correctly for your needs.
D. Based on your analysis, provide a list of potential questions you could answer for management.
V. Compiling and Cleaning the Data: In this section, you will load the relevant data into an enterprise-style system (in this case Access) and clean the data
in preparation for generating a report.
A. Compile the spreadsheets you have analyzed and load them into Access in order to create a table.
B. Create a query to maintain the integrity of the original data and clean the data. For example, if you have different names within your table that
actually mean the same thing, you will use the query to make the necessary changes.
C. While cleaning the data, be sure to look for and fix any incorrect, incomplete, and erroneous data.
D. Based on your initial analysis and your compiled and cleaned data, explain how it will effectively answer the business question.
V. Report for Management
A. Using Access, generate an enterprise-level report to submit along with your executive summary.
B. Alter labels (identifiers) that appear in the report so they are consumable for management to comprehend.
VI. Executive Summary: Compose an executive summary in which you explain what your process was to create the enterprise level report as well as why
you performed the actions you did. Within your summary, provide a detailed description of the report in which you explain the identifiers used. You will
also need to anticipate questions management may ask, so be sure that your explanation is as detailed as possible but also uses audience-appropriate
language.
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