Building A Sales Dashboard for A Sales De-partment by Using Power BI

Business Intelligence can be defined as a solution which facilitates companies to make an intelligent decision in business processes. It can be a service to effectively organize and transform data into information, which is a knowledge basis in decision-making. With the help of an appropriate business intelligence solution, a company can play an active role in timely monitoring business performance, quickly responding to the external business environment. In this thesis project, the commissioning sales department, a vendor of transformer instruments, requires a power BI sales dashboard to monitor monthly sales performance. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to build a sales dashboard displaying monthly sales performance by visualizing data in power BI. Power BI is a business intelligence software developed by Microsoft. Technical skills are not highly required when using power BI. This thesis can be divided into two parts: a theoretical part and an empirical process. Theories include history and definition of business intelligence, an architecture of business intelligence, an introduction of power BI and a specification of its four building blocks. The empirical process builds the sales dashboard by power BI. Since this is a software development process, it applies user-centric design as a guideline. There are four steps in user-centric design: gathering users’ requirements, specifying the requirements, building a prototype and the real product, and finally evaluate the product. As for gathering users’ requirements, a qualitative interview and benchmarking were selected. To evaluate the final sales dashboard, an interview was carried out again to collect comments from users. Based on the results of the evaluation, this sales dashboard meets with the requirements of the department. The process of information delivery becomes smoother between visualized data and users than before. By viewing a sales dashboard, users can clarify sales performance in the current month. Moreover, the empirical steps specified in this thesis can provide a guide for the department to follow and improve in the future. Keywords: Sales Dashboard, Power BI, Data Visualization, Business Intelligenc