8-2 Report: Maps and Data Layers

Overview

You are a business analyst for an organization that distributes pizza ingredients to various restaurants. These ingredients include dough, sauces, and toppings. Your organization wants to expand its customer base but does not know what kind of restaurant or which U.S. region to target. You have been given a Clean Customer Sales Data Set that is a representative sample of the sales at your customers’ restaurants for 2015 and 2016. This also contains household income data for the restaurant zip codes.

You have been asked to compare demographic(s) data to determine consistencies or inconsistencies in the data. You must also determine the areas with the highest household income and the restaurants in those areas. You must then analyze these results to find out whether there are opportunities for business expansion and determine how these may impact your recommendations.

In this activity, you will work with the given data set and create maps in Tableau, and then recommend opportunities for business expansion.

Prompt

Create a report that presents the recommendations for business expansion by creating and analyzing maps using your data set. Include the relevant screenshots in the report.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

• Create Maps
  • Determine the variables you are going to use.
    • Determine whether they are in the correct format for creating a map.
  • Graph the count of customers by U.S. state and the sum of the order_total variable.
    • Identify the states with the most and least customers.
    • Identify the states that have generated the most and least revenue for the restaurants.
• Add Data Layers to Maps
  • Compare the revenue generated in each state to the state’s median household income using the Map Layers option.
    • Determine whether this would provide an indication of how successful a product expansion would be in those areas.
  • Analyze the results when you use Household Income and State to create a map.
  • Analyze the results when you select Zip Code instead of State in the “By” option.
    • Identify the zip codes with the highest revenue for this group of restaurants and determine if they are in high-income or low-income zip codes.
    • Analyze the high-income zip codes and determine if the restaurants are well-represented or largely absent.
• Recommendations
  • Elaborate on the opportunities for sales and marketing.
    • Determine if there are high-income zip codes that aren’t well-represented by the restaurants but would be lucrative to expand into.
  • Analyze the impact of having data with the names and zip codes of the restaurants’ suppliers on opportunities for sales and marketing.
  • Identify other data layers that you consider important to map out and investigate. Explain.

What to Submit

Submit a 3- to 4-page Word document containing relevant screenshots using double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and one-inch margins. Sources should be cited according to APA style. Consult the Shapiro Library APA Style Guide for more information on citations.