[AWS] Developing a Sales Analytics Dashboard using Amazon Quicksight

Project Overview

This project involves developing a comprehensive dashboard in Amazon Quicksight that will allow us to quickly discover insights and patterns in our data while also providing us with an interactive visual dashboard that we can publish and share.

Objectives:

• Insight Discovery: Develop a dashboard that enables users to quickly identify trends, patterns, and key insights from complex data sets.
• Interactive Visualization: Create an interactive and user-friendly visual dashboard that allows for real-time data exploration and analysis.

AWS Services Used

• Amazon Quicksight: A fast, cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy to visualize and analyze data in minutes. It is the only service we used to implement this very project as it has all the capabilities required to successfully execute this project. We made use of .csv data stored locally on our machine.

Deliverables

• Interactive Dashboard: A comprehensive, interactive dashboard in Amazon QuickSight that displays key metrics, trends, and insights.

Why QuickSight?

Amazon QuickSight is a powerful tool for data visualization and business intelligence that offers several key benefits:

• Ease of Use: QuickSight provides an intuitive interface, making it accessible for users of all skill levels to create interactive dashboards and visualizations without requiring deep technical knowledge.
• Scalability: It can seamlessly scale to accommodate growing datasets and user numbers, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
• Integration: QuickSight integrates smoothly with various AWS services and external data sources, allowing for a unified and efficient data analytics experience.

Implementation

Have a look: Global Industry Dataset

Before we can begin creating interactive dashboards we first need to provide Amazon QuickSight with the data that we will perform the analytics on first. We were able to obtain a well-structured dataset about the Global Energy Industry, which we uploaded into QuickSight as a (.csv) file.

After uploading the (.csv) file to QuickSight, we are given an opportunity confirm our file upload settings, we are also given a chance to review the file data.

Uploading .csv file to quicksight

For this project we had no need to edit any settings thus we proceeded to click ‘Next’ after reviewing the data itself. At this we were able to access the main QuickSight console.

On the left panel of the QuickSight main console, have the data attributes (columns) which we can select and combine to create interactive graphs which together will form our dashboard.

In creating our first graph we simply select 2 attributes which in this case were ‘Order Date’ and ‘Sales’ and we were able to generate our first graph in seconds.

The possibilities and depth at which analytics can be generated with QuickSight are endless. QuickSight also allows us to generate forecasts, which give us an idea of what we can expect future data to look like based on the given data.

Finally, we manipulate the configurations of each attribute, we decided to change the ‘Aggregate’ setting for the Order Date data attribute, this changed the graph into Line Chart graph type and after enabling the ‘Forecast’ option we were able to get a future forecast for December 2023 up until February 2025.

There are far too many configurations to explain or list here but below is our final result for our Global Energy Industry dataset.

Conclusion & Clean Up

We have successfully developed a simple sales dashboard using Amazon QuickSight, providing us with valuable insights into our sales data. The dashboard effectively consolidates sales metrics, visualizes key performance indicators, and allows for easy analysis of trends. We leveraged QuickSight’s ability to seamlessly connect to our data sources, enabling us to create an interactive and shareable dashboard that enhances our ability to make data-driven decisions.