My First Client Project

Last week, we (DS34) presented our first internal client project, 'Allchains', and throughout this process, I have learned a lot about how to work with very large amounts of data. The data set we were tasked to work with consisted of 91 different tables of data and a schema (a sheet on how to connect these tables) with a short introduction to the data. Our task, was to value the company given only it's production, purchasing and sales data.

Firstly, my (production team) data had massive join issues. When joining 6 data sets together using relationships, I had to use LODs/Table Calculations so that my numeric values didn't multiply in value. I also had a problem that, a certain pair of tables, had two ids (component id, product assembly id) joining onto a single id (product id), and this meant that when I joined them together and tried to use data from both tables, the screen went blank. If you ever have this problem, create two of the table with the single id, and join them like so

                           Single id table - double id table - single id table1

first on one pair of ids (component id-product id), and the other one the other pair (product assembly id-product id1).

As it was our first 'client' project, we did not know what we were supposed to do. Previous projects having been about building dashboards to help people better understand data, then being faced with having to make a numeric decision, having no idea how to value a company, was a massive shock. We spent the first day trying to learn how to value a company, and forgetting the most important part of the project...the data. The next day, we split into 3 separate groups (production, purchasing and sales) and then started looking through our sections of the data. Trying to find any interesting and useful trends or relationships.

One problem I had was that, after going through the data, I had a lot of graphs showing relationships between certain values but nothing that helped us calculate the value. It was only after our PM stopped us and told us exactly how she wanted to calculate the value, that it finally clicked. My graphs added value as they showed ways to reduce our costs (in production) and speed up production times, in order to improve our gross profits, which in turn, increases our valuation.

What I learned from this project is, do not panic when you are given key words you do not understand, by searching the data, you will eventually find what you were looking for, is exactly what you were looking at the entire time.

Author:
Lauren Halliwell
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