DYS541: Getting Started with Spreadsheet Modeling

and Business Analytics

Dyson, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

Getting Started with Spreadsheet Modeling and Business

Analytics Action Plan

Professor Haeger has explained that there are three steps in the data-analytics process,
and the first of these is to gather your data. Consider how you will gather your data and
towards what end: What are the key business questions you’re hoping to answer?

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

1. Describe the key business need you have for analyzing data or the problem you
wish to solve. For example, do you hope to more effectively work with your inventory
records, customer or guest records, sales data, purchase orders?

The startup I work for has a business need for analyzing purchase order data. The
problem we need to solve is our current inability to derive insights about the effect on
sales and revenue of our various (social media) marketing efforts.

2. What is it that you need to do, better or for the first time? Describe your goal(s) for
analyzing data.

We need to be able to answer basic questions, like how many orders were placed
today and in what markets (what city or what state) were the orders delivered? Were
the orders delivered on time?

3. As you reflect on your business need for performing data analytics, consider how
you will gather your data. Will you be collecting it yourself, such as via a new customer
survey? Will someone else in your organization, such as the customer service or HR
department, collect the data and deliver it to you?

There is currently a Data Science team, but they are still improving their data analysis.
Our startup is a tech-based business so, in theory, we should be able to gather data
from the various internet-based platforms we use to reach customers: app, website,
social media. However, we’ve recently noticed that sometimes we can’t even answer
the questions I listed in #2.

4. Now that you have identified your business need for analyzing your data, identify the
main categories of data you expect to gather. For example, in terms of customer data,
this might be: first and last name, street address, city, state/province, mailing code,
email, phone, purchase history.

For each order, we need first and last name of customer, customer ID (to track their
order history), first and last name of recipient, address of recipient, time order placed,
SKU ordered, time delivery started, place delivery started, time delivery completed,

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 DYS541: Getting Started with Spreadsheet Modeling
and Business Analytics
Dyson, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

place delivery completed, notes on any details about the delivery (e.g. late delivery
because of traffic, dropped order because of vendor who refused to sell item)

5. Describe your plans for making sure that the data you’re working with is accurate
and up-to-date. How do you think you can best accomplish this? Which colleagues or
departments will you need to collaborate with?

One way to make sure the data is accurate is to work closely with tech, engineering,
and data science teams and create a data map and data dictionary to document their
data sources and data funnels so I know where the data I use comes from.

6. Set a timeline for success: What do you plan to do in the next month? In the next
three months?

In the next month, I will be creating a data map for all the data processed by the
company (also for compliance and data privacy purposes). In the next three months, I
hope to design a dashboard with the appropriate data sources to provide order and
sales insights.

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