Business analytics : Case UK Online Gifts

 Unit 1 Case UK Online Gifts has been in business for a few years selling gift items primarily to other wholesalers and retailers. They have tracked their sales for the last year and believe that they should be able to use the information hidden in it to make better business decisions this year and beyond. They have hired you to analyze the sales data and report back. The attached document includes 12.5 months of data. Assume that you received this information on December 15, 2011 (a week after the last observation) and have been asked to provide your report on the first business day of the new year (2012). INSTRUCTIONS 1. Review the Online Retail UK gift supplier file in MS Excel. 2. Conduct exploratory data analysis in MS Excel of the sales and customers’ information, generating summary statistics, tables, and/or graphs that describe the data. Please follow the spreadsheet format rules as defined by the file in Moodle. 3. Write a report for UK Online Gifts that describes the relative importance of different customers, as well as different products. Provide interpretation and recommendations based upon your analysis. Include appropriate graphs and descriptive and/or comparative statistics from this unit’s reading. Please read the Report Writing Guidance file on Moodle for further advice. 4. Submit both the report and the MS Excel file used for the completion of this assignment to Moodle and via hardcopy in class or to the instructor’s office. 5. This assignment is due at the end of Unit 1. NOTE/HINT: You will notice that there are no specific questions to address. Instead, I want you to examine the data and think about what information would be important to review and include in the report. For example, the company might like to understand what their best, worst, and average clients look like. How might clients behave or interact differently? Can you measure these differences with this data?