Slice and Dice Sales to see Business Analytics from Every Angle
‘Slice-and-dice’. Despite sounding more at home the dining room than the board room, the potential of slice-and-dice within business analytics tends to set analysts’ eyes aglow. But what’s really meant by this term? Potential answers include . . .
- “It means drill-down.”
- “It lets me view my business from any angle.”
- “It’s a way of rearranging data, determining KPIs and better understanding how my business is doing.”
Slice-and-dice is often misused (and confused) with the related term ‘drill-down’.
Slice-and-dice refers specifically to the process of viewing data from multiple perspectives, each successive perspective focused on a smaller and smaller subset of the original data. “Slice” refers to an initial perspective – such as “sales by salesperson”. “Dice” refers to subsequent perspectives that retrieve more focused subgroups of data.
For example, a sales manager might wish to view (or “slice”) their department’s activities by salesperson, and then dice those results by each salesrep’s clients. A CFO, on the other hand, might wish to view/slice those same sales activities first by product, and then have them diced by region.
DataSelf’s Sales Slicer Dashboard
A Slicer report enables you to look at your data from every possible angle to identify KPIs, outliers, and anomalies. This includes analysis via multiple “measures” – because while one measure (such as sales revenues) might present a rosy picture of sales activities, a different measure – (such as the gross profits from those sales) might indicate a very different reality.
Effective slicing and dicing provides business analytics for:
- Multiple perspectives (e.g., at least four levels of slicing)
- Expedited results (sub 10 seconds)
- Totals & sub-totals at every level
Business Analytics Provided:
- With a tool like a Sales Slicer, you can get insight into:
- Whether gross profits are keeping in line with gross sales
- Market leaders – regarding top producing items, customers, & regions
- Outliers – which products, clients, & salesreps are under-performing
Want to see it in action?! View a quick two-minute demo of Sales Slicer here.
