This Power BI dashboard was built as a learning project to gain hands-on experience with data analysis and visualization. Using fictional data, it provides an opportunity to practice end-to-end business performance analysis by tracking key metrics for sales, profitability, and operational efficiency.
- Power BI Desktop (Data visualization, dashboard design, and data modeling)
- Power Query (Data cleaning, transformation)
- DAX (All custom measures and KPIs)
- Excel (Initial data structure design and preparing the fictional dataset)
- GitHub (Version control and project documentation)
- Comprehensive KPI Tracking → Monitor Total Revenue, Total Cost, Total Profit, Profit Margin %, and Total Orders at a glance.
- Customer Segmentation Insights → Evaluate Enterprise, SMB, and Distributor contributions to total revenue dynamically.
- Customer-Level Profitability Analysis → Compare customers’ revenue, profit margins, average order value, and order frequency to identify growth opportunities.
- Revenue & Profitability Trends → Visualize month-by-month changes in revenue and profit margins to detect underlying business patterns.
Jan 2024 – Aug 2025 totals:
- Total Revenue: ₺1.612.450.363
- Total Cost: ₺1.178.251.569
- Total Profit: ₺434.198.794
- Profit Margin: 26.93%
- Total Orders: 1,000
💡 Insight:
While a 26.93% profit margin may seem reasonable, profitability varies significantly across segments and customers.
Understanding where profit comes from is critical for optimizing growth strategies.
The overall 26.93% profit margin is a positive sign, but it's not the full story. True strategic growth requires moving beyond this high-level view. The business must analyze profitability by segment and customer to identify where profit is actually being generated. This approach enables targeted strategies that focus on margin optimization, rather than just general revenue expansion.
- Enterprise: 35.52%
- SMB: 33.81%
- Distributor: 30.67%
💡 Insight: While the overall revenue distribution across segments appears balanced, a deeper look reveals significant and volatile monthly fluctuations within each segment's performance. This lack of consistency poses a strategic challenge for supply chain management.
- Unpredictable Performance: All segments show major month-over-month swings. For example, the SMB segment's revenue spiked from ₺22.9M in December 2024 to a record high of ₺51.4M in January 2025. Such drastic changes can make future demand forecasting and resource planning highly difficult.
- Supply Chain Implications: These sharp fluctuations suggest potential misalignments between sales and operational planning (S&OP). Revenue spikes could lead to inventory shortages or operational bottlenecks, while sudden drops might result in idle capacity.
It is critical to move beyond the high-level revenue balance and investigate the root causes of this monthly volatility. Understanding the specific factors driving these dramatic swings is essential for creating a more resilient and predictable supply chain. The focus should be on stabilizing month-to-month performance to optimize operational efficiency and minimize risk.
| Customer | Total Revenue | AOV | Profit Margin % | Total Orders |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CUST-0202 | ₺22.26M | ₺3.18M | 21.79% | 7 |
| CUST-0191 | ₺14.90M | ₺2.98M | 34.10% | 5 |
💡 Insight: High revenue doesn’t necessarily translate into high profitability. While CUST-0202 leads in revenue, its lower profit margin (21.79%) reflects higher operational costs per order. In contrast, CUST-0191 achieves a 34.10% margin on fewer orders, demonstrating greater efficiency and a more profitable customer profile.
True business health is measured by profitable growth, not just revenue expansion. This analysis highlights the need to shift from a broad, volume-based strategy to a more granular approach that focuses on margin optimization at the customer level. By identifying and replicating the success factors of high-margin customers like CUST-0191, the business can enhance overall profitability without sacrificing growth.
| Month | Total Revenue | Profit Margin % |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | ₺103.27M | 24.74% |
| Apr 2025 | ₺54.46M | 36.18% |
| Jun 2025 | ₺79.86M | 40.79% |
| Jul 2025 | ₺79.01M | 22.63% |
💡 Insight: This table demonstrates the complex and often unpredictable relationship between revenue and profitability. A look at recent data reveals three critical scenarios:
- 1. High Revenue, Low Margin (December 2024): This month generated high revenue but had a low profit margin. This may indicate a period of aggressive, high-volume sales driven by promotions or end-of-year discounts, which increased top-line revenue but eroded profitability.
- 2. Low Revenue, High Margin (April 2025): In contrast, April 2025 achieved one of the highest profit margins despite having a low revenue month. This suggests that sales during this period were highly strategic, likely focusing on high-margin items or a significant reduction in operational costs.
- 3. The Revenue-Profitability Gap (June vs. July 2025): The most critical insight is the dramatic gap between June 2025 and July 2025; despite nearly identical revenues, their profit margins have a massive 18% difference. This highlights a significant inconsistency in profitability drivers.
True business health is not measured by revenue alone. These trends show that a robust strategy must prioritize margin optimization and understanding the underlying factors behind monthly volatility to ensure consistent, sustainable growth.
- Revenue & Order Trends → Analyze month-over-month (MoM) changes in Revenue and Total Orders to understand sales performance and demand fluctuations.
- Segment & Category Profitability → Break down profit margins by customer segment and product category, revealing which combinations are most profitable.
- Inventory & Workload Analysis → Assess Orders in Progress and Inventory in Progress to gauge operational load and potential bottlenecks.
💡 Insight: The Marmara region demonstrates severe profit margin instability from late 2024 through 2025, indicating potential challenges in demand planning, pricing strategy, and cost management. From Nov 2024 to Feb 2025, revenue remained relatively stable, but profit margins collapsed:
Nov 2024 → Feb 2025: Margins dropped from 34.73% to 10.82%.
Despite steady revenue, operational efficiency weakened, suggesting rising production costs or aggressive discounting to drive sales.
Mar 2025 saw a sharp rebound to 26.12%, but by May 2025, margins plunged to 4.09%.
Indicates short-term corrective tactics rather than sustainable profitability — possibly temporary promotions or bulk sales.
Jun 2025: Margins peaked at 44.55%, marking the region’s highest profitability since early 2024.
Aug 2025: Margins dropped to -15.32%, entering negative territory despite moderate revenue declines.
Suggests cost overruns, excess inventory clearances, or pricing misalignments.
The Marmara region’s extreme profit margin volatility highlights an urgent need for:
- Better demand forecasting to align production with market realities.
- Stronger cost-control mechanisms to protect margins during revenue fluctuations.
- More sustainable pricing strategies to avoid short-term profitability swings.
Stabilizing profitability will require a data-driven approach combining forecast accuracy, cost optimization, and strategic pricing alignment.
Revenue Month Selected: VAR CurrentYM = MAX('Date Table'[YearMonthISO]) RETURN CALCULATE([Total Revenue], FILTER(ALL('Date Table'), 'Date Table'[YearMonthISO] = CurrentYM)) → Uses a variable (VAR) to dynamically capture the selected month, then calculates total revenue for that month. Demonstrates dynamic, context-aware calculation in Power BI.
Total Orders Month Selected: CALCULATE([Total Orders], FILTER('Date Table', 'Date Table'[Month Year] = MAX('Date Table'[Month Year]))) → Counts orders for the selected month.
Revenue Month Selected: DIVIDE([Total Profit],[Total Revenue],0) → Safely calculates profit relative to revenue.
MoM Arrow Text (Revenue / Orders / Profit Margin): IF(ISBLANK(v),BLANK(),IF(v>=0,"▲ "&FORMAT(v,"0.0%"),"▼ "&FORMAT(ABS(v),"0.0%"))) → Provides visual cue for growth/decline, showing both direction and magnitude of month-over-month changes.
💡 Insight: The data reveals significant instability in profit margins across multiple segments, especially within Electronics SMB and Home Distributor.
❗ Potantial Causes:
- Sudden pricing adjustments and discounting strategies appear to have triggered extreme short-term fluctuations.
- Possible inventory misalignments — either excess stock leading to markdowns or shortages driving up prices.
- Demand volatility in certain customer segments, particularly SMBs, may indicate inconsistent forecasting accuracy.
- Implications of Instability:
- Unstable profit margins can distort revenue predictability and impact cash flow planning.
- Sudden margin drops — such as Electronics SMB (-21.0%) in May 2025 — could reflect operational inefficiencies or reactive pricing policies.
- High spikes, like the 69.9% Electronics Distributor margin in Jun 2025, may suggest short-term wins but also carry risks if they are not sustainable.
- The significant fluctuations in profit margins indicate potential pricing inefficiencies, demand forecasting gaps, and inventory misalignments. Such volatility can undermine revenue predictability and cash flow stability, making it harder to plan operations effectively. A more integrated Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) approach, combined with tighter pricing control and improved cost tracking, is essential to ensure sustainable profitability.
💡 Insight:
A closer look at orders and inventory reveals critical operational inconsistencies that highlight risks in planning and resource allocation.
- Low Orders, High Inventory (Mar 2025): Only 6 orders were in progress, yet the inventory value reached ₺13,023,024. This indicates that a few high-value orders were tying up a large portion of inventory, creating potential cash flow and storage pressures despite low order volume.
- High Orders, Moderate Inventory (Feb 2025): In contrast, 11 orders were in progress, with ₺16,030,267 inventory value. Here, inventory scaled more proportionally with order count, but operational strain is visible due to the simultaneous spike in both order count and cumulative value, potentially stressing fulfillment capacity.
These extremes illustrate the importance of aligning inventory management with both order volume and financial value. Months with few but high-value orders can create unexpected financial exposure, while months with many orders require careful coordination to avoid operational bottlenecks. Focusing on these anomalies helps improve cash flow management, storage efficiency, and fulfillment reliability.
This dashboard uses a layered, data-driven approach:
- KPI Overview: Tracks Total Revenue, Profit, Orders, and Profit Margin % at both overall and segment levels.
- Trend & Volatility Analysis: Monitors month-over-month changes to detect fluctuations in revenue, profit, and workload.
- Customer & Segment Drill-Down: Examines profitability by segment, category, and customer to identify high-margin opportunities and operational risks.
- Backlog & Orders Monitoring: Assesses pending orders’ count and monetary value to manage cash flow and fulfillment risk.
- Actionable Insights: Focuses on understanding causes behind fluctuations and provides prescriptive recommendations for pricing, inventory, and operational efficiency.
⚡ Goal: Help decision-makers understand performance patterns, identify risks, and guide strategic actions for sustainable growth.
This dashboard was built as part of my journey to master advanced Power BI techniques and DAX calculations. While working on it, I explored how to make data tell a story and highlight trends dynamically.
- VAR & RETURN: I learned how to store intermediate values and output final results cleanly, making complex calculations more readable and manageable.
- ISBLANK & BLANK: Handling empty values became essential to avoid misleading results and keep visuals accurate.
- FORMAT & ABS: I discovered how to present numbers clearly, including absolute values, so trends and magnitudes are immediately understandable.
- ALLSELECTED: This function taught me how to respect user selections while still calculating totals or cumulative metrics across the dashboard.
Using these techniques, I created dynamic indicators—like upward and downward arrows for month-over-month revenue or order changes—that make trends instantly visible. This project not only sharpened my technical skills but also reinforced the importance of turning raw data into actionable insights.