CM 7 - Excel Advanced Features

Tejas: Our teacher said that the local Kirana shop owner wanted some help with his business and asked us to become his consultants!

Moz: What kind of help does he need? Why does he need your help?

Jyoti: He enters a lot of sales and inventory data in his books. We observed that he also saves the customer details along with sales details. [can we give an answer to the question, and then get into elaborate explanation; broadly two tasks are required – income from dedicated customers and identifying fast running stock]

Tejas: He wants us to extract information from the data.

Jyoti: Using the customer and their respective purchase details the shopkeeper wants us to:

1. Calculate the total expenditure of each customer for the previous month.

2. Sort the customers in descending order of their expenditure to find the top 5 customers.

3. Give 8% discount to the top 5 customers.

Moz: Good strategy to attract and retain customers who buy from his shop.

Tejas: Using the sales data he wants to find the following:

1. Compare the sale of choclates, ice creams and cool drinks. [brand preferences?]

2. Decide on ordering of new stock of the above products based on the sales.

3. Consider whether any product should be discontinued.

Moz: This is part of Inventory management where a shop keeper orders and maintains the stock of products in his shop by analyzing the sales data. The shop keepers make decisions like which product should be stocked more and which product can be discontinued based on the information that is extracted from the sales data and customer preferences. [Cumbersome statement]

Concept: Inventory management involves a retailer seeking to acquire and maintain a proper merchandise assortment. It handles all functions related to the tracking and management of material. This would include the monitoring of material moved into and out of stockroom locations and the reconciling of the inventory balances.

Jyoti: We can also draw some charts to show him about which items are moving fast and which brands are preferred, this sounds exciting!

Moz: OK. It looks like we can use the data to learn new features of EXCEL and in the process, also help the shop keeper. Why don’t you go and collect the data about the customers, sales and product details in the shop and put them under various categories. [CONNECT: CATEGORISATION] [could we instead say, study the shopkeeper’s notebook, identify relevant info and enter this into excel] Stock details

Sale details Monthly Name Products Expenditure Type

Customers Kirana Shop

Tejas: Here is the list of frequent customers. It will be good to sort it alphabetically [ CONNECT to LISTS AND TABLES ALHABETICALLY SORT

Customer Name Yasmin, Tabish, Bhairav, Aruna, Usha, Savani, Prashant, Rekha

Moz: Yes, you can sort a column of both textual and numerical data in spreadsheets. When you want a sorted list alphabetically, then it is in ascending order. When you want to find the top five customers then what is the order that you should define?

Jyoti: Descending order.

Concept: SORTING

Sorting is the process of placing the data in some well defined order. • Sorting can be performed on data based on one or more columns. • Some order is defined for each column (example: ascending or descending), and the sort is performed on the column in the defined order. skill of sorting Tejas: We also have data on the monthly expenditure of these customers. Let us add this in the next column.

Jyoti: We have to find the top 5 customers using the monthly expenditure. Let us sort the expenditure column in descending order.

Jyoti: We have to extend the selection to customers too. If the first column remains unchanged , then the amounts do not match the customers !

Moz: Good observation. You cannot select and sort on a single column when you have multiple columns of data. You should select the full table.

Tejas: Since expenditure is our focus now, in sort criteria let us sort in descending order of expenditure.

Jyoti: We have to now calculate/compute the discount amount for the top 5 customers and also provide the final bill amount of the customer.

Tejas: Let us add two columns, one to calculate the discount and the other to calculate the final amount. We need to write the formulas for each of these columns. [ CONNECT AVE FORMULA USED EARLIER].

Moz: Suppose the shop keeper decides to change the discount percentage, all you have to do is change the formula in the cell number: C1 and all other new values are automatically calculated.

Tejas: We had earlier used the Sum icon to compute the sum , is there any other way of doing it?

Moz: Yes there are built in Functions in Spreadsheets like SUM,AVE,MAX,MIN,=SUM(F7:F14)skill box Tejas: Next let us take the sales data of different brands of chocolates and provide a comparison chart using the line chart type

Chocolate sale data for 3 months Month Brand Name B1 B2 B3 M1 11000 5000 7000 M2 13000 3000 7200 M3 15000 500 7500

Moz: Notice that sales of brand B1 is growing every month, brand B2 sales are going down and brand B3 sales is almost constant from M1 to M3. So the shop keeper can now decide if he wants to discontinue to stock B2 brand of chocolates or just keep a smaller stock of the same.

Jyoti: If the sales are going down why should he even stock it?

Moz: If his prime customers have been buying then he may decide to keep at least a small stock of this brand for them. Now, see the following data and tell me what is your conclusion?

Ice cream and cool drinks sale data in a month Percentage Variety Stock Sold Remaining sold

Family Pack icecream 75 15 60 20

Small pack icecream(cups+cones+sticks) 250 225 25 90

Cool drinks (small bottles) 350 340 10 97

Cool drinks (Large) 150 85 65 57 Jyoti: The percentage sold for Family packs and large cool drinks is less whereas Small pack icecreams and small bottles of cooldrinks are being sold very quickly!

Moz: Good, I see the consultants are able to read and interpret data from a graph . This information can help him to decide which item scan be stocked more and for which items the stock can be reduced.

[ You already have some advice about which customers should be given discounts, about stocking , about which brands of chocolates to discontinue ]

Tejas: One more critical decision has to be taken. The shop keeper has either walk-in customers or home delivery customers. He has many phone orders, and when he informs the customer that it will take time, he might end up losing them. So, he has to decide whether hiring more delivery boys will improve his business. [this is a new idea we are getting into; not brought up in the beginning of the lesson] Moz: This is an interesting problem. How do you propose to solve it?

Tejas: The shop keeper has also data of customers who give phone orders, the time when they want delivery. Here is the chart of number of customers and the time of delivery.

Data and chart will be given here later once this is ok.

Jyoti: We can see from the graph that most customers want the delivery in the night between 8 p.m and 9 p.m or in the early morning 8.00 a.m and 9.00 a.m

Tejas: We also considered the peak hours of walk-in customers which is 8.30 a.m to 10.00 a.m and 6 p.m to 9.00 p.m. Data and chart to be given later.

Delivery 8.00 a.m to 9.00 a.m, 8.00 p.m to 9.00 p.m

Peak time 8.30 a.m to 9.30 a.m and 6.00 to 9.30 p.m

Jyoti: Based on the above we advised the shop keeper to hire an extra person for delivery between 7.30 to 9.30 a.m and 7.30 to 9.30 p.m.

Tejas: The extra half an hour before and after is for packing and traffic issues that may arise during delivery.

Moz: Very good. You are able to analyze the data very well and also provide useful advise. Keep it up and explore more features of excel.

------End of lesson------

I felt the following data does not fall well into the above problem Hence I rewrote. During our discussions prof. Sridhar and the others also felt we need to change this.

Jyoti: The categories and sales for the month are given . We calculated the profit percentage for each category. As Stationery and cereals are not very profitable , these categories can be stopped and more investment can be done for the high return categories .

Category Sale Profit

Rice,dal,flour 400000 80000

Cosmetics 300000 15000

Soaps 100000 5000

Cereals 50000 1500

Stationery 10000 100

Snacks 200000 50000 Profit Category Sale Profit % Rice,dal,flour 400000 80000 20 Cosmetics 300000 15000 5 Soaps 100000 5000 5 Cereals 50000 1500 3 Stationery 10000 100 1 Snacks 200000 50000 25