SAS VA - Comparing week-to-week sales or monthly sales

[Reaensh]

Hi,

Does anyone know how to create an early warning indicator in the data when it compares last month to this month?

Also is it possible to add plan figures in a dashboard to show how actual sales compare to planned sales?

Thanks

Reanesh

[Sam_SAS]

Hello Reanesh,

You should be able to create an aggregated measure using the RelativePeriod operator to get the difference between each month. You can then set up a display rule to highlight the data where the monthly difference meets your criteria.

For comparing actual values to target values, VA has a variety of gauges to visualize this:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/vaug/68648/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n0dva9kxvxnw9en1ofben...

I'm not sure if that answers your second question, however. I'm not sure what you mean by adding plan figures.

Sam

[Reaensh]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for this and I can see how to use a relaive period operator now.

Is there a way to show for example each month backwards:

June compared to May

May compared to April

April compared to March

What I meant regarding plan, is we have a plan target sales to hit. I need to find a way of inlcuding this in an overall table as my dataset currently only has sales data, so the final display will show:

Jan-16 Plan Sales

Jan-16 Actual Sales

And so on for each month.

Thanks for your kind help in advance.

Reanesh

[Sam_SAS]

To get the monthly difference, you would use an expression something like this:

(RelativePeriod(_Sum_, 'Sales'n, 'Date'n, _ByMonth_, 0, _Full_))
 - 
(RelativePeriod(_Sum_, 'Sales'n, 'Date'n, _ByMonth_, -1, _Full_))

So for May, the aggregated value is the sales for May minus the sales for April. For April the value is the sales for April minus the sales for March. And so on.

I am still not sure I understand about adding the target sales values. If you add a "target sales" column to your dataset, then visualizing that in your report is easy. But did you want to create this column within the Visual Analytics report designer? You could make a calculated column if the target sales are based on a formula like Sales * 1.05 if you wanted to target 5% growth or something simple like that.

[Reaensh]

Hi Sam,

Thank you for your response that has really helped.

Regarding the plan hopefully this might help:

I have a dataset full of sold policies split by various factors and these can be grouped to show how many were sold by each week or month.

I also have a separate dataset that has what we planned as a target sales for the last 12 months, and what I want to show on one graph and one table is how actual sales compared to target sales. So it is not a multiplier but an actual figure in this dataset.

Thanks

[Sam_SAS]

Hi Reanesh,

Thanks for the additional details. Data management is not my field, but I believe that you will want to join the target data set into your data set that contains the actual sales figures.

You can do this in the data builder component of Visual Analytics if you have the correct permissions.

This chapter in the documentation should help:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/vaug/68648/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p0ynejicr0vyecn16q7or...

[jithuzoom]

Hi Ramesh,

I have two files( current month and previous month data) loaded in lasr and I need to compare one field difference( ECL value difference) between them and show as a SAS VA report. Could you please confirm that I use them directl as seperate dataset and generate this report without combining them.?