Power BI Executive Dashboard
An end-to-end Adventure Works dashboard putting sales, customer reach, and inventory in front of executives in one place.
- Role
- BI Developer
- Focus
- Dashboarding & forecasting
- Tooling
- Power BI · DAX
- Model
- Star schema
Overview
Adventure Works sells bicycles and cycling components, both direct to customers and through a network of resellers across several countries. Its sales, customer, and inventory data lives in separate tables — which means nobody can answer a question that crosses two of them without exporting to Excel first.
This project builds the layer that removes that friction: an interactive dashboard executives open themselves, covering sales performance, customer reach, and inventory trends, with forecasting attached to the sales trend so the view is forward-looking rather than purely historical.
Modelling the data
The source is a classic star schema — a central Sales fact table carrying order quantity, unit price, and sales amount, surrounded by Customer, Date, Product, Reseller, Sales Territory, and Sales Order dimension tables that supply the context.
- Verified and corrected column data types before loading, so numeric measures aggregate rather than concatenate
- Established relationships from the Date dimension to the Sales fact, enabling time intelligence across order, due, and ship dates
- Hid key columns from the report view to keep the field list usable for non-technical readers
- Built hierarchies — geography down to city, product down to model, fiscal year down to date — so executives can drill without needing new visuals
Core visuals
Each visual answers a specific question an executive actually asks, rather than displaying data because it exists.
- Product sales tables breaking revenue down by category and reseller business type
- Category revenue column charts comparing performance across product lines
- Time-series line charts tracking order trends and exposing seasonal peaks
- A fiscal calendar slicer so any view narrows to a chosen month, quarter, or year
KPIs and geographic reach
Three headline measures sit above the detail — total sales, customer count, and geographic reach — giving the summary an executive needs before deciding whether to look further. Geographic reach is mapped by reseller country and region, which is the view that directly informs global-expansion decisions.
Forecasting
The dashboard projects 12 months of sales ahead using seasonality, reported at 99% confidence intervals. The wide interval is deliberate: it communicates the uncertainty in the projection rather than presenting a single line as certainty, which matters when the output feeds capital decisions.
The outcome
Fragmented sales, customer, and inventory data became a single unified dashboard. The practical effect was improved cross-departmental visibility — teams reading the same numbers from the same source — and a shift from reactive reporting toward data-driven strategy.
What the dashboard showed
- Bikes carry the highest sales amount overall, with Value Added Resellers and Warehouses the strongest reseller channels.
- The United States leads on order quantity, making it the clearest anchor for expansion planning.
- Seasonal peaks in the order trend are pronounced enough to plan inventory around.
- Reporting forecasts with confidence intervals keeps executives honest about what the projection can and cannot promise.