Tutorial: Sales Dashboard

This tutorial will take us back to a familiar business, which we have by now grown fond of: the UK-based online retailer selling all-occasions gifts. Automating the weekly Excel reports using KNIME (something we did back in Chapter 3, Transforming Data) has granted us quite a reputation that is now pulling us back into the spotlight. As the business keeps growing, the hunger to make descriptive analytics available to a greater number of employees expands. Updating some Excel reports that answer a static list of given questions is not sufficient anymore. We would like to offer the opportunity to deep-dive into quarter-by-quarter and country- and product-level details so that our colleagues can "explore" data by themselves and find interesting insights.

With the help of the financial analyst (who is still full of gratitude for us) and after interviewing a few managers about their most recurrent needs, we are ready to synthesize the requirements...