Empowering Retail Decision-Making: Design and Implementation of an Interactive Visual Analytics Dashboard Using Power BI

Abstract: This paper presents the development of an "Executive Retail Sales Overview Dashboard," an interactive Business Intelligence (BI) solution designed using Microsoft Power BI Desktop. The primary objective is to empower retail executives and analysts with a comprehensive, unified visualization of transactional data spanning a four-year period (2015–2018). The system's architecture is founded on an optimized star-schema data model, connecting a central sales fact table with multiple dimension tables for customers, products, and temporal data. To extract deep analytical insights, thirteen custom Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) metrics were engineered, enabling advanced time- intelligence tracking such as Year-over-Year (YoY) growth and Year-to-Date (YTD) cumulative sales. The resulting dashboard comprises multiple interactive report pages that allow users to dynamically cross-filter data by region, category, and timeframes. By replacing conventional static reports with this self-service visual analytics tool, the project significantly enhances data-driven decision-making and strategic planning in retail management.

Keywords: Business Intelligence, Microsoft Power BI, Star Schema, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), Retail Analytics, Interactive Visualizations.