Product Segmentation Analysis

Analyzing Customer Data to Evaluate Efficacy of Market Segmentation

This project was completed during my internship at Cognex Corporation. The goal of the project was to create a series of dashboards that could quickly and intuitively display information used to make business decisions, namely product segmentation. I constructed the dashboards in PowerBI.

PowerBI is a powerful tool for creating such dashboards but there were some issues I had to surmount in order to complete the project. First the project required complex financial calculations which I was unfamiliar with, requiring a great deal of studying and exploration into a field I was unfamiliar with. Ultimately, this challenge proved helpful as I am now familiar with several key financial analyses, such as PVM analysis, which I will be able to deploy going forward in my career. Following the completion of my learning I then had to implement the equations in PowerBI. This required learning a new computer language, which I was not familiar with: DAX. Learning this language within the time provided proved to be a challenge but through hard work and perseverance I was able to learn the programing language and design the dashboards necessary for the company.

My dashboards were met with extremely positive reception. I had managed to condense what would normally be several pages of calculations into only a few dashboards highlighting only the most important results. In addition, my calculations live updated as the companies database was expanded with new marketing data. These offered a huge leap forward for the company's market analytics, giving them insights not before possible. I was told by my mentor that my dashboards will likely be used for years to come, and may save the company up to $1 million.

This project was done almost entirely by myself. The company had just adopted PowerBI and no other employee had any knowledge beyond its basics. This meant that I was essentially on my own in terms of learning the system, leading me to rely heavily on online resources for help learning the program and DAX. By the end of the summer I was the resident expert on PowerBI, helping other employees with technical diffculties despite being only an intern.

While I was left to my own devices to learn PowerBI and DAX, I did have some help learning the financial calculations. My mentor, who was one of the companies product managers, pointed me in the right direction by giving me a lot of material related to relevant calculations, and spent a lot of time answering my questions. Her help quickened the pace in which I Was able to learn the calculations, ultimately condensing what otherwise may have been a 4 or 5 month project into 3 months.