Agree or disagree

This week we were asked to share our project proposal and receive feedback. I believe I decided on my final project in the second week of this course when we first listed our top three ideas. The proposal I chose is sales forecasting. 

This type of forecasting that I have chosen will help a business forecast future sales. The current problem that I am trying to solve is the lack of inventory to meet the demand during holiday seasons. It is important to have enough inventory as customers may not want to return if there aren’t enough products when they are ready to buy. During the holidays especially, customer wait time increases drastically. If by the time their turn to get the product comes and there isn’t any leftover, this could create animosity and prevent them from wanting to return. The goal is to identify areas in which inventory is needed during the holidays, to meet the demand in the future, and to prevent the lack of products when they are wanted or needed the most.

The data that will be used for this project will be an excel spreadsheet that contains past sales from Walmart. The data is provided by data.world and it contains sales information over 3 years. It has everything necessary to determine what items are more likely to sell during holiday seasons such as dates purchased, department information, product sales date, and more (Hoover, 2021). 

Other data this will be used for this project include textbook data, journal entries, and classwork to assist in researching and developing. These are important because they will be used to find the appropriate methods and techniques to be used to conduct the analysis. It is important to ensure how these techniques can be used and how to utilize them properly to yield the correct results.

Tools that will be used are Microsoft Excel and RStudio. These will be used to aid in finding the overall sales, individual sales, and moving averages. They will also provide the data in visually appealing ways to assist the company when it comes to understanding and possibly marketing. 

The expected results when accomplishing this project include finding which departments sell the most during holiday seasons. One hypothesis is that the electronic department will be high in demand, especially during holidays. Another outcome that is expected is to see if the departments selling the most products will ultimately have higher revenue. 

Reference

Hoover, Gary. (2021, December). Walmart Retail Dataset. data.world. https://data.world/garyhoove470/walmart-retail-dataset