Purpose

The Trend Analysis tool helps users identify patterns and performance changes over time across key metrics, providing insights into how specific metrics evolve across different time periods. This tool is essential for understanding long-term shifts in market behavior, product performance, or customer consumption.

Example Questions

What are the sales trends for Brand A over the last 12 months?
How has the pasta category grown in the past year?
What is the volume trend for whole grain products over the last quarter?
How did Brand X perform in Q1 vs Q4?

Key Features

Time-Based Performance Tracking
The primary purpose of the trend analysis is to track performance over a selected time frame, which could range from days to years. Users can observe how key metrics like sales, volume, or units have changed over time.

Granularity
The tool offers flexible granularity, allowing users to view trends by day, week, month, quarter, or year. This flexibility makes it ideal for both short-term and long-term analysis.

Multi-Metric Support
Users can track multiple metrics simultaneously, such as sales, volume, or unit growth, over time. This provides a holistic view of performance across various dimensions.

Dimensional Breakdown
In addition to tracking overall trends, users can break down trends by dimensions such as brand, region, or category. This helps pinpoint which areas or segments are driving changes in performance over time.

Comparison Against Benchmarks
The trend analysis tool allows users to compare performance against past time periods, enabling them to assess whether the metric is improving or declining versus historical benchmarks.

Growth Rate Calculation
The tool calculates growth rates and percentage changes over time, helping users quantify the extent of changes in their metrics. This is useful for identifying significant spikes or dips in performance.

How It Works

Initial Setup
Users define the metrics they want to track and the time frame for the analysis. The tool supports both default and customizable configurations, allowing users to focus on specific metrics (e.g., sales over the last 12 months or volume trends in the past quarter).

Period Selection
The tool processes the selected time period, breaking down performance across different time frames such as days, weeks, or months. Users can also apply filters to analyze trends for specific segments, such as a particular brand or region.

Dimensional Analysis
Trend analysis can break down trends across different dimensions, allowing users to see how performance evolves across various segments (e.g., how brand performance shifts over time in specific regions).

Visualization
Line Charts
The default visualization for trend analysis is line charts, which clearly depict how metrics change over time. Line charts are ideal for visualizing patterns and fluctuations across different periods.

Comparison to Previous Periods
Users can compare current performance to previous time frames (e.g., month-over-month or year-over-year comparisons) to assess whether the metric is improving, declining, or staying stable.

Growth Rate Indicators
The analysis also includes growth rate calculations and percentage change indicators, highlighting significant shifts in performance.

Warnings and Limits

Data Availability
Trend analysis is dependent on data availability across the selected time periods. The tool will notify users if data is incomplete for certain periods, which may impact the accuracy of the trend analysis.