Describing Export Statistics using Power BI #
You may already know that Exports from Georgia contribute between $35-40 billion to our state economy each year. But have you ever wondered – What do these Georgia products look like?
This blog article and attached video is an effort to answer that question. It uses a free tool from Microsoft called Power BI to slice and dice the detailed monthly export data that is available from the US Census.
What Does the Power BI Tool Show? #
I’ve previously retrieved this Census data for 2013-2018 and ended up with a 2.4 million row data set in SQL Server. While it is all well and good to have the raw data - the trick is putting that data in a format end users can easily navigate and learn from. On this score, PowerBI delivers.
The video shows how Power BI can generate:
- Full year summaries from 2013-2018
- Filtered summaries by commodity types (known as Harmonized Codes)
For the selected date and commodity classes, it then tells you:
- Total sales
- Shipping method by export value (USD)
- Shipping method by weight
- Top 10 destination countries
- Monthly sales trends from 2014-2018.
Export Data Terms #
If you’ve not worked with export data before, there are two data topics that deserve explanation:
Harmonized Codes #
In the demonstration you’ll see that exports are classified using the Harmonized System. This is an internationally agreed-to taxonomy for naming merchandise and commodities. It is hierarchical starting from 22 “sections” and then proceeding to increasingly more specific detail. The data presented here includes section, 2-digit, 4-digit and 6-digit classifications. For more explanation of these codes, you may find this link useful.
Origin of Movement #
Data is limited to transactions in which Georgia is the “Origin of Movement.” In other words – only merchandise that starts it’s journey in Georgia is reported here. There is a more detailed explanation from the Census on this topic.
Summary #
The port of Savannah and Atlanta Hartsfield airport are two assets that help our Georgia export-economy. In similar fashion, data and tools like Power BI can be an asset for your company. As shown here, PowerBI makes digging into a large data set more informative and productive.
Please call or email if we can help you harness any of these Microsoft data tools.