Okay, so today I messed around with COPA scores, and let me tell you, it was a bit of a rollercoaster.
First off, I needed to actually get the data. I started by figuring out where this COPA data lives. Turns out, it was buried deep in our ERP system. So, I logged in, navigated through like a million menus (seriously, who designed this thing?!), and finally found the reports section.
Then came the fun part – exporting. It gave me a bunch of options: Excel, CSV, PDF… I went with CSV because I figured it would be the easiest to wrangle later. Downloaded that sucker and opened it up in Excel.
Holy moly, what a mess. Tons of columns I didn’t need, weird formatting everywhere. The dates were all wrong, numbers were formatted as text… I spent a good hour just cleaning things up. Deleted unnecessary columns, reformatted the dates using Excel’s built-in functions (thank goodness for those!), and converted the numbers to actual numbers.
Next, I wanted to get this data into a format that I could actually use. I decided to try and import it into a simple database I’m running locally. Created a new table, defined the columns, and then… import failed. Turns out, there were some rogue commas in the description fields that were throwing everything off. Ugh.
Spent another half hour writing a quick script in Python to go through the CSV and strip out those pesky commas. Ran the script, saved the cleaned-up CSV, and finally got the data to import into the database. Victory!
Once the data was in the database, I could actually start analyzing it. I ran some basic queries to get a sense of the numbers. Total revenue, costs, profit margins… that kind of stuff. I even tried to chart it out using the database reporting tool, but the charts were ugly and confusing.
Eventually, I decided to export the data again, this time from the database back into Excel. I know, it sounds crazy, but I just felt more comfortable with Excel’s charting capabilities. Plus, I knew I could easily copy and paste the charts into a PowerPoint presentation.
After a bit more tweaking, I finally had some decent-looking charts showing the COPA trends over time. Not groundbreaking stuff, but it’s a start. I also created a few pivot tables to slice and dice the data in different ways. Turns out, one product line is doing way better than the others. Good to know!
So, yeah, that was my day with COPA scores. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t glamorous, but I got the job done. And I learned a few things along the way, like how to handle rogue commas in CSV files and the importance of a well-designed ERP system (ours isn’t).
Takeaways:
- Data cleaning is always more time-consuming than you think.
- Python is your friend.
- Excel is still surprisingly useful.
Now, time for a beer!
