Automating the first step analysis of "Why are sales decreasing?"

Question

Given a clean data set, is there a best-practice way of highlighting likely causes of changes in a KPI -- for instance, examining 10-50 dimensions to find out which contributed most (or was most off trend) to sales declining?

Typically my solution is to pull together all the likely attributes; then chart them based upon % change and magnitude, to see what sticks out; often it's "the West region is down" or "this plan is reducing" ; but the process for finding is surprisingly manual.

As an example, imagine a data set

(salesdate),(store_id),(store_region),(store_type),(planSKU),...

If we note that the total number of sales is down 10% WoW; is there a common way to suggest the likely trends to investigate further?

I don't even know what to call this sort of analysis.

p.s. It gets more complex when you expect sales to be down somewhat; so you want to see which dimensions/attributes are the outliers from the trend

Answer 1

The closest I can get to an answer is that when studying historical data it is often possible to detect "statistically significant" change points . These often suggest the possibility of one time effects or level shift/trend changes. They can also point to changes in model coefficients over time. I would suggest you search for help on Intervention Detection and either get some statistical consulting or be prepared to do a lot of reading.