Acumatica: Make Better Business Decisions by DataSelf

Fantastic. All right. Hi everyone, this is Don Farber with Dataself, joined by Johnny Girardi, founder and CEO of Data Self. We'll be talking today about Acumatica and specifically how to make better, more informed business decisions. And I'm going to kick things off with a little bit of an introduction. First of all, we'll be with you for about 30 minutes. I'll be taking you through most of the initial business level conversation, then I'll be turning things over to my colleague Johnny who be taking us through a product demo. We will do our best to leave a couple minutes at the end for Q and A. If you have any questions as we're going through the presentation or demo, please do feel free to type them into the chat session in the meeting and we'll do our best to answer them. We'll also be sending around a follow up email after this presentation and any questions that went unanswered will be answered within that email. Right, a little bit about us here at dataself. As I said, my colleague on the phone with us today is Johnny Girardi. Datacell has been around since 2005 and since that date our focus has always been on technologies that enable clients to make more timely and more informed business decisions. The technology behind that is kind of a unique trilogy or perhaps trinity of functionality. First, it uses a next generation data optimization tool. It blends that with industry leading business intelligence technolog and wraps that all up in a template library, the largest in fact that exists today in the analytics world. We'll be talking more about those technologies a little bit later on in this presentation. For right now, I'd like to start out by turning this slide over to my colleague Jonny to talk about those challenges that you may be having in reporting out of Acumatica. Jonny?

Thank you, Don. Yeah, you know, when people move to Acumatica, which there's a lot of good momentum, a lot of companies leaving old legacy systems and going schematica. One of the things that many organizations need is a more empowering reporting platform for managers. As Don will be saying shortly, managers need to have the macro and micro view into their data license anytime, in anywhere. And even though Acumatica has an amazing reporting platform, when it comes to decision makers, it's not as easy, it's not as fast, it's not as intuitive and we add that layer. We have many companies using Data Self, including Acumatica for their own reporting and analytics and hopefully you'll find this webinar, some information checking if you also should be looking at it. Don, back to you.

Thanks so much, Johnny. All right, now you might have just heard Johnny refer to or make an allusion to two kinds of reports or two kinds of report audiences within and organizations. So I'd like to start start out by talking about those two kinds of reports. The first kind are what are called staff oriented reports. And I like to refer to that as the little picture of your business. And it's why we use the the microscope here as our analogy. Staff oriented reports are those reports that focus on task completion that is keeping your staff informed about what they need to do now. And in fact it goes a little bit beyond that. It also reports on what has been done in the past, yesterday, last week, last month, as well as what is coming down the pike, what needs to be done tomorrow, next week or next month. And good examples of these staff oriented reports are things like today's shipments, stock status report ar aging and invoices processed today. Now as Johnny mentioned, Acumatica does a really superb job in terms of its reports addressing the these staff oriented needs. And in fact in ERP solutions in general, this is what you get with an ERP applications standard reports. But then there's the other side of the coin, management oriented reports. Now the focus of these reports is on decision making. It's all about giving management and executives the key performance indicators or KPIs that tell them not only what has happened in their business, but why it's happened. And allow them to make more informed high level business decisions, changing directions in different parts of the business in order to ensure your organization the greatest chance of success going forward. Now good examples of these management oriented reports are things like high risk receivables, debt inventory projection, sales rep growth analysis, negative cash flow and year over year variance. We really tend to refer to these as providing the big picture view of your business. And that's why we use the telescope image here. And in fact it is these big picture decision making reports that is typically what you get with an analytics solution. Now that begs the question, if you've got these two kinds of reports and out of Acumatica, you're getting these nice task oriented reports. Why can't you use those and simply apply them to what management needs? And the answer here is actually a fairly simple one. Technology. The technology is substantially different between staff oriented and management oriented reports. And as the current slide builds you'll see that management oriented reports include features like a scalable data warehouse, simply because there's more data that needs to be considered by management before they can make the most informed decisions. The retrieval of data not in hours, not reports that need to run overnight, but reports that retrieve their data in just a few seconds. Infinite drill down going from the highest or macro level view of data into the transactional level detail natural language or google like searching predictive and what if reporting Looking into the future, what if I rearrange my sales territories? What if I increase the amount of inventory for these items? And also certainly KPI based alerts because management needs to make decisions now. They can't wait in some cases hours and certainly not days to reach certain conclusions. And finally and although this is last, it's certainly not least data blending. Because although we're focused on acumatica today, your organization does not exist solely on its ERP solution. Perhaps you've got a CRM, you've got third party add ons, you've got Excel spreadsheets. That data needs to be blended together to give management the greatest wealth of information to base their decisions on. And in fact it is the management level reporting needs that Data Self analytics addresses. And on the current slide I want to draw your attention first to the extreme left hand column titled Limited Visibility as these are your typical management level business pains that organizations face and what Data Self analytics does. If we skip over to the extreme right hand section of this slide is provide that visibility to address these high level business pains. So we've talked about the importance of management oriented reports and we've talked about some of the technology that supports management level reporting. So the next question we should address is well, what makes Data Self's analytics solution different from other analytics solutions? And in fact there are three key items, the first of which is data optimization. We've talked about the the amount the wealth of data that needs to be considered for managers to make the most informed business decisions. Well, Data Self is the only analytics solution that gives you a next generation data optimization tool with our ETL plus technology married to a SQL Server data warehouse. And as you can see at the bottom of the slide, the average report dashboard coming out of Data Self runs in well under one minute. You'll see examples of these when Johnny jumps into our demo in just a moment or two. But the second difference Top rated BI Engines. Now I don't know if you spent a lot of time researching or looking into business intelligence technologies, but consistently rated the top two technologies for years and years now are two solutions, Tableau and Microsoft Power bi. Data Self is the only analytics solution that gives you the choice of using either of these two solutions. And to me the important quality there is not only that they're top rated in terms of functionality, but these are two solutions that have been around for years and they're going to be around for years. You need to invest in technologies that are not going to change or all of a sudden disappear from the horizon. And finally, the most robust analytics library in the industry today. In fact we have a library of over 8,000 reports and dashboards. We refer to these as templates. Now don't let that 8,000 numbers scare you because certainly a small fraction of that is applicable to acumatica. But this library covers ERP solutions, CRM solutions, other solutions. Because the matter of fact is as good as any analytics or BI technology is. You don't want to bring that into your organization and then have to face process of creating 10, 20, 40 or more dashboards and reports. We've been at this since 2005. We've gathered these 8,000 plus templates from Real life customer implementations. So you get basically a ready to go solution upon completion of the Data Self analytics implementation. Okay, so you've heard a lot about the solution, now it's time to actually see it. And at this point I'm going to turn the proceedings over to Johnny to show you the Data Self analytics solution in action.

Thank you Don. Can you hear me and can you see mouse moving?

Certainly can Jonny. Thank you.

Thank you Don. So what I'm going to be showing is the main focus of today's webinar is how we empower managers, decision makers, business users to be more independent to find answer to their questions anytime and anywhere. Next month we're going to have a webinar for business analysts, the people who support decision makers. But today the goal is business users and I'm going to show you a few examples of how Data Self can help ad hoc questions, you know there's no answer pre configured to answer those questions and how business users can find answers in acumatica anytime and anywhere using Data Self. The first way is using what is called natural language query and it's pretty much you just need to know English. So middle school is required in English. But if you know English and you know your business is like Google, you ask a question and you get an instant accurate answer to that question. I'm going to show a couple of examples. Let's see, you want to see sales by salesperson in 2022. I just wrote the question and if you noticed the tool uses natural language query, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to translate what the human wrote into a query into query parameters. I don't care. I just write in English and I press enter in the tool instantly accurately show, in this case by salesperson. It shows sales in a descending order where the year is 2022. It's that simple. This report didn't exist. It was built from scratch right now. And you can keep on typing, let's say by month. I want to drill down into the month level. Press enter. So now again the tool answered the question. In this example, gave a line chart using colors for every salesperson. Where I see the sales by month in 2022 and maybe you know, I want to see different graphical representation. Maybe I want to see bar chart. Why not? Or maybe I'm an accountant. I want to see the number by the penny. You can pick and choose any option in this example text table. And now I see the numbers by the penny, by salesperson, sales by month. In a couple of more clicks I can export this to excel, PowerPoint whatnot to do analysis outside of it. So natural language querying is the first part of the solution that is really empowering. You only need to know English and if you do, just like in Google, you ask the question and you'll find lots of answers anytime, anywhere. Right? Like I just I showed you now, like in Google, you will not answer all the questions. So let me show the next level of ad hoc analysis that is also very powerful. I'm going to show now the slicer. The slicer is also a part of the tool designed for business users. And it's like an Excel pivot table on steroid inside of Akumatica. You can see in this case is a sales slicer right now by customer. I see sales in a given period and you can easily change everything. So let's say I only want to see sales by salesperson in period two and three. I select period two and three first of all. So I narrow to a different period. But I don't want to see customer, I want to see salesperson. This list here is available out of the box with these options. And it's easy for a business analyst to customize this list to add remove more parameters once the list is customized. A business user with little training just pick and choose. So right now I'm going to choose salesperson. And there it is. This report now shows sales by salesperson in those two months. All right, that was the big picture. I want to drill down and see more details. I want to see sales by salesperson by item. I can Click and expand into the next column. And right now I already have item. So that was easy. Buy salesperson, buy items. On those two months I want to go to more detail. I want to see also to whom I sold customers. Sure. I drill down to the next level and now I pick the next parameter and that's pretty much it. You can start from any point in the top column. You can drill down and just pick and choose the next parameter and the tool keeps on giving the answer, even the measures. When I'm looking at sales, what if I want to see gross quantity sold, gross profit? You just pick and choose. You press apply. And now in this report I have sales and quantity sold. That's pretty much the training that it takes for a business user to learn to use a slicer. There's a lot of ways you can slice and dice the data and it's really, really empowering to find answers to the questions anytime and anywhere. So this was the second example of how business users can be more independent. I'm going to jump now into a little bit of financials and then I'm going to go back into some other ad hoc analysis. And right now everything that I'm doing I was inside of Acumatica. Yeah, many users want everything inside of Acumatica. What if you don't? What if you don't want to have access to Acumatica at all? So I'm going to show now data cell phone outside of Acumatica and this is just a security setting. If you want to lock people inside of Acumatica and they have to be in Acumatica to get your data step reports. Sure. If you want to get some users access outside of Acumatica board members, CEO sure. It's a security setting. In this example I'm looking at my P and L. We can do multi company, you know, multi akumatica tenant. We can do multi currency. We can customize extensively bringing your financials to this web portal. Now again very important is to allow business users to quickly find the outliers. Why something is really good or too bad. And drill down to the detail right here. Let's say if I look at this P and L and I see that this number, I don't like it. I don't like the 14,000 maybe too big or too small. How can I go to the details in Acumatica? If you click this, it changes to a second page that you go to some high level and you click on eventually go to the GIS and it's kind of hard sometimes to see things around here. If I click on a data point at the bottom it will show my GL transactions. Every single GEL transaction that feeds into this number is right here at my fingertips and maybe if I want to see the next month I just click it and I still see my financials here and I see the details. Maybe you want to see everything together. So this whole line together now is the whole line together. Or maybe you want to see the whole cost of goods sold. You just point and click and dynamically you know the total here of all of these transactions matches with this in Acumatica. If I were to click this reference number is going to go and open Acumatica right into the document. The ability to start from the very high level is slice and dice the data and go anywhere in data self is amazingly empowering. So this is one example of ad hoc analysis that you can do using the web portal. Now when I go back again into the Acumatica and show the most popular reporting dashboard in our client base. As Don mentioned, We have over 8,000 reports and dashboards that cover ERP, CRM and whatnot. This one is the most popular and it's kind of busy, but I'll explain the idea. The idea here is to analyze your sales this year by period, by quarter, year to date and compare to the same period last year. That's why we call year over year variances and you can easily pick, you know, the year. Right now I'm choosing this year, but you could compare last year versus the prior year anyhow. So right now I'm looking this year and I'm selecting out of the box seven months. What if I want to see year to date through period nine? Sure, select that. Press Apply now the report is showing year over year from a year to date perspective. The dark blue is this year so total here. The light blue is last year total here and I see the variances so very big numbers. Now visually I have a drill down into the same using the same colors. The trend analysis by period dark blue this year, light blue last year and you can see how I'm growing on a seasonal perspective. Then I have another visual drill down. Now I'm seeing things by period by state. The size of the bubble is the sales this year in the color represents growth or decline like Texas. In this example I see all the numbers including a growth of 2% since last year to date. If I check New Jersey on the other hand, I see a decline of 1%. So visually it's quick to see trend analysis by Region. In here I have for customers and items the total sales last year, this year in the variance. Now this is the telescope. I'm looking at the big picture from a year over year sales perspective. As a VP of sales sales manager, usually they look at this and they want to see the outliers and why. For instance, why Marina Golf is declining so much in sales since last year. In this case, if I simply click on this data point, it filters the whole dashboard to show the total for this customer, the trend analysis, the ship to and which products are driving the analysis. In acumatica, if you go to a dashboard and you click a data point, primarily you go into the GI from top level to the most granular, no matter what in data self you can actually build how people navigate from one level to another to another. You have pretty much infinite ways to drill down or drill across the data because we use this business intelligence technology. Anyhow, now that I got to this perspective and I see, let's say some products that have major decline, maybe now I actually want to see a GI like piece of information. I want to see the details behind these three items. Sure, I can select those three items right now when I chose them, the the dashboard filter again only for Merna growth, only for these three items what the totals are. But hey, I want to see the details. So I put the mouse over and it should show details. And now I see at the bottom all the details, the invoice number, the invoice date, the items, the quantity sold and the sales of whatever. I have selected all the information at the bottom in case you want to export this information into Excel, for instance, primarily you just tell the tool download my cross tab. And now this information goes right into Excel. Very quickly, let's say I want to select the details, download Excel and now I got the information right into Excel. So from the big picture to the little picture, just with a few clicks without having to know technical things. Now this user experience that I showed you so far, everything that I showed you so far is functionality that business users can do with no training or little training. As you can tell, it's point and click. What I'm going to show in the next three minutes is the ability to use the web report editor. So this requires more training and quite often many business users will need not learn. But those who want to learn. I want to show how easy and amazingly empowering the report editor is. So Insecurity also controls who can have access to the report editor. So you can tell who can, who cannot and what they can do with the report editor. Anyhow, I'm going to show two use cases of changes to an out of the box report. First, let's say that I don't care about customers from an analysis standpoint. I sell to retail. I care about sales by city instead of customer. So I want to change this widget to show city sales, not customer sales. How can I do that? Well, the edit button is enabled for me because I'm a power user and I'm going to show how easy it is to change a widget like that on the fly. So right now I am in the web report editor. It is more sophisticated. But I'm going to only go into this widget specifically. Right now the rows are being controlled by the customer and I actually want to go and change to the customer city Instead I drag and drop, put it on top of it and I just start descending. And that was it. With a few clicks I change a dashboard that was showing sales by customer. Now it's sales by customer city. It could be anything that you have changed. Just drag and drop and you change the dashboard. That's it. Changed. Easy. Now what if I want to create a new report from scratch using the report editor. Again, the report editor is not for everyone, but we have many business users doing. What I'm going to show you next is creating a new report from scratch. So new worksheet completely from scratch. I'm going to pick my revenues and build a report showing sales by customer this month from scratch. I could do in natural language, yes I could. But let me show the power of the report editor. I want to have customer name I put in my rows. So there it is just customers. I want to see my sales. So I take sales and I drag the report. So this is simply sales by customer. I can quickly start descending. These are my top customers in the whole company history. Well, I want to see by date. I'm going to bring invoice date to my columns. Drag and drop. And now I see the whole company history. I only want to see a certain year. So let's make a filter to only show this year. So I only Want to see 2022 point and click. Now sales by customer only this year. I want to see this month. Well, I can easily drill down from the year to go to the quarter level and go to the month level. So there it is. I have everything by month. But hey, I just want to see one month. Let's make a filter for the month. There it is. And I only want to see the month of September for instance. And there it is from scratch by customer sales in September. And now comes the easiest licensed. I want to see for two years side by side. So I just picked last year in ST sales last year and this year side by side. Maybe you want to break down by product or by product line. You just drag and drop and now it becomes very flexible to slice and dice the data in any shape or form. This web editor is amazingly empowering and if the user can do drag and drop, point and click, it's amazing how many changes business users will be able to do without calling the consultant. And that's pretty much it what I wanted to cover. I hope you found it informative. Don, back to you.

Thanks Johnny. I think you need to perhaps stop sharing your screen. There we go. Just needed to get things back to my side of the net, so to speak. So appreciate the demo very much Johnny. And I have to tell you it reminds me of the first time that you demoed this technology to me and I was impressed, but I was also a little scared because I thought wow, this is tremendous, but it's got to be out of the price range for the average mid size or small to mid size organization. And I was very much surprised to find that in fact it wasn't costing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so I wanted to share that with the folks on this webinar with us. Just some general numbers for you to work with. Data Self analytics comes in a few different editions, but it can be had started at as little as just under $400 a month. Very importantly is that we customize the licensing and the pricing to each customer's requirements. We do not believe in paying for functionality or components that you don't need or won't use. But we do encourage folks to actually come to the Data Self website to not only get more details about the different edition options and pricing, but also to actually start using Data Self for free. So you can actually sign up for a free evaluation. It is the full functioning software and you can try it out for 30 days and get it working with your acumatica data right away. Now at this point what I wanted to do is to open up the lines for any Q and A. I know a question came in a little bit earlier from one person who just wanted to confirm that this webinar is being recorded. It is indeed. We'll be sending links to the recording to everyone who participated so that you can share it with colleagues. Also, a question was asked about a special coupon for a promotion and everyone again who has participated in this webinar, you are eligible for a special promotion which is one month subscription for free should you choose to purchase Data Self for your organization by the end of this year. Now, if there are any questions, please do type them into the chat box and we'll do our best to answer them. And Jonny, I actually do have a question of my own that I'd like to pose to you which is based upon everything that you showed us. Very powerful, comprehensive, flexible and we also talked about getting a customer to try it out. How long would it take to get data self to a functional perspective so that the clients on this call can try it out for themselves? Because it looks like something that would take weeks or at least a lot of days to get set up to a functional environment. Yep.

And just one clarification. The promo of the one month free is for the Advanced in Pro editions. It does not apply to the Enterprise edition which is the high end anyhow. Good question Don. Typically for Acumatica if you're using the Acumatica SaaS, you know that the cloud based the actual effort that it will take you to get data self to be deployed is under half an hour. Primarily you have to give data self user credentials and sometimes it's even the guest user I think it's called with reading rights from your OData version 4 and that's it. Once you create the user give us access and give us the credentials to access your akumatica pretty much once the system has extract your data and it might take some time for the system to automatically track your data. Your data is going to be live with the raw akumatica data in data cell so your effort deploy is usually under half an hour. It might take hours and even days to load your data if you have lots of data. And in practical terms when you get your data self solution with your data there's always a phase to test the data any report on any reporting platform when you get it for the first time you got to be sure that the business rules behind the report is matching the way that your acumatica is capturing your data. So there's usually a phase of hours, days, sometimes weeks that someone will have to be sure the data getting into reports and data self are matching to the penny with yours. In practical terms I tell people that once we get all the business settled we deploy your system usually under half an hour as it is deployed, the data is loaded and with the QA process usually in a week or two the out of the box comes alive and will have the data matching with your system.

Thanks Johnny. We just received another question from one of our attendees. Do you have predefined data warehouse as part of your solution? How do you populate the data warehouse from client acumatica instance?

Good question. So yes, part of the solution in Data Self is a SQL server data warehouse that can be cloud based in our cloud, can be in your cloud, can be on premises. So yes we have a data warehouse somewhere of your choosing where it should be hosted and the way we extract the data from your acumatica into the data warehouse is using our ETL plus technology. If your acumatica is in a SAS model then we use odata and we have very efficient ways to extract old data from acumatica into SQL. Many clients actually use just that they got acumatica data into SQL and then they do reporting out of let's say Excel. Simply if you do have your acumatica on premises where you have access to SQL or private cloud, we can also extract directly from your Kinetica SQL into another SQL data warehouse. So I know it's a little bit of technical explanation, but we have very efficient ways to get your raw Kinetica data into a SQL data warehouse. Plus in our data warehouse we have lots of data manipulation preconfigured out of the box AP, AR, GL data aggregations and linking. So you don't have to start the data warehouse from scratch. You start with a very well mature framework to get your BI rolling.

Excellent. Thanks Johnny. I think that's all we have time for. I don't see any additional questions coming in through chat, so on behalf of Johnny Girardi and myself, I'm Don Farber with Data Self. Thank you very much for your time and interest in the Data Self analytics solution. We'll be following up with you via email and if you have any questions do feel free to contact us. We very much look forward to working with you and again thanks for your time and interest. Have a great afternoon.

Thank you all folks. Bye bye bye.