Acumatica Pre-Summit 2021 Webinar and Top 5 Dashboards

All right, so I'm about to get started already everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Johnny Girardi, I'm Data Sales founder and CEO and today we'll be talking about the Acumatica Summit 2021. And if some of you are attending, would be great if you can use the Zoom chat box to let me know. I'll be there with Zach, one of my BI ninjas and I look forward to seeing some of you. There's a lot of exciting things going on with Acumatica and we have a ton of news to cover as well. Today I'm going to use this half an hour really well. My idea is I'm going to be covering the top five dashboards used by Acumatica customers in 2021. I will show how easy it is to customize reports and dashboards using dataself. And then I'm going to be talking about the data self analytics launchpad which is something new we're going to be doing at Acumatica Summit. But at the end of the day what we're really doing here is going from GI generic inquiries to BI in 10 minutes. And you might wonder why do you want to do that? Primarily what we are, the pains we are addressing is we see many clients ecumedica clients where the decision makers have to wait for a more technical person to address some of their business questions. You know, people have to be Building Reports GI's Dashboards in Ecumatica and that's usually a very technical, you know, process. Most business people will not know how to build gis will not know how to use the Acumatica report designer will not know how to build dashboards from scratch. So quite often they have to ask you know, decision makers someone else to do that and have to wait. And quite often when they get the information they have to sometimes export the data to an Excel and do manipulation outside. Nowadays business cannot wait to do things. Decision makers have to be more timely access to their data anytime, anywhere. And that's why you need bi. Our BI is not a regular average mid market bi. We use best of breed technology. We use Gartner endorsed technology, meaning it's not perfect but like one of our clients say is the best reporting technology in the planet. That's one of our clients in true, it's very empowering. So let's go through, you know, this GI GI to BI in the 10 minutes and before I show the product per se. You know why Data self. So first of all, since 2018, Acumatica Inc. The company that uses Acumatica as the ERP. They use data Self as their internal BI platform for data warehousing and analytics. So it's great to have Acumatica as one of our reference sites. Second, we've been helping midsize companies do better when it comes to reporting and analytics for more than 16 years. So we've been around, we know the challenges and we have a great platform to help organizations go from GI to BI very quickly. What you get at the end of the day with Dataself the platform is actually data warehousing. It's an amazing technology and it's easy and it's easy to customize. And we also bring Tableau and Power BI as the user interface so users can be more self sufficient, independent, making their own decisions anytime and anywhere. High level what we make is easy and affordable. Enterprise level BI, something that Fortune 2000 companies can use every day. You can use it now without breaking the bank and getting up and running in minutes. So that's what we do. Where our top reports come from this year we look at the most used reports and dashboards among our client base and we have found these top 10. They cover sales, financials, inventory, purchase order, sales order and whatnot. But today what I'm going to be covering is the top five from a sales perspective which is the biggest demand from our client base. And the top five from a sales perspective is also going to be included in the data self launchpad that we'll be talking in a few minutes. So that's why I'm going to be showing the top five and I'm going to go through right now this top five most popular dashboards in the Medica client base. And I'm going to jump the number five first because it has to do with ad hoc analysis in how to create new reports from scratch. Which is the second session of my demo. So I start first going to the number 4, 3, 2, 1 and then I'm show how number 5 and how customizing the solution works. Let's see the most popular dashboards for Acumatica. Right now I am in the data self analytics embedded into Acumatica. When you log in, the system can know who you are and it will only give you access to the things that you have rights to in data cells. Users don't even need to know is another application feeding their data. But my number four most popular, our number four most popular dashboard is the Daily Flash. What is the Daily Flash concept? Many businesses when they're making decisions, sometimes the answer to Their questions. They only get the reports properly manipulated. Days, weeks, sometimes months after the fact. It's like looking on the rear view mirror and look in the past. Well, the Daily Flash is a concept to give users information about what's happening today. And especially giving or highlighting the things that are critical, the things that are really good or really bad. That's usually where top level decision makers really care is the exception. So this is an example of an out of the box Daily Flash looking from a sales perspective where you have some controls, you have the big numbers for your transactions happening today and then you can tell colors, telling something critical. In this example, the color is if profitability is below the threshold shows that data point in red. If it's above the threshold showing black, you can have several colors, maybe green, yellow and red, depending on those criteria. But the point is for decision makers to quickly look at their own daily Flash, see what's going on, seeing the big numbers and seeing data points that are too good or too bad in taking action. Daily Flash, this one is available out of the box, is part of the launchpad, but it can absolutely be customized to address each decision maker own KPI they want to manage on an ongoing basis. And that's the number four most popular dashboard in our client base. Number three is the hot and cold. Hot and cold is another interesting perspective. It goes against the exceptions is what is the biggest, you know, biggest by business or by growth at the same time what is the biggest by decline or things are no longer happening. This dashboard, like all the data self dashboards are highly interactive. So right now I can choose a data point I want to see. I can see my customers, my territories, my products, my salespeople, whatnot. And then by choosing something here in what metric I want to analyze, maybe I want to analyze my sales, my gross profit, maybe I'm shipping things I want to see by pound. Maybe I want to see whatever it is. You just pick and choose those metrics or those dropdowns we have which can be customized. And then in this example I'm looking sales and customers in a given period, you know, last period in this period. And then this shows my top customer by sales this period, they're absolutely hot. These are my top customers by sales growth since the last period. If they're growing a lot, they're hot. And on the opposite side of the curve you see the biggest decline, which clients are declined the most in business since last period and which ones they were buying last period, but not at all this period. So this is looking at the tip of the curve, the best and the worst scenarios. And again, this is showing sales is available out of the box as part of the launchpad, can be easily customized and can also be looked from different perspectives. Maybe you want to see your expenses, your purchase, your inventory. So looking at the hot and cold is also is the number three most popular reporting dashboard in our client list. Let's go to number two. The number two most popular from a sales perspective is the salesperson dashboard. Salespeople, they usually have to have a very good understanding of their market, their customers, what they're selling, what they're not selling, open receivables, sales order CRM information. So the idea here is putting a single dashboard, all the widgets with all the data points that account managers should know before they call a customer or when a customer calls them, they can go to a place that can see all the data points of this customer. This particular example that I'm showing right now is showing mostly sales information of a given period and you can put a goal. So in this case my goal is 7 million. I'm still a little bit short of the 7 million, so it's all red. If my goal were to be 6 million for instance, then my dashboard will change to show the colors. Meaning I reached my goal. Yay. You know, great. And if I'm far from reaching my goal, maybe you know, my goal was 20 million is going to show that things are still red. I have to work harder to meet my quota. So anyhow you can work with budget in actuals in this kind of visual interaction. In here you can also see open receivables. So if I click on a customer over here, I can see if this customer particularly have any sales in the current period in any open sales orders. All the dashboards in dataself are highly interactive. As you might know in acumatica if you use the built in dashboards primarily when you click a data point you go into the GIs. You cannot change the report and dashboard just by pointing and clicking with data self. You can extensively slice and dash your data before you go into a GI kind of view. So very interactive this number two. And by the way, if you go through the launch data self launchpad, we're only going to be focusing the launchpad on sales to make it super quick. You will not include receivables open receivables in sales order. But that's only a few extra minutes of setup in case if you go to the launchpad and you also get the complete data self out of the box solution. The number one dashboard is the year over year sales dashboard. This dashboard is actually quite powerful. It's a way for decision makers to look at their data and be able to see things that is happening this year, any period, year to date, quarter, quarter to date. And if they want to compare to the last year, same period is just a few clicks away. So right now what I'm looking at is my total sales this year, last year the change in dollar and change in percentage I can see by period. This year dark blue, last year, light blue. I can change the periods by just changing this dropdown. Let's say I'm going to choose 2021 and actually in my sample database my current period is period six. So let me just go through period six, press apply. So just change the filters to show only a comparison through period six. And then when I look at my customers sales last year, this year in the variance product, same thing in territory, I see one of my top customers is declining quite a bit. This is one of the beauties of dataself. You can see the high level information slice to next level and eventually go down to a GI kind of perspective. Let's say I'm going to choose this customer to see what's going on. When I select this customer, the whole dashboard changes to only show data for this customer, totals, trend analysis, what I'm shipping to in what products are driving the decline. And if I scroll down, up and down here, I see that this product is driving the majority decline. And if you didn't know about it, maybe that's a data point you need to work on. So high level, drill down, find out something interesting. Maybe once you found out something interesting you actually want to see some kind of, you know, GI kind of information, detail information. You can pretty much click show details and at the bottom of the report of the dashboard now you have a GI kind of view that you can see all the details of your transactions, sales, inventory, financials. And if you want to export to Excel, you can quickly Click download to PDF to PowerPoint to Excel and do more manipulation in case you want to. So high level, easy to slice and dice it, easy to filter, drill through and download if or when you want to. And that's our top five reports and dashboards just showing what comes available out of the box as part of the launchpad. I'll talk in a minute. Now the number five that I didn't cover yet is actually called the slicer. The slicer is when people want to become self sufficient, customizing their own reports like users. But they do not have time to learn GI's report designer and how to customize things in acumatica which is pretty complex overall. It's not for business people, more for consultants. So this is how people can use data self to extensively slice and dice and customize their tool, their platform. Right now I'm showing sales by customer in a few periods. Let's say I want to see something else. I want to see sales by salesperson in periods three and four. Sure. I can select periods three and four. Press apply. So I'm changing that first. Periods three and four. Right now we're showing customer I want to see something else. I can choose the drop down and choose salesperson out of the box. We have these options, but it's easy for a consultant to add more options. As many as you want, 10, 15, 20. Whatever it is, once you do the customization, the business people just choose what they want. Like salesperson. And there it is. Now this report is showing sales by salesperson in those two months. What if I want to break it down? This report by customer, you know, by salesperson by customer. Sure. I can drill down to the next level right now I already have customers, so easy. Sales by salesperson by customer for those two months I want to drill down further and see sales by product as well. I can drill to the next level which right now is city and I choose product. So pretty much you can drill down from four levels down, just picking, choosing what you want. Super easy. This is the training. If you have seen this next time, if you want to use it, you know how to do it because it's very straightforward. And if you want to see more measures, let's say gross profit, you pick and choose, press apply and that's it. This is a way to give users power so they can find answers to the questions anytime without calling it and waiting for an answer. Very empowering. Now we have more ways to customize it in one that is very exciting is the natural language query. Natural language query is like searching the Internet. However, the search is your data at Qematica and anything else you have in data self in the answer is actually a report built from scratch using AI, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Let me show an example. I want to see sales by sales person in 2020. The tool will read what I wrote, try to make sense, give me hits, options. What you want to see, you read the one that makes sense. Like just when you're searching on the Internet, you select it and the tool will build Instantly accurately an answer to that question. So in this example by salesperson, I see sales in a descending order in 2020. This is not magic, this is natural language query functionality. If you want to break down by month. So typing by month, I choose the right hit and now it will show by salesperson by month sales in 2020. Maybe you want to see the numbers you know by the penny. You can choose tax table instead. Now you have the numbers by the penny. And if you want to get some of this data into Excel, you can select any point in Data Self. You can select your data and tell show me the data. You can see all the high level information, you can get all the details. This would be like a GI download. And now that information go to Excel. And if you want to use in Excel, now you have complete information exported to Excel. So natural language is a very powerful way for users to do to get find answers to their questions, export data to Excel if they want. I mean slice and dice the data in the web browser and export Excel in case they want to. But natural language is not a magic wand. It will not answer more complicated questions like the dashboard that I showed you before. So how can you build those more elaborate reports and dashboards? You can use Tableau or Power BI as the Data Self ui. Let me show an example how easy it is. Right now I'm using the tableau functionality. You go here, you see all your data. In this case I'm looking at sales and let's say I want to see sales by customer by year. I take the field that I want, I drag it to my report. Actually I need to reload here. There it is. Drag and drop sales to my report. I see all my customers, I want to see sales drag and drop into the report and I want to see by year put my invoice date in my header. Pretty much building reports and dashboards in Data Self is drag and drop. If you know how to drag and drop, you can do a lot. You can make charts, you can make maps, you can make all this interaction very straightforward functionality because we're leveraging very powerful reporting engine with data warehousing and tableau and Power BI on the front end. So Report Designer is significantly easier to use than the Acumatica's equivalent and actually significantly more powerful because we're using Gartner level BI things that Fortune 2000 companies usually use on a daily basis. All right, let's now go through a quick explanation of what's happening behind the scenes here. How Data Self does all of this Magic and talk about the launchpad. The way that we pull data out of Acumatica or any other system is using what we call an ETL process. And we have Data Cell ETL plus. It's an easy way to get data from any of your systems into a SQL Server data warehouse. And then we use our tools to quickly get out of the box reports and dashboards. Let me show behind the scenes and this is going to be a little bit more technical part of this presentation. So if you're technical you're going to appreciate it. If you're not, just wait two, three minutes and we'll go back to the business side of this discussion. So let me show what ETL is. This is the ETL plus functionality. You can have on the far left, your data sources. You can have Excel files, you can have Google Analytics, you can have acumatica with Odata v3, Odata v4 Salesforce, any of your data sources. And when you expand you can see all the tables or GI's available from the data source. And then as you pick and select which data you want to import from your, you know Acumatica you goes into the data warehouse section. Like in this case I'm showing that the data from acumatica using OData v3 I'm pulling these few tables and then this data go to Data Warehouse. If I go to the Salesforce I can see data and go to the OData V4 and whatnot. So all of the data is over here. All this functionality, you don't need to know programming, but if you like programming and if you know SQL statements, this is plain vanilla SQL Server state. SQL Server statements you don't need, you don't need to know how to do coding because the tool does most of it for you. But if you know how to use it is extremely powerful to do more manipulation in case you need to. Once you use the data self ETL that is very fast to extract the Akumatica data. The first load can take a while to bring all of your data because old data can be slow. But once we load all the data, all the ongoing extraction will only bring the deltas. So refresh on an ongoing basis usually takes minutes to refresh. If you know SQL or if you don't, all your data will be hosted in a SQL Server data warehouse. If you know SQL handles data volume very effectively. And that's why when we refresh reports out of our framework is because your Acumatica data has been copied over to a SQL Server database in the cloud or on premises. And when you run into your reports, they'll run in seconds no matter how much data you have. Some of our larger clients have dozens of millions of records in. Our reports still run in seconds because we use this very powerful enterprise level technology. Having said that, let's talk about the data self Launchpad. What is the data self Launchpad at Acumatica? Only at Acumatica Summit in Vegas. If you want to see, if you want to take advantage of everything that I showed you so far here today, that's going to be part of our data self Launchpad in Vegas. You come to our booth, our Booth is number 59 and you just need to provide us a username with reading rights only to Acumatica. If you'd have Acumatica that is older, you need to upload one GI to your Acumatica. Very simple. If you have Ecumatica 2020 R1, I'm sorry 2020 R2 or newer, you just give us a username with reading rights and odata before access and pretty much in a few minutes you fill out the form with your contact information whatnot. So under 10 minutes we get this part done. We will deploy your data self analytics right off the bat. And as soon as your data has been loaded, which might take minutes or hours if you have a lot of data, you'll be able to see about more than a dozen sales dashboards out of Acumatica. Everything that I showed you from a dashboard standpoint, natural language query building new reports and dashboards will be available as part of this for 30 days for free. So it's a free trial. So it's an easy way to see if going from GI to BI will be beneficial for you and your users. And if you don't like it, you unplug it within 30 days if you do like it. The pricing of Data Self, you know on our website if you click the pricing tab over here, Our pricing is 399 per month. It includes 20 users as part of the package and it's fairly affordable to go up. Everything that I showed you today again is included on the dashboard per se. We also have more powerful additions that provide a lot more reports and dashboard out of the box. You a lot more power from a BI standpoint as well. We have what is called the do it yourself. You do one of our templates. You're just having issues getting your data out of Acumatica to do your own reports and analytics and it takes a long time because all data is slow. Well if you use do it yourself or use use our ETL + you will significantly improve the back end extraction of your acumatica data. Having said that, let me just go Back to my PowerPoint again. The data self launchpad will only be available during summit. Come to our booth number 59. We're going to be providing more information about the website, giving some information what kind of user we need pretty much as an akumatica credential with anonymous reading rights. Super simple. If you want to see a session of data self including a deployment, you can come to our breakout on Tuesday 10:15am during the session we're going to be covering something similar that we covered today. Zach the BI ninja is going to be with me. He's going to also deploy in parallel a full data cell from scratch to show how easy the process is. That's it. If you have question or comments, I'm going to double check now the Zoom panel. If anyone has any questions and let's see, we have some questions. Questions from Derek does the salesperson dashboard take in sales from SO&Projects? Derek we have templates for distribution companies as well as for service companies. Right now I don't know the answer to your question. If the salesperson out of the box dashboard it includes project as well. If it doesn't, it doesn't take a lot of time to bring that information over. So I'll get that answer specifically back to you. But again any data from any of your data sources can be customized. In the salesperson dashboard that I showed you is usually a good starting point. But if you need customizations that are not yet done because out of the box we can either teach you or your or your team on how to do those changes and if you're too busy you can hire us to make those changes for you. Pretty much bringing sales from projects, it's usually a few hours of custom work to make part of the sales dashboard framework. All right, another question from Derek. Is this recorded so I can get it over to our yes, this session is being recorded in tomorrow. By tomorrow we're going to be sending all of you the recording. So watch out for an email from us with the recording. I'm going to take one more answer, one more question, then I'll stop. Question from Peter how long does the training take about data self analytics training? We have several different ways to go. One is self service training. There's a lot of materials around the data self technology that is self service. If you're a self service kind of person you might not need training, you just run with it on average. We recommend our Orange Bell training which is eight hours of live web based training every month. We have this session going on if you have more sophisticated needs. We also do a lot of one on one training after orange Belt. Focus specifically on your data needs. Overall building reports and dashboards is something people can do out of the Orange Belt training. If you need to do more backend customizations, data warehousing that usually takes more one on one hours. One on one hour of one on one training sessions. It depends how much you know already about data warehousing kind of technology. If you know quite a bit, it takes not a lot of hours. If you know nothing, it takes more time. Folks, we're running out of time. I really appreciate you joining us here today. I hope to see some of you in Vegas in a week from now. Thank you very much. And again, if you're interested in the data self launchpad, feel free to. Actually I didn't put my contact information. Sorry about that. Let me share this again. You can email salesataself.com or this phone number to get in touch with us anytime to answer your questions about BI analytics. Thank you very much. Have a great day. Looking forward to hopefully seeing you in Vegas in a week or so. Thank you. It.