Acumatica Summit 2023 Pre-Event DataSelf Analytics Webinar

Good morning, Good afternoon everyone. Thank you very much for your time and interest in this webinar on fast tracking business intelligence for Acumatica. My name is Don Farber. I am joined by Data Cell CEO and founder Johnny Girardi. Today's presentation will take approximately 30 minutes. We'll start out with a quick discussion about what it means to fast track business intelligence. We'll then jump into a live product demo courtesy of Data Johnny and then we'll wrap things up with some licensing and pricing information as well as leave time for any questions that you might have. So with that, let's get right to it. Starting off with a little bit about Data Self. We've been around over 15 years. As I mentioned, we're joined by Data Self CEO Johnny Girardi. Our mission is to enable organizations to maximize profitability and productivity, minimize losses by enabling organizations to make more timely and more informed business decisions. How do we enable that? By leveraging a combination of technologies, BI plus data management that both serve to simplify and expedite the decision making process. So let's talk a little bit about reporting in general because some folks might say, well, we've already got reporting in our ERP app. How is business intelligence different from that? And so I like to use this illustration to show that business intelligence is a rather large circle that actually encompasses what ERP reporting tools do. Now with that, ERP reporting is very specific in that the ERP reports typically are process oriented. They focus on transactional level details such as invoicing or procurement, and they're looking at the raw data in an ERP database like Acumatica. Business intelligence encompasses and includes that. But very importantly, as opposed to being focused on transactional level detail, Business intelligence is focused on KPIs key performance indicators and it aggregates data. To me, what this really boils down to is business intelligence gives you a much improved sense for how you're doing, how are your sales doing, by salesperson, by product, by region, etc. And as a result, BI gives you that insight to look forward to, look towards the future and make better business decisions as your business moves beyond today into tomorrow and the weeks and months to come. Now let's drill down into a further level of detail. Where exactly does ERP reporting fall short? Well, a number of these limitations are probably familiar to you. Some of those ER reports take a long time to run and once they're done generated, they only give you access to a limited amount of related data. Limited drill down. There's no access to a nice friendly natural language search technology. There's very limited ability to look forward to say, what if we were to increase monies over here or reduce activities over there? Also a lot of time we hear from clients who say, I've got different reports that are telling me different things about my business. They seem to be in conflict with each other. So there's no single version of the truth as businesses need to see it. Another limitation with the ERP reports is that they can't combine data from multiple sources. Very often what you see in your ERP application is also reliant upon information, perhaps in a CRM map. So the ability to join that data together is missing from ERP reporting. And you know, probably everyone on this call has gone through the process of trying to extract or export data from Acumatica, usually to be viewed and played within a, well, a friendlier technology such as Microsoft Excel. But you know, even when you get that data into Excel, you still have to clean it. You have to run macros, formulas, et cetera. And it's still a very complex process. So let's talk about what is required for organizations today to fast track that BI initiative and be empowered to make better business decisions going forward. There really are three steps to fast tracking bi. They start with extracting and optimizing your Acumatica data. Continue, pardon me, with selecting your preferred analytical tool to interrogate that data, and finish up with allowing you to get immediate access to insight from your Acumatica data. Let me go into those each in a little bit more detail. Pardon me again, extracting and optimizing. What we're really talking about here is the need to take your Acumatica data and get it into a friendlier format to do so. Pardon me, let me grab myself a quick sip of water here. That's better. To do so requires the use of a tool set of something called etl. ETL is a type of technology. It stands for extract, transform and load. And it takes ERP data such as Acumatica and it puts it into an optimized format so it's easier, faster, faster and more flexible for reporting purposes. And typically that extracted data needs to be put into a place where it can be more easily and efficiently managed. And that entails the use of a data warehouse. Secondly, selecting your analytics layer or BI toolset, and there are a lot of analytics tools out there and what you need to consider when selecting the one or ones to use is that obviously you want one that's going to be powerful and flexible. But perhaps most importantly, you Want an analytics technology that's not only around today, but going to be around one, two or five years in the future. And an analytics tool set that works with your other database management tools such as Excel or other such technologies. And finally, the third step in terms of fast tracking your acumatica implementation and reporting to a BI mindset and is that once you've extracted your acumatica data, you've got it into a good workable format. Once you've selected an analytics layer, excuse me, you don't want at that point to have to sit down and start writing reports and dashboards for yourself. You're looking at months of effort to write all of those various analyses that you need. So the third and final component of fast tracking your BI is to implement a solution that includes a library. A library of KPIs of reports and dashboards that already give you much of the insight that you're looking for. So those three steps, power, ease and speed are what comprise the process of fast tracking bi. And if we take a look at how Data Self addresses those three steps, you can see for yourself our approach, starting with a proprietary technology, we call it Data Self ETL plus. That is an award winning technology that extracts and optimizes your acumatica data and puts it into a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse. Secondly, the analytics layer we've chosen to allow you to use either of the top two rated BI technologies on the market today. Those being Tableau and Power bi. Of course we also allow you to support other database tools that you rely upon such as Microsoft Excel. And then finally there's the element of speed. The Data Self analytics solution comes with the largest analytics library available today, over 8,000 KPIs and preconfigured reports and dashboards. So that on day one, the day that you first implement the Data Self analytics solution, you can start getting meaningful insight out of your acumatica data. Now this all sounds well and good, but how does it look in real life? And for that I'm going to turn the proceedings over to Johnny Girardi to have a look at data cells analytics solution.

Thank you. Don't my screen. My throat is also acting up as yours today. All right, Let me know if you can see the Data Self demo agenda here.

We certainly can. Thank you, Johnny.

Thank you, Don. All right, again this is Johnny Girardi, Data Sales founder and CEO and I'm going to take you through a overview of the Data Self experience and I'm going to take two focus first on the business users because Ultimately they are the ones who benefit the most from business intelligence, you know, making more informed decisions anytime, anywhere. Usually they're the ones funding the investment. But also very importantly is how we empower the report publishers and BI people to do their jobs to support the decision makers more efficiently. So my first session is going to be again around business users. I'm going to focus first of all in what's called analytics, meaning ways that business users can ask questions about their data and find answers without calling anyone else. Very, very, very empowering. I'm also going to show a very popular way of doing reporting which is Excel. There's a lot of people out there that they always want to have the reports in Excel. So I'm going to show one example that we enhance reporting in Excel from a P and L standpoint. My second part of the presentation is going to be more technical, significantly more technical for the business folks. But still I'll try to keep a high level in a way that business folks will have an idea of the technicalities is but those of you who are more technical, you'll see we opening the hood and showing how empowering the Data Self backend solution is from a data preparation standpoint as well as the user interface available to support decision makers. All right, so let's go for it. First of all, so for business users, many of them, they want to have the reports and dashboards inside of Akumatica and here I'm showing example where you go to Akumatica and there is one or multiple Data self dashboards embedded, it will be completely transparent for them. Sometimes they don't even know that this dashboard is not natively Akumatica, it's from Data Self. Some business users actually don't want to go to Akumatica. They have nothing to do that. They want to see their KPIs anytime and anywhere. Then the Data self dashboards can be outside of Acumatica, on mobile devices, on web browsers. So we have the flexibility of giving business users the way the KPIs in the shape or form that is best for them. Now in this case I'm going to go into the data Self dashboard inside of Acumatica and when I click on it right there, it launches the analytics engine behind the scenes. And as a business user I can start to interrogate my questions in this part of my presentation, what I call the analytics. I'm going to go through three different examples that are very popular. The first one is the most powerful is you ask a question in plain English, like when you're doing Google, you know, you just search for what you're looking for and the Data Self solution will answer that question with an instant accurate answer in a report. And that's called natural language query. So you go and you just type in English whatever you want to see. Let's say sales by salesperson in 2022. So I just wrote what I want to see. If you noticed, as I was typing in, the tool was identifying the segments of my question and translating into a query question. As a business user, I don't care. I wrote the question, I press enter, and the tool instantly accurately answer the question. So right there by salesperson is showing sales in a descending order in that particular period. So question enter get the answer. Maybe I want to break down by month. So you type in by month, press enter in the tool again, answers the questions instantly. Now, each salesperson has a line with a different color showing sales in the months of 2022. Many times when you look at this data and you know the natural language query gave you a certain representation like this on a line chart. Maybe I want to differently. Maybe you want to see just a text table like in Excel that many people love. Well, you pick and choose tax table in this example and that's the answer in text table. Last example. What if I want to see gross profit percentage by state, so I just type in again what I want to see. Press enter and you see the answer. So natural language query in one is one of the most empowering analytics components of Data Self. Because if you speak English, you're done. You don't need to know anything else. I mean, of course you need to know your business, what you're looking for, but you just use plain English to get an answer to your questions, just like in Google. Now, just like in Google, you will not answer all the questions. Some questions are more sophisticated and you won't be able to get the answer using natural language query. What I'm going to show you next is another feature in Data Self that answers some type of questions that natural language cannot answer. In this next feature we call the slicer. The slicer is like an Excel pivot table, but on steroids. Easier, better, faster, anytime, anywhere. You can do Excel pivot table on Steroid, even using a mobile device, pretty much you select your filters. So right now I'm looking this year, I mean last year for three months, and you have here the reporting area, which right now is showing my customers with sales in those in that particular period. What if I want to see sales in A different format. Let's say I want to see sales by salesperson broken by item broken by customer. You know, I also want to see the quantity shipped. So that's what I'm going to see in this report. Well, with the slicer, you use the slicer to change. So I want to see salesperson. I just pick and choose salesperson. The list of entries here is available out of the box in data self. But a more technical user can change this list, add more parameters, remove, customize, completely customizable. Once the list has all the parameters that the business person wants to analyze. As a business person, I just pick and choose salesperson. There it is. Now I see sales by salesperson. I click plus to go to the next column. Now we're showing sales by salesperson by item. I expand to the next column and now I want to see customer for instance. So using the drop downs, I can extensively customize this report. Well, I want to see sales and quantity sold. I go to my measure and I select quantity sold. Press apply and there it is, the report is done. So pretty much if you've been using Excel pivot table. Imagine something automated on the web at any time, anywhere you can see the answers and they run in seconds by yourself, without calling anyone. That's the slicer, the power of the slicer. The last example of the analytics is what we call dashboards. Dashboards is a way to give every decision maker or groups of decision makers, group of people ways to look into piece of your business or across the whole business in giving you big picture numbers where these decision makers can monitor how your business is doing, how your department is doing and then when they see outliers, something really good or something really bad. Give the ability to these business users to quickly find the why something is really good or really bad and being able to filter and slice and dice the data again without calling anyone else. In this example, this is one of the most, this is the most popular out of the box dashboard in our client base is called the year over year variances. You select the year in the period. Right now I'm looking last year through period seven. I see the total in that period, the total in the same period in the prior year in the variances. So in this case the company has growing 14% on a year to day basis. Big numbers. Here I have a visual drill down. I see the same data but broken down by period. Dark blue last year, this year, light blue last year, the same data. Now from a geography standpoint, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. Red is Going down, declining black is growing. And if you put the mouse over you can see more contextual information or that particular data point. Here we have customers and items last year, this year's in the variance from, you know, from the prior year. Now this dashboard as it is is informative but most importantly, how can I interact with it? Well, if I'm a salesperson and look in my territory, let's say us, and I see this customer declining a lot in sales and maybe I don't know what's happening. Well, I want to know why in Acumatica if you take a dashboard and you click on a data point it goes straight into the gis, all the details and sometimes you're not ready to go to all the details you want to see yet high level information like in this case, if I click this customer now, the whole dashboard changed to only show data for this customer. As I select different customers you can see it filters the rest of the report. This customer here which has a huge decline, I can see the totals, I can see the trend analysis where I ship the products and what products are driving the decline. Maybe now I actually want to see a GI kind of look and feel and see all the transaction details. It may be only for the top three items by sales decline. I can select them and now I can click show details and at this point I go into a GI looking query that shows me all the little transactions, everything and I can with a few clicks here I can export this data into Excel and whatnot if I want to manipulate the data outside of Data Self. But again giving business users the ability to look at the dashboards at the high level in being able to slice and dice, drill down and eventually drill into details is something very critical in Data Self provides. While the Acumatica built in is usually from the top to the most detailed level with nothing in between. So this is analytics allowing people to do slice and dice reports and dashboards within Akumatica or outside. Another very popular way of doing reporting is using Excel in quite often the finance department loves Excel and they want to see their P and L, the balance sheet, their cash flow, the cash cash statements in Excel. So this is one example where the data is coming from. Akumatica is populating the data Self BI engine and then users pull their data into P and L reports using Excel. The beauty is when you need to refresh this Excel report, usually you run in seconds no matter how much data you have in Acumatica and we'll talk about that a little bit when we Go into the technical side of the presentation. All right, so that was the overview for business users. What I'm going to show you next is empowering the techies, the report publishers in the business intelligence users. Let me go back to my web here to show the architecture. So right now, until now I was showing the ease in the speed of data self di for the business users. Now I'm going to show the back end and talk a little bit, a little bit more about the UI per se. So first of all, one of the main challenges of getting more sophisticated reports out of Acumatica is getting the data out of Acumatica. Many people use gis, many people exporting outside into Excel and whatnot and it becomes slow process, sometimes very time consuming. Well, ETL plus is an amazing tool that we have designed to get the extraction of data from any data source, including Acumatica, quickly and easily putting into SQL Server. And this is the main UI of ETL plus where in the left you define what sources or you want to pull data from. In this example I have Acumatica data, I have some budget data in Excel, I have payroll from CSV and I can quickly see the credentials that pull the data from each system. In this case, if you know Actimatica and you know how to extract data. Odata is the most popular if your acumatic is cloud, but it could also be SQL if your Acumatica is on premises anyhow. So here you define your sources and again you can bring any data that you have. Google Analytics, HubSpot, whatever it is, salesforce.com, you can bring all of your data, you just map them on the left panel. The right panel shows or allows you to manipulate and transform the data that you are pulling from your source. As you can tell here from Akumatica, I already have a bunch of tables pre mapped, some tables for budgeting from payroll and whatnot. But since this is an Akumatica presentation, let me focus on Akumatica. If you click on any of these tables that we have mapped, you can see on the right we have a select statement pulling this data from Akumatica. And most importantly we have ways to refresh the data very efficiently. We call upsert. Upsert means the first time we bring data from Akumatica. It can take a while if you have a lot of data because, well, all data is slow. But after the first load we only bring, we only update records that have changed since the last refresh and new ones. For example, AR Tran has lots of records and if I say load now it will only take a few seconds because we're only pulling the records that had changed since last time and actually let me show a full refresh. So you have a better idea? I'm going to refresh all my acumatica data right now. It's going through all of the tables and as you can tell as you go through the tables it tells how many rows is importing from Acumatica. If it says upserted it means it only pulled the deltas. Modify the new records. If it shows loaded means it brought everything. This table so small that bringing everything is super quick. If it shows replaced is another way of bringing just partial information more quickly. Anyhow, no matter how much data you have, this refresh usually takes seconds or a few minutes. Our largest Ecumenica client has more than 50 million records in their largest table and the refresh runs fast because we're only pulling deltas. So that's a refresh. All of this data is being populated into a SQL Server database or data warehouse. And if you don't know SQL but you know gis, once you know what you can do in SQL compared to gis, you're going to be amazed how much more power you'll have to do your reporting logic and how much faster things run. That's pretty much a quick overview of the ETL plus in SQL Server. My last comment is People ask us hey you guys support Power BI and Tableau. Which one is best? They're both amazing tools. Usually when someone asks us this question we usually ask a few questions back. What you want to do, where you are today, what technology are using so we can make a recommendation because usually one of them is going to be better for your case. So There is no A1 fit all but it's usually the right conversation can guide you into selecting the best BI solution or the best user interface between the two of them. Don, back to you.

Thanks very much Johnny. Appreciate the technical overview and demo of the Data Self solution. And Johnny, let me just make sure that you are once again looking at my screen. Yes, excellent. I know we have just a couple minutes left, so very quickly I do want to review licensing and pricing options for the Data Self analytics solution. We offer four tiers of pricing. They're shown for you up at the top of the current slide. I wanted to mention that the one at the top left ETL plus for $99 a month. This is designed for organizations whose primary concern is extracting and optimizing the data in your acumatica ERP system. So if you say to yourself, you know, I don't need all of those reporting technologies, I have my own tool set that I want to use, but I need to get that Acumatica data into a format, into a data warehouse that is cleansed, optimized, et cetera, then the ETL plus solution is ideal. The three additional choices, Advanced, Professional and Enterprise are the full suite solutions encompassing not just the ETL plus tools, but also the inclusion of Tableau use of Power BI, and also of course our library of over 8,000 KPIs, dashboards and reports that you can choose from. So those are your options. I also want to mention that you can visit dataself.com and actually download and try out the solution if you choose to do so. The version that is available for free trial is the Professional edition. And of course our staff is here to help you with your trial experience. Please do speak with your VAR if you're interested in looking more deeply into the Data self analytics solution and please do visit us at the Acumatica summit. Our booth number is 419 and my colleague Johnny will be speaking at two sessions during the summit conference. So in the one or so minutes that we have left, one or two minutes. If anyone has any questions about the Data self analytics solution, please feel free to use the chat dialog box. And I'm just going to check and see if we have one question that has come in. And Johnny, I'll pose this to you. The question is what is the typical annual increase for pricing?

Usually is inflation based at least our own software, we keep that, that standard. We use some external software like you know, SQL Tableau and Power bi. We don't control their pricing, but it's usually inflation based.

Perfect. And one additional question that's come in, thank you for answering that one is what about using other BI technologies? And, and I know Johnny, that you made a little allusion to it earlier, but this person specifically references a technology called Domo.

Yeah, we actually are working with a prospect right now that they were having trouble getting data from Acumatica into Domo. You know, we have tested many different ETLs and they're saying they all kind of sucked. And then they tried all out and said, wow, yours just works. Absolutely. Our technology, even though we have the full package that can get out of the box with, you know, a bunch of reports and dashboards, Kabul and Power BI quickly, quickly and easily. But the back end, especially TL plus, is a generic tool that can help get data out of any system, including AKUMATICA into a SQL data warehouse and then you can plug any analytics layer, any analytics tool like Domo, Qlikview and whatnot so we can absolutely help with those needs as well.

And Jonny, I know we've gone over our time limit by one minute, but I noticed one more technical question that came in regarding an on prem installation. Do you want to tackle that one as well?

Okay, on premises what is the cost? We will provide the infra we need one time installing.

The question for those folks who perhaps can't see it on their screen is on premise what is the cost? We will what is the cost? We will provide the infrastructure. We need a one time install and then optional services.

Let's do it offline because every situation might have details that are important so we can give you the correct assessment. And I think this gentleman that is asking, we already have an ongoing conversation to give more details. So if you have questions about specific pricing, how can we work, how we can help? Do you only need software? Need our support services, training? Contact your data self VAR or us directly to go over those details. And if you go to Summit in Vegas, please stop by so we can talk about your specific needs and be sure we give you the right information based on your specific needs.

Perfect. And one final technical question. Can someone also use the data self ETL plus solution to pull data from Google Analytics?

Yes, and we need to talk about that because we are we have many drivers to different Google data sources and Google Analytics is one of them. So contact us specifically so we can discuss and tell you how we can help. Google Analytics is not a simple data source, but yes, we can help you with that. Absolutely.

Perfect. Well I think that brings us to the end of today's webinar. On behalf of Johnny Girardi and myself, Don Farber, thanks very much for your time and interest in the DataSoft solutions. We look forward to seeing you and speaking with you at the upcoming Acumatica Summit conference. We'll follow up with each of you with a link to this presentation in a recorded format so that you can share it with your colleagues. Again, thanks very much for your time and enjoy the rest of your day.