Advanced Analytics for Sage 100 by DataSelf

Hello everyone, my name is Johnny Girardi. I'm Data Sales founder and CEO. I know that we are in unique times and I appreciate that you're making time to learn about Advanced analytics for Sage 100. The Conversation today is about again, analytics in artificial intelligence out of your Sage 100 data. So let's start talking about what challenges that we are addressing. The most important one is decision makers usually have challenges accessing their key performance indicators, their reports and dashboards. They're trying to understand what's going on with their business. They have new questions, ad hoc questions, and it is not easy quite often for them to get the answers anytime, anywhere without calling someone else. So that's the most important challenge we address. Second, for the people who support the decision makers, you know it consultants, business analysts, usually supporting decision makers when it comes to getting KPIs keepers indicators, it's a time consuming job, usually takes a lot of hours, a lot of effort, working overtime. You know, it's not easy, especially with the unique times we are right now where many companies or many people are working from home or changing the whole structure. It can be even more time consuming and more painful to allow decision makers to know where they should be focusing the resources during this critical times. So time consuming for it is one of the main issues that we're addressing at the end of the day. You know, reporting, building reports, refreshing reports, cleaning the data, vetting the data, setting up security, distribute reports to people, answering questions. Usually it's slow, inexpensive, expensive. It's hard to hear decision maker saying I love my reporting platform. It's very rare unless they have data cells. It's rare to hear, you know, those challenges. People are complaining all the time, why can I have my data? It's right there, it's in Sage. Why can I have it? We are not a magic wand, but we make the job much easier. And that's what we're going to be focusing today. And I'm going to run, I'm going to jump right into the product presentation and then we'll talk a little bit more about how we help those different areas. So let's see how data self helps addressing those challenges. The first part of the solution which is really critical and really empowering for decision makers is called natural language query. It's like searching on the Internet. The person just needs to type a question, type in the question and a report will be created from scratch on the fly to answer the question. Let's see some examples. I'm going to type in sales by salesperson in 2019 and I press enter and voila. A report with instant accurate answer to this question is created by salesperson. This is sales and every salesperson has a bar where it shows me the sales as a number on this pop up window. It's that easy. Type in the question, press enter, get the answer and maybe I want to make something more elaborate, you know, maybe I want to break down by month. So by month enter and there is natural language in artificial intelligence behind the scenes, understanding what I typed and coming up with an answer that the machine learning and artificial intelligence believes that I want to see this example in 2019 for every month I see different lines for different salespeople. Now maybe you don't want to see a chart, maybe you want to see a different chart, maybe you want to see numbers by the penny, which is very common. I want to see numbers, you know, don't show me charts. Sure, right here. As a human I can control and choose a different graphical representation or maybe just a text table and I click the text table. Now that chart becomes by salesperson sales for every month. Natural language query is an amazingly powerful tool for decision makers to become more self sufficient anytime, anywhere to get answers to their questions in this so unique and critical times. And yes, you want to export to Excel? Absolutely. Let's say I'll export everything to Excel or maybe only one data point, let's say home account, January. I want to see all the details. I can click on a data point, choose this view data option and then I'll have this extra window that allows me to take the full data with all the rows, all the details, download this data to a CSV file and when I open it it goes into Excel and show me every single detail behind the data point. Yes, easy to come up with questions, easy to come up with answer to questions, easy to manipulate, easy to export. Again, empowering decision makers to answer their questions anytime, anywhere. Let me make a couple more examples when I clear the I mean by the way, I could have saved all of this thing that I'm doing can be saved. So later on you don't have to redo it, you just retrieve a pre saved report. Absolutely can do that. Let's see top 10 customers by sales in April 2019amore elaborate question. In this time I'm not going to press enter, I'm just going to wait because again the artificial intelligence engine reads what I wrote and tries to make sense. And this example gave me two options and if I just press enter it will automatically choose the first option and sometimes it's not the right one. So sometimes you just type in the question and you wait for the machine for the artificial intelligence to give me options. Just like in Google, you see the options, you pick the right one and then you get the answer. So in this example, the first option is the right one. I'm going to press enter and I'm going to get a report with an instant accurate answer. So these are my customers in blue. They are in meaning in, in the top 10 group and the grade are out. Out of the top 10 group. And again, if you put the mouse over each bar, it shows me the numbers of the sales and yes, you can convert anything into text. I'm going to show it again because many people don't believe until I show. So I'm going to convert this query into text and then when I converted the artificial intelligence thought, well, you only want to see the top 10 customers. I'm not going to show all of them. So it only showed me the top 10 customers. Thank you. I didn't want to see everything, only the top 10 customers. However, the engine sorted them on an alphabetical order and actually I want to see in a descending by sales how can I change the sort? I can put the mouse over the customer, I have this icon for sorting, I can come here and choose. Show me descending by sales. And now it's sorted in a descending order again people, business users can learn how to do this with no training because usually it's like searching the Internet and the few features, if they just poke around they'll probably figure it out. Even though sometimes it's good to give a little tour to tell them where to go in case they want to export Excel or things of that nature. My last example of natural language is going to be gross profit by state. And yes, if you ask a geographer of information, the tool will show you on a beautiful map just like this, where in this example the color legend represents the profitability by state and if I say this by year as a map, what it does is it will break down my whole history which in my sample database I only have two years but for every year it will show states and how gross profit is changing year over year. In a way, using the Correligent natural language query is already available for Sage 100. Actually any data source we can plug to any data source we can provide natural language for decision makers. Very helpful for business people to be more independent anytime, anywhere. Now what I'm going to show next is the data self report in Dashboard editor, because natural language only like Google, there's a lot of answers, but not answers to all questions. What I'm going to show you now is how people who go through a little bit more training, they can create very sophisticated reports and dashboards. And I'm going to show the very basic mechanics of how to do that. I want to build a simple dashboard from scratch showing sales by customer by product and trend analysis by division. So first of all, by customer. So this is my sales connector to Sage 100. So these are my customers. I want to see sales. I drag and drop sales into my report. These are customers, sales by customer. I'm going to put this ending order to see my top customers at the top. I want to see by year. I take document, date and put in my columns. So right there, by customer, by year, sales. And I want to see sales by product. So I'm going to go here, take product and drag and drop. Very quickly I was able to build a report showing sales by customer by product in my company history. All right, I could drill down, I can add filters, but just the mechanics, drag and drop. I also want to see trend of sales in quantity sold over time by, let's say, division. So I want to see sales, I want to see document dates so I can see things over time. And I want to see this on a monthly basis. So right now I'm seeing sales in the whole company history. And I want to take quantity sold and add to my report. So the top line is quantity sold, the bottom of sales. And I want to make this on a dual axis. So right now, quantity sold are the bars. The line is sales. And I want to break this down by division. Or maybe let's do product line instead. Product line in my rows. So right there I have my product lines and then I see the trend analysis for each one of them. And maybe, you know, this product line here is way bigger than the rest. Let's say I do. I only want to see the smaller ones. I'm going to exclude. And then now I see the others with more data. Let me remove this one just to make it a little cleaner. I don't care about this one. And excludes only have everything else. Okay, I just built it these two reports. And now I'm going to go and tell the tool that I can combine these two reports into a dashboard. And I'm going to take my sheet one put on the left, my sheet two put on the right, just, you know, put those sheets side by side. And now that I have built this report from this dashboard from scratch, it's highly interactive. I can export to Excel, I can slice and dice it. For instance, if I want to see all the details only for this particular product line, when I click here, you're going to see that on the left it filters all the details to only show customers and products that are associated with a particular product line. And if I want to choose several product lines together, I can just follow Windows standards like press and hold the control button. Now I can select two other product lines and on the left the report will be changing. So creating reports and dashboards, very complex. These are simple ones, fairly simple. But creating fairly complex reports and dashboards that can address unique requirements from your, from your decision makers is something that using this editor, you can do a lot. You can, it's not a magic one, but you can do a lot more than the crystal, Excel, all of these tools, you can do a lot, a lot more and much more easily. And you can quickly publish to the web and then users having Internet connection anytime, anywhere, they can get better information out of their system, make more informed decisions and hopefully weather this unique times and be able to keep it afloat and hopefully thrive as soon as the crisis get out of the way. What I'm going to show you next is so I showed you how to build reports from scratch using natural language, which is a tool designed for business users. I then showed how to build a report and dashboard from scratch and that part is for more consultants, business analysts and even business people who go to the hours of training. And now I'm going to show you is actually how reports and dashboards look once they have been properly designed to address different questions from business users. And what I'm showing you now is actually available out of the box for Sage 100. Once we deploy it is going to be ready to go pretty much within hours or maybe a day. As we deploy the system, this particular dashboard is looking at year over year sales analysis. A very common request from salespeople is I want to analyze what happened in the first quarter, in the third quarter, in a certain month last year versus this year in the whole year, by customer, by product, by salespeople, all of these things. And this is how this dashboard works. Right now this year is 2019 and I'm looking at all the periods. The total sales 2019 is here, the total sales in last year is here. And right Now I have 14% decline now in my sample database. Today is October 8th and as you can see in my trend analysis that the dark Blue which is this year October is small and no sales yet forward because again we're still in October. What if I want to analyze year to date last year and this year very easy. I come over here, I unselect the peers that I don't want. I'm only going to see full period. So through period nine press apply. Now the dashboard changes to show all sales through the period nine and I am growing actually on a year to day basis. Pat on my back. So total this year last year changes by customer last year, this year in the change by product last year, this year in the change by geography. Bigger bubbles, bigger sales. Black bubbles growing since last year to date. Red decline since last year's date. Now when I look at this information, I look at my customers and my top customer has a major decline since last year to date. Huh? Do I have other customers also having major declines? Good question. Very easy to interact with this dashboard. If you put the mouse over these headers you can easily sort like with this icon I'm going to click once to show descending. So these customers are growing the most on a year over year basis. I click the sort again, it's going to show top customers by sales decline. Two customers will decline over a million dollars. What about them? Why? What's going on? I can select these two customers. Just select them with the mouse in. The whole dashboard now will change to only show analysis around these two customers total this year last year. How much I'm losing revenues products that I sold last year this year and change by location and trend analysis and maybe my next question is what products are driving the decline? I mean definitely my top product this year is a lot of decline. What else? I can sort this table also. You know, some products are growing but a lot of products are declining. And let's say if I choose this top three products, the whole dashboard will change again to only focus on them. But now I can also click sales details. And when I click sales details what happens is a pop up at the bottom of the report will show all the details for this, for this particular sales, you know, invoice number, invoice date, quantity shipped, all the details should be popping up. And right now it looks like it's not going to pop up. Sorry. In a production environment when I click sales C, Sales details is like an Excel sheet that has all the details out of those three products where you can, you know, export to Excel and do more analysis in case you have to. Anyhow, this is an example of a pre configured out of the box Report or dashboard that comes with dataself. And by using the tools that I showed you so far, you decision makers, you consultants, you IT people, you business analysts, you will learn how to build those reports, how to customize them extensively. We do have in data Self this version which we call advanced analytics. And we'll talk about pricing in a few minutes. Very inexpensive, it can be deployed in a few hours. And right now it covers sales analysis as well as AR aging analysis. So if you're going to see how much you're selling, I mean how much money is supposed to be coming from your, you know, buy your aging bucket on total, on time, late 30 days, 60 days and whatnot. Where the money is coming from, the distribution by due date. So today is this line, these are on time, 30 days late and so forth by salesperson totals and using color with the same color legend, by document, by customer and all the details. And again, highly interactive. If I want to see only old invoices, I can select all the past due invoices in the whole dashboard will change to only focus. You know, my total is almost $900,000, where the money's coming from and so forth. So highly interactive. And you can customize this, you can build new reports industries from scratch. We are building more templates out of 100 with the advanced analytics going to be eventually covering purchasing, sales, order, inventory payables and financials and probably even beyond. But right now we have sales and AR aging already available out of the box with a very nice integration. I hope you have found informative the quick demo. Let me switch back to my PowerPoint to cover some other important topics. This is how the system works. This will be your sage 100. Advanced analytics only can work with one sage or company. If you have more than one. You can have more than one advanced analytics site. Or you can use enterprise analytics, our big brother product that can bring any data from any data source, multi company, bring data from POS systems, Google Analytics, you name it. You know enterprise can bring all of your data together. Anyhow. For advanced analytics we install a small data extractor in your Sage 100 network. It pulls the data from Sage 100, put it in the cloud. We use all of this natural language, artificial intelligence, data warehousing behind the scenes. And at the end of the day what you decision makers and users will get out of data self is business intelligence. Easy for decision makers to access their data and easier for IT consultants to be able to support decision makers with information anytime, anywhere. It is a very reliable and very scalable solution. Behind the scenes. We're using data warehousing, SQL Server, data warehousing in tools like Tableau and Power BI to do the magic. But for you, you don't have to worry about the back end. You just have to worry about installing the system and getting users to take advantage of it. The retail pricing of Data self is 299 per month. The current system, as I mentioned, covers AR sales and AR aging and it includes 10 named user licenses. That's the retail price. Now because of the unique times that we're going through, we decided to expand a promotion through June 30th when we hope and we believe that this whole major situation is going to be under control and hopefully all of us will will be able to go back to our regular life and regular work. So through the end of June, this price will be covering 40 users. We have been hearing and already working with some clients that are having major issues having people working from home, they don't know how to access their systems. Decision makers are having a hard time seeing, you know, what's going on with the business where they should be focusing their time on. It is being critical crazy. For many businesses a lot of challenges and if getting decision makers information to their databases to Sage101 not can be critical in these unique times, we hope that this promotion will make it easier for them decision makers to use natural language to get better visualizations out of their data and make it easier for the people. The IT people, consultants that right now are crazy trying to support the transition to workforce part of it at least working from home and hopefully we are making easier. So this is again through June 30th. After June 30th, people can just drop the additional users, no question asked, no additional cost or just license the users that are needed to move forward. We hope it helps. And by the way, we have limited availability of this promotion so the first companies that take advantage of it, once we run out of our inventory of, you know, sitting on our inventory, you know, possibilities will stop offering the promotion. So if this can help your company or if you know someone that can be benefiting from it, please contact us as soon as possible so we can assess, decide and perhaps move forward and take care of your needs. Already I'm going to open a Q and A session. We only have a few minutes. If you have questions, please use the Zoom panel to ask questions. Let me open the Zoom panel. We do have a question here from. Let me not opening. All right. Question from John how much training does it Take to Learn Data Self so John, natural language usually requires no training because people know how to search on the Internet kind of similar even though like a 10 minute tour about the extra things usually is helpful. The report editor, the report and dashboard editor that I showed I learned it with no formal training. I like to be self taught. I like to watch videos so you can learn without training. But on average we budget six hours of training to provide users with a solid start. That usually takes care of about 80% of the customer reporting needs. You can do a lot with six hours of training. This platform is really powerful. There's a lot of things you can do and you know I've been doing this for over eight years and always I'm learning new techniques. So it's very powerful and you can do a lot with it. All right, hope I answered the question. Let me see more questions. One more question I'm going to address here from oh question from Bob. Any quirks or issues with integration between integration method between Data self and the Sage 100 server? Bob, thanks for your question. We've been working with Sage 100 for 15 years. It was the first ERP system that we plugged to and we integrate with both the providex version as well as the SQL version. So overall no our platform has been designed to work with sage 100. If the sage 100 has add ons. Add ons sometimes a change the environment, sometimes the ODBCs searching for providers can cause some issues. But we have lots of schedules on the clients and the extraction data from 100 is usually once we set it up we schedule the auto refresh. It just works. So overall it works. By the way, a follow up question from Bob here. Do you also integrate with other ERPs? Let me actually switch to very quickly to the website. That's our website. If you go to dataself.com you'll see here what ERP and CRM systems will support out of the box. If you want to learn more about Sage or any product, you click on the product. In this case, let's say I go to Sage 100 and then we have Advanced analytics which is a new product and Enterprise analytics which is more expensive. I encourage you to look at first Advanced Analytics. This page has more information. There's some videos, some explanations how the system works, pricing, more details about pricing and then if you want to order feel free to contact your reseller or even to contact us. You can click the Try it now which is actually going to give our your contact information to us. We'll contact you, discuss your needs and perhaps hopefully moving forward. We're running out of time. Again, I really appreciate making time to learn in these unique times. Hopefully we're going to get over this whole crisis in the near future. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us. Thank you. And by the way, it's being recorded and we will make the recording available later today or tomorrow. Thanks for joining us and have a great day and stay safe, stay calm and just follow the procedures and we'll be fine. Thank you.