Analytics and BI for Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains)

Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. This is Johnny Girardi, founder and CEO of DataSelf. Thanks for joining our session analytics, NBI for Microsoft Dynamics GP or gray planes. We're going to have an informative session today, 30 minutes session. Before I jump into it, I'd like to talk a lot about a little bit about why I founded the business back in 2005 and what the vision of the company is. So I'm actually an electrical engineer and in my early career I spent several years programming heavy duty programming stuff and eventually I fell in love with the business area. I had my MBA and became a business person. And for me reporting data analysis was never an issue. I was comfortable with reporting tools, databases, you name it, I'm a programmer. But I quickly realized that my business friends, they had a hard time, they would have to ask a consultant, they have to ask me to help them with reporting. So I joined the industry, the business intelligence industry, 14 years ago and in 2005 I decided to open data self. The vision was I was working with mid sized companies and I was seeing that mid sized companies, they need better reporting, they need something easy, something fast for business people. But usually the solutions that are really good are for the Fortune 2000 companies, very expensive solutions and very expensive to set it up. So mid sized companies just couldn't afford it, couldn't take advantage of it. So when I started it itself my vision was, hey, I want to go back, I want to go in the market, in the upper market, find top notch technology, I want to simplify and I want to amplify it for mid sized companies. So when I find something out there that is great, that works well budget wise and for easy of use for IT and business people. I want to make it simpler, I want to make it better and affordable for mid sized companies. So that was when I started the business back in 2005. It's been nine years, we came a long way and what you're going to see today is the latest and greatest. And I think you're going to have an informative and exciting session. So let's go for it. Before anything else, just to let you know, the all phone slides are muted and if you have questions please type them in in the gotomeeting chatting box. And then at the end of the QA session we're going to open and answer the questions. Alrighty. So I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about why analytics and why us. I'm going to spend some time showing the product and then we're going to do a questions and answers session at the end. So most of the time when people come to us or look for analytics out of gray plains is because they're trying to get better sales or they're getting better information out of supply or manufacturing financial modules, those are the most popular ones. So let's talk a little bit about each one of them. On the sales side, the most popular need that want to improve is is just to have a better understanding of their sales and profitability looking sales by customer, by salespeople, by product, by region, profitability, quantity shift, you name it. Analytics has a lot of functionality to enhance that. Some people, they have a more elaborate ordering and invoice system that it may take a while to invoice things and things can fall through the cracks. So analyzing where the issues are is critical to to be able on top of them. And analytics can definitely help significantly with that part of the process. Some people, they have elaborate sales commission structures and it's time consuming at the end of the period they have to spend hours and hours in an error prone process, copy and pasting to come up with a commission. Usually with analytics you can completely automate the process becomes anytime, anywhere you can see commissions and how you're going toward your goals without having to call anyone else. Pricing strategy if you're selling to big boxes or into large contracts that are multi month, multi year, you better have the right pricing strategy. So analyzing pricing components, it's critical and we have many ways to help you with that kind of analysis. Forecasting if you try to forecast your sales, looking at your past sales, maybe you have information coming from Excel spreadsheets, from your salespeople or from your clients, some kind of data and you want to combine with a gp. So analytics provides a platform to do that so we can see the information and make better forecasting. So data integration is a topic that people frequently ask us, hey, I need to combine with CRM information or data coming from clients and so forth. And definitely analytics is a great platform for reporting from different data sources. On the supply chain, one of the most critical needs is just plain inventory management. Where the items are, how long it's taken to ship things, what is inventory turnover, how long things have been sitting on shelves, cost of goods sold and so forth. Cost on hand. If you have inbound and outbound shipping may be coming from overseas and you have challenges, so analyzing that can be critical. We can also help if you collaborate with your vendors, shipping companies and customers and you got data from them and you need to analyze everything in a single place without being copy and pasting analytics may help. If your purchasing process is elaborate and you need to make it more efficient, be on top of it. Analytics can help as well. Forecasting, you know you have to forecast your quantity on hand, are going to be able to ship on time, looking inbound, outbound, maybe producing things. So analytics can also help with forecasting. And again, data integration is usually a hot topic in all areas. Bringing data from, you know, Excel, access, SQL database and other data sources and this platform provides an outstanding framework for that. The final thing is on the financial side. Most people are fairly happy with the financials coming from gp. However, if it became a labor intensive process, spending hours, sometimes days or even weeks to close your financials, talk with us, we may able to fix your problem. If you have multi company frameworks you need to consolidate, the financials can be a hot topic, it can be complicated and analytics like ours can provide big value in plain vanilla. If your decision makers, they want to have the ability to slice and dice their financial information on the fly, anytime, anywhere with mobile devices, talk with us, we may be able to help. So this slide is about Gartner. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies assessing technology in the upper market. In every year in February they come up with an assessment of they call the magic quadrant for BI and analytic vendors. So this is the latest from February 2014. The more to the right you are on this quadrant, the better it is for Fortune 2000. So not so critical for mid sized companies. However, the higher you are in the Y axis the better because the better the vendors providing technology and services and framework. And these two that I highlighted are right now Tableau is considered the king of the hill when it comes to dashboarding, data visualization techniques and user friendliness. And Microsoft BI is considered the the leader when it comes to BI infrastructure. What about them? What about us? Well, it goes back to my vision of the company as a small company that we are. We cannot be the best of the breed all over the place. So I went in the upper market and I chose actually years ago Tableau and Microsoft to be part of my platform. Today what we have in datasoft analytics is Tableau is Microsoft BI infrastructure. So the top leaders in each category, then we add our own technology which eliminates programming from the equation. So we simplify those two other vendors and then we add more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So we amplify the value so that's what we do in another way to say again, top notch platform from the upper market. There's pretty much nothing better out there. Easier to use, very impressive, very rock solid platform. But then we make it simpler and we use our etl, which stands for extraction, transformation and loading. It's a technology that simplifies business intelligence overall. And then we add our comprehensive set of out of box reports. Can you do this? Can you build your own solution like us? Absolutely. However, if you get from us, you're going to get four major benefits. First of all, again we're using the easiest to use industry standard platform, SQL Server BI tableau. And then we simplify with dtl. It's easy for business people anytime, anywhere. They'll be able to slice and dice the reports. Easy for it. It will be able to easily maintain this framework and find support through us or our partners. So easy for both sides. Fast to deploy. Usually competition or building from scratch is going to take months or years. For us it takes hours or days on average. So much faster to get up and running. Then we have expertise. Our core team has been working with mid sized companies and with top notch BI technology for over 14 years. So we know GP, we know BI, how to connect them and how to make them work for companies like yourselves. And then finally, low cost. If you try to get a similar solution from the market, it's going to take you months and years and cost you six figures. Our cost is a fraction of that. So that's our value. Ease of use, fast deploy, expertise and low cost. Because we use best of breed technology, we call our solution like a Ferrari among the mid market BI vendors. So let's go for a test drive. I'm going to bring my presentation in three components. Secure access, sample KPIs out of the 2000 and then dashboard building or ad hoc analysis. So have a seat at the passenger seat, buckle up, put your helmet and let's have some fun with my Ferrari here. All right, so now I'm switching to this web portal. Most business users will access data self analytics through a web portal using a desktop, web or mobile device. This is a highly secure framework. It can be behind your firewall or it can be in the cloud. Regardless of a highly secured framework, when you log in you only be able to see or access your own dashboards. So if you are a salesperson, you'll be seeing the sales team dashboard. If you're a person from the finance team, you're going to see the finance team dashboard. So security is granted Based on your user credentials. Now, when I open one of these dashboards, I'm going to open the top customer by sales dashboard. Then I see we can set up security so it shows your own information. So if I'm the rep from California, I'll be looking the top customers in California. The rep in Florida opens the same dashboard and only views top customers. In Florida, the big boss opens the same dashboard. It views the top customer across all territories. So security can be granular to that level. Same dashboards serving different people. So that's how security works. Now let's show some of the out of the box reports. And when we're building reports and dashboards, we try to make them simple and insightful. Like this one here. This is an example of a top performer dashboard and we have lots of them out of the box. In this example, we have the top customer by sales this year. So we have the customers here. Each customer has a bar, bigger bar, bigger sales. On this X axis you have the color of the bar represented by this gross profit theme. So from not so profitable to very profitable so quickly I can tell that one of my top customers is fairly unprofitable. Maybe that's not good. Maybe you have to work more closely with this client to increase profitability. So very insightful. We also have these black dots that represent profitability using this other axis. Anyway, a simple dashboard that once you get a little understanding of it, it becomes very easy, very quick to see what's important out of this trend so you can focus your resources where it matters the most. Let me show some other more intriguing dashboards. Here we have tons of top performers, top customers, salespeople by sales, gross profit, purchasing, you name it. This kind of dashboard, it looks at the tip of the growth curve of your main key performance indicators. So there's a way to do that in this particular one is looking at the tip of the sales growth curve, meaning top growth and top decline. In this case, on a year to date basis, these customers are growing the most since last year to date. Most likely happy customers, salespeople working closely with them. Maybe I don't have to worry about those guys, but how about these customers? If you have recurring customers, these would be the ones declining the most in sales since last year to date. Maybe something is wrong. Maybe they're not happy. Maybe competition is locking the door. Knowing who they are is the first step towards addressing issues, if there are any. So looking at the tip of the growth curve for your KPIs, maybe you know, expenses, quantity on hand, you name it is critical. And this technology provides you insightful ways like this to keep track of those things. Let's look at some other examples here. I'm going to show one more Exception reporting. Exception reporting is another important way to look at the critical trends. Exception reporting is used to show things that are no longer happening. In this example, we are looking again, if I have recurring customers, why these customers are no longer buying. They are buying before, but not now. And we can easily change these time buckets here. But the point is why, why they're no longer buying. Maybe it's okay. Maybe something is wrong and you better know who they are, check them out and be sure to fix if anything is wrong and hopefully reverse the trend. I'm going to show one more and then we're going to do some ad hoc analysis here. So let's take a look at sales by geography. There we go. So we have here a map and we have bubbles, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. The bubbles are sliced by the size of the deals, large, medium and small invoices. And I can use this slicer here to see if I'm growing or declining over time. This could be quarter month, fiscal period, you name it. And I can see if the bubbles are increasing. Are the blue slices increasing? Because I want to sell more large deals, let's say kind of very insightful. We have here on the left, salespeople with bars. Bigger sales, bigger bars. And again the profitability using the color theme. And then we have how much of the top products were shipped based on this dashboard. Now if I'm the VP of sales and I'm meeting with the west coast team using my iPad, I only want to see west coast information. Well, I could use my fingers on the iPad and select those three states. There it is. The dashboard shows now only salespeople selling to those three states in what's being shipped out of the five top products. Very cool, very easy. Maybe I only want to see for Sam. I click on Sam and I further change the dashboard. Now it's only showing sales for Sam and what products he's been shipping. Now making these changes is very straightforward and business people with very little time, sometimes about an hour and sometimes even no training whatsoever, they'll be able to do this kind of filtering, slicing and dicing on the fly on web and mobile devices by themselves. Very impressive. But some business people or some users, they are more sophisticated. They want to extensively change things on the fly. For those, the power users, they will have the edit button. So the edit button is only for power users. But let me explain how cool this is. First of all, the engine behind this user interface was designed by Stanford University professors. These professors studied how business people look at business data and have insights from it. And it's a journey, it's a process. They have an idea of where they want to go, but until they walk through the journey, they don't know exactly the final outcome. And that's why when they're asking someone else to build a report, it takes forever. The person tells, hey, show me this. The consultant goes and comes back. And the business person, well, can you change the filter? Can you summarize differently? Can you add a chart? Can you change the color? It takes many interactions. Sometimes it takes hours and days and weeks to get ready. It's a journey. It is what it is. It takes interaction. So these Stanford professors, universities, they came up with a software engine that helps decision makers walk through this process with no help from it. In our experience, more than 70% of the customer reporting needs of business users, they can do it or someone close to them, they can do it if they want to. If they want to learn how to do it. That's what I'm going to show right now. How easy and how cool it is to change things. I just landed on my edit mode of my dashboard and I have a tab for each segment of the dashboard. Now, suppose I'm an accountant and I like to see numbers by the penny. Well, I click the show me button here and here I have the options of what kind of data representation I can plot for this data. Well, I just want to see a grid with numbers. I'm going to click this one. There it is. I'm looking. Sales by the penny. Awesome. I love that. I'm an accountant. I don't want to, you know, if I were, I would love that. Okay, but what if I want to break this down by let's say, product line? Well, I just come to the data panel, I find the reporting component that I want and I just drag and drop. Let's say product line. This is a sample database. So I'm going to drag and drop product line into my rows. For instance, use my fingers very easily. Just drag and drop. There it is. By salesperson, by product line, Sales and gross profit. Very quick, very quick and very easy. How about on a breakdown by customer, same idea. Find the parameter that you want. Just drag, maybe before the salesperson, between the two or after. Just drag and drop where you want. Buy salesperson by customer, by product line, sales and gross profit. Maybe you want to see years? I can drag the year, let's say, to my columns. For instance, right there. I have by year amount, sales and gross profit. Very fast, very intuitive. A business person can do it. Let me just take the year back here, just to make something a little simpler. What if I have one of these measures and I actually want to download underlying data? Let's say I want to have this here, and I'm going to get the records into an Excel file. It's easy. I can click this view data. I'm going to get all the underlying data with all the columns, and I can click download into Excel. And then if you want to do whatever in Excel, that's the data. Invoice number, ship to information, item number, everything right here. Very easy. Very, very quickly. So that's our Ferrari. I hope you have enjoyed the spin. Now we're gonna go back to our PowerPoint and resume the presentation. And let's open questions and answer. So if you have questions, please type in your questions in the gotomeeting chatting box. And I'm gonna be addressing a few questions right now. So let me open my box here and we have questions. First question is from Susan. Thank you, Susan. How do you compare against Jet Reports and Jet Enterprise? Susan, that's a good question. We have this question quite a lot, actually. Let me answer this way. Let me go back to this slide here. So, first of all, Jet Reports and Jet Enterprise, both of them awesome solutions. They have been in the dynamics world for a long time. Great pricing, really affordable. We call them like a Bimmer, a Mercedes, a Porsche. Awesome for a lot of clients. But when comparing to us, we're like a Ferrari. Why we're like a Ferrari? Well, it goes back to my initial vision of best of the breed, simplified and amplified. If you look at what Garner has done, Jet is not even here in the squadron. They kind of far less sophisticated and less refined. They're great, but they're not as refined and as sophisticated as these other guys. And we're just using the top two. So we are really like a Ferrari. So our solution is faster, is easier to use, overall uses the latest and greatest platform, and it costs more. It does not cost a Ferrari, but it costs more than Jet Reports and Enterprise. But there's a value in it. Usually when we show to business people and they look at the value they get from this versus Jet Reports, if the company is really trying to get the best anytime, anywhere, we provide an extra value that pays off quickly. Most of the time, the return on Investment data self analytics is measuring weeks, sometimes in days. So cost sometimes is not an issue, it's how much value you can get out of it. But again, Jeffrey Ports is awesome as well. Let me go back here. Susan, thank you for the question. Other questions here. Let's see. Alex, Alex is asking. This looks great. Thank you. Alex, can you give me an idea of pricing for 15 users in time to deploy? I love those questions. So price wise we have a pricing model. You can buy the solution or you can subscribe on a yearly basis or on a monthly basis. So the price can change significantly depending on what the pricing model is. But just to give you some numbers so you don't walk empty handed most of the time what we do is subscribe on a yearly basis and if you go with the five user system, which is an entry level, which I know from the top of my mind and we have several different additions depending on your needs, how many users you want, how many data sources you want. So there are many components that go into pricing but if you were to start with the basic of five users, then with the year subscription it's going to cost you into the less than $10,000 per year for your subscription and then plus services and you get it going. And again depending on what your needs are, it can go less or it can go more, but that's pretty much ballpark figure. So Alex, we'll circle back after the webinar with you to talk in more details to see what your needs are and give you specific pricing estimate. As far as you know, time to deploy, as I mentioned before, usually takes hours or days spread out in a few weeks. So by the time we wrap up with the contract we get access to your server, we install, you test, we train. It takes weeks worth of time, but the actual effort is usually hours or days. Well, we are pretty much now getting out of time. It's already 10:30 here so we're going to have a few more questions but we're going to wrap like later for each one of you. Before I go, just to give you a quick review of what's coming up on your email. This is our website. If you go to this section here you can get more information about GP and you're going to have later a link to the website here where we're going to have a recording for this session so you'll be able to view it again or you can share with other people. We also have brochure Software architecture, sample KPIs and reporting KPIs. And that's it. Let me go to the last page. Here I have my contact information, my cell phone, my email and my Twitter account. I recommend you to follow us. My Twitter and now on LinkedIn because we're always coming up with some exciting news. I thank you for your time in our business. I wish you a happy Tuesday and looking forward to talking with you again. Thank you.