Analytics and BI for Microsoft NAV 140327

Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. This is Johnny Girardi, CEO and founder of Data Self. Hope you're having a great Thursday. We're going to have an informative and hopefully exciting 30 minute section today. Before we get started, let me give a brief overview of why I founded this company back in 2005. I'm an electrical engineer. As my background and in my early career I was doing heavy duty programming for many years. So very technical computer stuff. Eventually I fell in love with the business area. I had my MBA and I became a business person. And for me, reporting and data analysis was never really an issue because hey, I was comfortable with programming complicated computer tools, databases and so forth. But most of my business peers, they would have difficulties. They would have to call someone else to get their reports. Sometimes me, sometimes other consultants. And it was not efficient. Even myself. When I needed some information, it would take me hours to get to it. So I joined the business intelligence industry back in the year 2000. In 2005 I decided to start Dataself and the main vision was and still is today is mid sized companies. They need better reporting, they need better data analysis, business people need that. But usually the very good solutions out there for reporting purposes comes from the upper market and they cost too much money for mid sized companies and often it's too complicated to get them going. So my vision was, hey, I think I can make these top notch technologies, I have to find the right ones and bring them to the mid market, make it simpler and make it better. So best of the breed technology, find them something that fits the mid market, make it simpler, make it better. So this is the vision from the beginning. We came a long way and I'm very excited to show you today the latest and greatest. So let's go for it. First of all, just to let you know that all lines are muted and if you have questions, just feel free to Type in the GoToMeeting panel and we will address them at the end of the session. So we're going to cover the following topics today. First of all, why data self analytics and then we're going to show the product and open a Q and A session. So why people come to us, you know, people who have dynamics, nav or navision. These are the main, the main areas that they're looking for improvement. Sales analysis, supply chain and manufacturing, financials as well. So let's take a look at each one of them and the hot buttons on the sales side, the most popular need is just to have a better understanding of your Sales and profitability initiatives to whom you're selling, is it growing or declining by customer product territory, Is it profitable? What salespeople are doing a better job when how is it growing? So forth a lot of questions on the sales side and analytics can answer those questions very quickly. If you have an ordering and invoicing process that is more elaborate, it takes time to invoice things and you're wondering why things are getting delayed. So analytics can help you pinpoint inefficiencies so you can address it more quickly. If you have sales commission that is complicated, maybe time consuming, you know, at the end of the month or the period you spend hours, days and sometimes weeks crunching sales commission reports. Typically analytics can automate the process and often 100% of the process completely. Anytime you can check where things things are. From a commission standpoint. If you get into large long term contracts with let's say big boxes, retailers like Walmart and Target, you better know what the right pricing is to be a win win for you and for them. So analyzing price strategy can be something complicated and time consuming and analytics can help you with that as well. Forecasting sales. You know, sometimes people do forecasting based on prior sales or a combination of prior sales with information coming from your salespeople or your clients or you name it. So being able to combine data from different places, not only from the vision, can be critical and analytics can help you with that. And in the same topic, you know, data integration, sometimes sales information comes from a POS system. Again, salespeople, spreadsheets, the ability to bring data together along with NAVISION can be critical for sales analysis and analytics can help you with that. On the supply chain, the most basic need is just a better understanding of your inventory management, where the items are, how long they've been sitting on the shelves, inventory turnover, moving among data warehouses, among warehouses, things of that nature. If you have sophisticated, let's say inbound and or outbound routing logistics, maybe you're bringing products from overseas. It's taking a month to get here and you're going to be sure you're going to have understand where things are and if they're on schedule. If you're collaborating data with your supply chain, maybe your vendors, shipping companies and clients are giving you information about their status so you can feed into your decision making process. And analytics can help you with that too. If your purchasing process are sophisticated and you need to pinpoint inefficiencies, we help with that too. Forecasting, maybe you need to forecast, have a better understanding if you're going to be able to ship your orders, delivering your services on a timely fashion, or being proactively working, if you're not going to be able to deliver those. So combining data is critical for decision making. Process and analytics can help you with that. So forecast data integration usually kind of, you know, are combined on the financial side. Most of the time people are happy with the financials coming from the vision, but sometimes they're not. Well when they should look for us. If your financials is still a fairly labor intensive, intensive process, you may spend again hours, days or weeks to close your financials on an ongoing basis. Talk with us, we may be able to automate sometimes 100% of the process. If you have multi company frameworks and you're trying to combine them, it may be complicated, different JL structures, talk with us, we may have a great solution for that. And finally, typically financials is pretty static reports that you cannot slice and dice them on the fly. You cannot put on mobile devices. If you need to slice and dice your financial information, looking at ratios and so forth, put on a mobile device, on an iPad, on a smartphone so the executives can check anytime, anywhere, check with us, we can have a good solution for that. So those are the main needs that people come to us. Now let me talk a little bit about the technology concept behind data self analytics. So this is a Gartner magic quadrant for BI and analytics platforms. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies making assessment of technology vendors in the upper market. I'll talk why upper market in a minute. But anyway, the more the company or provider is to the right, the better it is for Fortune 2000. So not so critical for us in the mid market. However, the higher they are in this Y axis, the better they are executing their vision and their products are better. So these two companies highlighted right now are the best of the breed in their own segments. Tableau is considered the best of breed technology when it comes to visualization, ease of use and dashboarding for, you know, the market, up market. And Microsoft provides the best BI infrastructure for analytics and bi. Well, what about these top market vendors? And what about us? What about you? Well, it goes back to my initial vision when I founded the company. I want, you know, to find in the upper market tools that would fit the mid market from a pricing and framework standpoint. I want to make it better, I want to make it simpler and I want to make it better. So what we do is we take right now the top two vendors from the upper market Tableau as the data visualization engine and Microsoft BI as infrastructure. We put them in a box, we add our own technology to simplify them, removing programming from the equation and we add more than 2000 reports and KPIs to make them better. So that's what we do. A different way to spin it again is the best of the breed technology. Right now there is nothing better on visualization techniques and dashboarding. There is nothing better from a BI infrastructure. So we are using top notch components. Then we add our own technology which eliminates lots of programming involved in the deployment of the top notch providers. So we simplify it and then we add thousands of reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box so we make the solution better. Can you do it from scratch all yourself? Absolutely. But what we do is we deliver the pretty much easiest to use technology. You know, it's the top notch simplified by removing the programming. It takes hours or days to deploy most of the time instead of months or years if you're going to be building from scratch so much faster. Our approach, we have expertise. Our core team has been working with the BI for mid sized companies for over 14 years. So we know the source system we saw in onavision, we know the BI tools, we know how to connect them and to make it valuable for mid sized companies. So you get expertise in making this happening and at the end of the day it's going to cost you a fraction of if you try to do it yourself or coming from other competitors, usually really a fraction. So we deliver ease of use, speed to deploy expertise and low cost. That's our main differentiator. And because we use the top notch technology, we call that our solutions like a Ferrari among the mid market BI vendors. And now we're going to go to a test drive. I'm going to break this session into three buckets. I'm going to show secure access, then show some sample KPIs out of the 2000 reports and KPIs and then we're going to do some ad hoc analysis. So have a seat in the passenger seat, buckle up, helmets on and let's go for it. So most of the time people will access the dashboards through a web portal, using a desktop, web or mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. When they log into this portal which is highly secured, they would only be able to see their own dashboards. So if I'm a salesperson, I would see the salespeople dashboard. If I'm a person from the finance, I would see the finance team Dashboard. Now, when I go through this list of dashboards, let's say I pick one of them like this one, top customer by sales. Then security can render information based on the user's credentials. So if I'm the rep for California, these would be the top customers by sales in California, while the rep in Florida opens the same dashboard and views top customers in Florida, while the BigBoss opens the same view and views the top customers across all territories. So security can be granular in that sense and automatically render different information from the same dashboard. It's pretty cool. Now, dashboards, when we create them, we try to make them insightful. Simple but insightful. Because decision makers, they need time to do their job not realizing what's going on. So we try to expedite the process. This is an example of a top performer dashboards and we have lots of reports showing top performers. So in this case here we have the top customers. Here on the left, each top customer has a bar. And the size of the bar relates to the sales amount. So bigger bar, bigger, bigger sales. The color of the bars represent gross profit from not so profitable to very profitable. So I could easily tell in this case that one of my top customers is not so profitable. Is something that we can do to make it more profitable. Well, we need to know to do that job proactively, that job. We also see profitability with these black dots. So this dashboard, simple information, insightful. Once I know what the information is here, next time it's going to take me seconds to realize which ones need more of my attention. So very insightful. Dashboard. Another type of dashboard that sometimes is even more important is looking at the tip of the growth curve of your major key performance indicators. Let me give an example. This one shows the tip of the sales growth curve since last year to date. In a nutshell, which clients are growing the most in sales since last year to date? And bigger bars means bigger increase as well as the top decline. Maybe my top growth. They're happy clients. My salespeople are working closely. I don't need to worry about them. But how about the ones declining the most? Is there something wrong? And if so, you better fix quickly. So looking at the tip of the growth curve of your major KPIs from a sales gross profit, expenses, cost on hand, over time, you name it, it's critical. Often it's critical and you better pay attention to those things. And we have many reports showing things like this. Very insightful. To help you focus again your time in fixing things, improving things, not figuring what's not so good? Let me show some other example of out of the box reports here. I'm going to show another one that is very intriguing. It's called exception reporting. Exception reporting is useful to look at things that are no longer happening. This is a good example. If you have recurring customers, which one of your recurring customers are no longer buying, maybe it's okay, maybe seasonal, maybe it's not okay. Knowing who they are, it's critical. And this shows a KPI like that. And you can be looking at again at inventory items that are no longer moving and things of that nature. We also have a way, let's say C level executives like the CEO, he want to have on his iPhone or his iPad something that just tells him, do I need to work today or should I go play golf? So this is an example of a CEO snapshot. The big boss just opens his smartphone early in the morning. He checks this and he sees an area that is red. Inventory cost on hand is above my target. I have to call the inventory guy to check what's going on. The other yellow areas is kind of not so good. But I look at here, well, it's minor. That's okay. Today sales is kind of low, but gross profit is positive. Well, I just remember that in our sales we are focusing on bigger sales or more profitable sales. So at the end of the day I really want to be profitable. So even if sales is not so profitable, not so big. But sales profit is up. I'm happy. So today I'm going to play golf. I wish the CEOs would have much time to take off. But anyway, the point is we can give also snapshots, very simple things that let's say in five seconds a person looks at this, have an insight and they go off to do their next critical tasks. And these snapshots can have different perspective. Some people like it simpler, red, yellow and green. Some people want to see bars. We see what the sales goals, how far I am, show me colors. Anyway, the point is we're helping people, focusing on getting insights and go about their lives, not spending so much time figuring out how things are going. So let's go back to my example here on my dashboard and show how I can change things on the fly. And that's where we really shine. Maybe I'm on a call, I. I'm in a meeting and I want to be able to take a report and slice and dice it extensively. So suppose I'm at the VP of sales. I open the sales by geography dashboard. I see States, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. And then the bubbles are sliced by colors which represent the sales by type of deal size. And I can change this by changing the time. Is this growing or declining over the years? I can, I can use this and see that I'm growing and the blue slides are getting bigger. Tap on my back, I'm doing a great job. Now if I'm meeting with the west coast team, I can using my fingers on the iPad, let's say select the west coast and right there I get salespeople, sales in the west coast. Salespeople, bigger bar, bigger sales, profitability. Same thing as before, what products I've been shipping. Maybe I just want to see what Sam is selling. I click on Sam and there you go. My dashboard changes to show sales by Sam in what products he's been shipping. Beautiful, Easy. Anyone pretty much can do these changes on the fly using their mobile devices, let's say in a meeting with a smartphone. Now, if I am a power user that has spent a few more time to learn, I can extensively change the dashboard on, on the fly, anytime, anywhere. So let me show you that how a power user can change this extensively. Power users have the edit button. They click the edit button and they go into the edit mode. Now, before I show you how it works, let me tell the idea behind this edit mode approach. The engine behind this technology was designed by Stanford University professors who studied how business people look at business data and have insights from it. And as you may know, it's a journey, it's a process. When they start the process, they have an idea of what they want to look at. But until they see something, they don't know exactly. And that's why when business person needs to talk with a consultant to build a report, it takes sometimes many interactions. He asks the question, the consultant brings an answer, oh, cool. But can you change the sorting? Can you summarize a different way? The guy goes, comes back and hey, can you put a chart, can you put a curve, change the color? Sometimes it takes hours, days or weeks to finish the report. It is what it is. It's a journey. It takes interaction. So these Stanford University professors, they created a software engine designed for business people that let them walk through the journey with little or no assistance from consultants, experts. And that's what I'm going to show right now, how this engine works. So when I got into the edit mode, I have the quadrants of my dashboard, each segment of it, and I want to change this one here. Suppose I want to see numbers by the penny I come to the show me button and I can choose different graphical representations. I'm going to choose just a grid right there. I see sales by the penny. Awesome. Easy. What if I want to break this down by product line? I can come to this data panel and I can see familiar business names and I just have to drag and drop into my report. Using my fingers on my tablet, I drag the product line. So buy salesperson by product line. Sales versus profit. Easy. Beautiful. Maybe when I break down my customer is the same idea. You just drag and drop. You find the parameter that you want. You drag into rows or columns, the beginning between. At the end you just drag and drop and you get it. There it is. By salesperson, by customer, by product line. Maybe you want to break down by year, by quarter, by month, by day, fiscal period, rolling periods. You just pretty much drag and drop and then you add the parameters to your report. Very straightforward. And it takes a few clicks to get information into a PDF or maybe into Excel. I can click here. I want to view the data, I want to see all underlying data with all the records. I want to download this information into an Excel file so I can do some manipulation or share with someone else that doesn't have this tool. Easy, quick, straightforward. So that's our Ferrari, our presentation. I hope you have enjoyed the drive. Let's go back to our PowerPoint and resume the presentation. And now we're open for questions and answers. So if you have questions, please use the GoToMeeting chat box. And I'm going to check right now if we have some questions here. So. Yep, we have questions. The first question is from Margaret. Thank you, Margaret. Can your application bring data from my point of sale system? POS system? Margaret, thanks for your question. Yes, let me actually show you. Let me go to my website to answer this question, which I think is going to be helpful. If you go to the website dataself.com by the way, you can come to Dynamics webpage. And then tomorrow we're going to have on this link here a recording of this webinar so you can watch it again or share with other people. And you also can find several other helpful pieces of information such as a sample of the out of the box reports brochure and you can also see the software architecture, which is what I want to use for your question, Margaret. So here we show how our technology works behind the scenes. And yes, we can bring data from your point of sale system if you have a CRM system, other data sources, pretty much we bring data automatically. On schedule from Navision into an ultralight data warehouse out of the box. We have many things already pre mapped but we also can bring from other data sources as a POS system, CRM, Excel and so forth. We combine the data in this ultralight data warehouse using our ETL technology fairly code free and then we use this analytic in memory analytics platform that makes information much easier which can be in the cloud or on premises. We have both deployments and at the end of the day your business people will be able to view this information using web devices, desktop and mobile. So the whole thing here is taken care of by IT people once they set up the system. Now business people will be able to slice reports on the fly. On average more than 70% of the customer reporting needs of business users. They can tackle it by themselves using our technology. So you're leveraging this technology, you're empowering your business people to do the job by themselves. I think I kind of diverted a little bit to the question. But anyway the answer is yes, we can bring data from our point of sale into data self analytics. Margaret, thank you very much for your question. Let's go back to more questions. So another question here from Kathy. Thank you. Kathy, how do you compare your technology versus Jet Enterprise? Cathy, every time we do presentations for Dynamics, almost every time we get this question. So actually I already have an answer for you. Thank you for the question by the way. Let me go back here to this slide here. So Jet Reports and Jet Enterprise, it's an awesome technology, very popular in the Dynamics world. But we consider them like a Bimmer, a Mercedes or a Porsche. Awesome technology, awesome cars, great pricing, but we're like a Ferrari. I mean by the way, we do not cost a Ferrari by far a fraction. But we're like a Ferrari. We're faster, we're flashier, we're more sophisticated. We're really designed for business people in Jet solutions. Actually if you look at this slide where we have the top vendors out there, from EBI standpoint, Jet doesn't even show here. They're probably like you know, here below, somewhere in the corner, lower left corner. So in the upper market they are not considered as a vendor. What we do is hey, we actually take right now the best of the breed technology. There is no one better out there. We make it simpler, we make it better for mid sized companies. So we consider ourselves a better solution because we use better components in the engine. We make it better, we make it simpler for mid sized companies. So we're like a Ferrari does not cost a Ferrari again, our pricing actually is more expensive than jet. Yes it is but it's not a lot more. Usually the value we bring by far outweighs the additional cost that people have to invest in us. I think we have more questions but we're running out of time so we'll address additional questions on a one on one basis. I really appreciate for your time with us today. I hope you found it informative. Feel free to reach me at any time. You can find here my cell phone, my email and my Twitter account. If you can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. We're always releasing great news and I hope to hear from you in the near future for any question. If you want to be educated, if you want to learn about us, we're here to help. I hope you have a great Thursday. Have a great day and looking forward to talking with you in the near future. Thank you.