Analytics and BI for Sage 100 webinar

Good morning everyone. Happy Thursday. I hope you're doing well. This is Gianni Girardi, I'm the founder and CEO of Data Self. We're going to have a half an hour very informative session. Thanks for joining us. Before I jump into the session I just want to give a little background on on why I founded the company back in 2005 and what's the vision behind dataself? So I'm an electric engineer as my undergrad and in my early career I was a heavy duty programmer. For many years I was doing heavy duty programming. Eventually I found business to be my love. I did my mba, I became a business person and for me reporting and data analysis was not an issue. I was comfortable with reporting tools, with tables and all the complexity of reporting because hey, I'm a programmer. But it didn't take much to learn that most business people, they are not necessarily it savvy people and they usually have to rely on other people, consultants, IT to actually take care of their reporting needs. So I joined the BI industry back in the year 2000 and in 2005 I founded it a self and the vision was well mid sized companies, they need better reporting, they need a better support system, support decision system and they usually have simple tools and the really good ones from the upper market are too complicated and usually too expensive. So my vision was hey, as a technical person and as a business person, I think I can improve this business. I think I can improve BI for the mid market. What I want to do is find the upper market best of breed technologies that are easy to use, that have a pricing model that fit the mid size budget. I want to make it simpler, I want to make it better. So the vision was using top notch technology, make it simpler, make it better. That was the initial vision. We came a long way and what I'm going to show you here today is the latest and greatest and I hope you find this session informative. All right, so let's go for it. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about why analytics. I'm going to spend some good time talking, showing our product and then I'm going to open a Q and A session. So why people come to us with analytics for Sage 100 primarily these are the three main areas, sales, supply chain and financials. On the sales side, the most basic need is just have a better understanding of the sales and profitability of the organization. They want to see to whom they're selling, how profitable they are, who's growing, who's declining, what they're selling, who's selling, what territories shipped to you, name it. And analytics provides a lot of great functionality to sales and profitability analysis. Some companies, they have elaborate ordering and invoice processes and they need to have it more efficient. And analytics can help them look at where it's not so efficient to be sure to tackle those issues. Sales commission. If it's more elaborate than what Sage 100 provides, it becomes a time consuming job at the end of the month. Usually, analytics can automate a lot of the process, sometimes 100%. And you can have sales commission calculation and checking against your goals on an ongoing basis every day. Forecasting sales, looking at past history to forecast your future, or looking at what your clients are expecting to buy from you. Many ways to forecast your sales and analytics can also provide great value for those things. If you sell into large contracts, like with large companies such as Walmart and Target, large contracts, long contracts, you better know what pricing you're going to be setting to be a win win situation. So analyzing price strategy can be challenging and we provide lots of functionality to help you with pricing strategy. Finally, when it comes to sales and profitability analysis, sometimes the information you need to do that is not in your sage 100. It may be in CRM, it may be in Excel files, maybe in other places. And you have to combine that Data with your Sage 100 data to have a better understanding. And our analytics provide great value, allow you to do that. Integration. From a supply chain standpoint, inventory management is very popular. Knowing where the products are, inventory turnover in different time periods, in different seasons, lots of functionality on that perspective. If you have inbound and outbound routing logistics that are kind of sophisticated, we can also help analyze those things. If you're collaborating with your suppliers, with your shipping companies and your customers, and getting data from them and you want to combine with your Sage 100 analytics can help you with that as well. If your purchasing process are sophisticated, many steps, and you're having inefficiencies, analytics can help you pinpoint those inefficiencies. The same way for forecasting, you want to see how many items you're going to have to ship on the right time. You're going to be looking at inbound items, production of items if you're a manufacturer, and be sure you have the right quantities when you need to ship. So forecasting is also very helpful for that. By the same token, data integration, you know, if you have data coming from your vendors, from your shipping companies, and you want to make a better supply Chain forecasting. Usually data integration is critical and our solution can help you with that as well. Financials also, you know, people are usually happy with the financials. Coming from sage 100 at the end of the day is an accounting package. But sometimes, you know, it's a labor intensive process. It can take hours or days or even weeks to do the financials on an ongoing basis, on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis. Usually when we do financials, we can automate the whole process on most of it. So that's an area that we can also help. If you have multi company frameworks, financials can become challenging and our framework can also help with the multi company consolidations. Finally, people want to slice and dice their financial information, their GL information. And our solution is usually a lot easier to do that than if you use your current tools. So those are the topics that are usually comfortable for financials. All right, so let's talk a little bit about us now. This is the Gartner magic quadrant for BI and Analytics. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies making assessment of technology vendors. And every year they come up with an assessment for the bi, which is what we do, BI analytics. And they just came out with the latest, which was last month. Making a long story short, this quadrant here, the more to the right, the better it is for Fortune 2000 companies. So for mid sized companies, being more to the right is not a big, big deal. Now the higher you are on the Y axis, the better the vendor is doing, the better they are delivering their vision. So the higher you are on this axis, the Y axis the better is for midsize companies. Here what we have is two top vendors. Tableau right now is the top provider of analytics and data visualization technology in the upper market and Microsoft is the top provider of BI infrastructure. What about it? What about us? Well, what Data Self does is we took the best data visualization technology, which is Tableau. We took the best BI infrastructure which is Microsoft represented by SQL Server. We put in a box, we add our own technology to simplify it so there is less programming and we add over 2000 reports and dashboards to make it better. So what we do goes back to my initial vision of the company. I want to find the best of the breed technology in the upper market that works for mid sized companies. I want to make it better, I want to make it simpler and that's what we do. Let me just explain again because this is the value we add to the market. So again it's top notch technology. Pretty Much the top vendors from their own categories top Microsoft. We add our own technology that eliminates programming from the setup of those systems so it's simpler. We simplify those top notch providers and then we have over 14 years built a very comprehensive of out of the box solutions that has more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs. So it's an amplified technology. So that's what we do. At the end of the day what happens is you're going to have the easiest to use technology out there for business people as well as for will be fast to deploy. Usually takes hours or days to deploy our solution. And if you try to build the same thing from scratch, it's going to take you months or years. So we cut the time significantly. We are experts doing this. Our core team has been working with BI technology for the mid market, specifically Sage 100 for 14 years. We know Sage 100 for reporting, we know Microsoft technology, BI technology for Sage 100. We know Tableau technology, we know how to connect them, we know how mid sized companies need to use them. So you get a lot of expertise out of us. And finally it's low cost. If you try to build our solution from scratch it's going to cost you six figures or more. Our solution you can get very, very inexpensively. So easy to use fast deploy expertise and cost is our value added already. And because we use the best technology available from the upper market we pretty much call our solution is like the Ferrari among the mid market analytics vendors. So let's jump into the product presentation. I'm going to go for a test drive and I'm going to cover three main topics. Secure access. I'm going to show some sample KPIs out of the 2000 and then I'm going to do some ad hoc examples. So let's take this baby for a spin. I'm going to switch now to the to the web portal. Most users will access data self analytics through a web portal using a web browser or a mobile device such as a tablet or a smartphone. When they log into this portal which is very secured, they will only be able to see their own dashboards. So if I'm a salesperson I see the sales team dashboards. If I'm the person from finance, I see the finance team dashboards. Okay now when I go to these dashboards and I open one of them, let's say I'm going to open the top customer by sales dashboard, then Sucuri can be smart enough to only show my own information. So if I'm the account manager for California. These would be my top customers by sales in California. While the account manager from Florida opens the same dashboard and only views the top customers in Florida. While the big boss opens the same dashboard and only views top customers across all accounts. So security can be that granular. Now let's take a look at some of the out of the box KPIs and dashboards available. So this is one of them showing top customer by sales this year to date. Now the information here is supposed to be insightful for business people and for people who like charts. This is really insightful. Let me show how this works. So we have here customers and then we have bars for sales. Bigger bars, bigger sales. We also have profitability showing using the scholar schema. So red is not so profitable, green is really good. And just by looking at that, I could tell one of my top customers is really unprofitable. And maybe that's something really bad that I have to change something. We also have the profitability looking at these black dots using this top schema. So it's very easy to see visually sales and profitability in a single screenshot. Now we have lots of top performer dashboards showing things like on the sales side, let's say customer products, salespeople, territory shipped to by sales, gross profit, quantity shipped return, you name it. Also looking from let's say purchasing, inventory, financials, expenses, you name it. We have lots of reports, top performing reports, showing things all over the place. Let me show you another dashboard that is usually more intriguing, especially the idea behind this dashboard. Often when you're looking at your critical trends, critical metrics, whatever they are looking at, the tip of the growth curve is usually critical, meaning the top growth and top decline is important and you should pay attention to those things. This is an example that if you have recurring customers, I don't know if you are a distributor manufacturer, these customers here are the ones growing the most in sales since last year. So most likely happy customers, salespeople are working closely with them. Most likely things are going well with them. Now what about the top customers by sales decline? Is there something wrong with some of them? Maybe not. Maybe yes. If there's something wrong, you better fix the problem quickly. You better know what the problem is and fix it quickly. Because maybe when you realize that they're declining, it's too late. The competition took them away, you were doing a lousy job and they left for good. So looking at the top growth and decline for your major KPIs or key performance Indicators is critical and this platform provides you with a way to easily and quickly analyze them. Just like this dashboard here. Very insightful information. Let's see a couple more of the out of the box dashboards. This one is also a very intriguing concept. This is called exception reporting. Exception reporting is used to analyze things that are no longer happening. This is a good example. Again, if I have recurring customers, this dashboard shows the ones who are no longer buying. They were buying the last 60 days, but not in the last 30 days. Maybe you could change the buckets here. Buy in the last 90 days, but not in the last 60 days. The point is, looking at transactions that are no longer happening can be critical for all of your KPIs and this platform provides many ways for you to keep track of those metrics and be sure if something is wrong, you're paying good attention to it and you're fixing in a timely fashion. I'm going to show one more dashboard, then I'm going to start slicing and dicing them on the fly. Let's take this geography analysis, which usually especially for operations people, geography is a nice way to look at data. This dashboard has a map of the US and Canada and we have bubbles, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. And then the bubbles are sliced by these colors which represent the aggregation of invoice sizes, large invoices, medium size and small sizes. So very easy ways, how I'm doing and how big the deals are by state. I can come here and change the year and see how things are going and I can go back as far in my history as my Sage 100 data has can go 5, 10 years, whatever your Sage 100 system has. And you just can see if you're growing or not and if the slices are growing or not. So very kind of informative way to look at data. Also I have here on the same dashboard sales background manager. So bigger bars, bigger sales. And I'm also using here the profitability color schema to see which ones are pretty profitable or not. And finally I have this quadrant here showing top products. Now if I'm the big boss and I have access to my whole dashboard, but I'm meeting the west coast team with my iPad. I could come here with my fingers on my iPad and select only the west coast states. When I do that, the dashboard changes to only show my account manager selected those two states and what products are being sold. If I want to see only one salesperson, I'm going to click here. And now the dashboard changes again showing how much Sam is selling those Three states, and he's not selling any large deal, only small and medium, and what product he's been selling. Very interactive, very easy. This can be done anywhere, anytime, using desktop, web and mobile devices. Very interactive. It takes little training for a business person to be able to do this on the fly without calling it. Now, if I'm a more sophisticated user, suppose I'm the VP of sales, but I'm a more sophisticated user and I actually want to further and extensively slice and dice dashboards or create new ones from scratch. I can do it. We actually have several CEOs, VP of Sales, CFOs, people who are not financial, people who are not report writers, and they are doing what I'm going to show you next. It's exciting and it's very, very empowering. So if I am a power user that took a little bit more of training, usually a few hours, I have this edit button. When I click the edit button, I have access to this interface that gives me full functionality. Now, let me tell you the story about this interface. The engine behind this interface was designed by Stanford University professors who studied how business people look at business data and have insights out of it. You know, when a business person is trying to come up with a new report, it's a journey, it's a process. They have an idea for where they want to go, but until they view the information, they don't know exactly. It takes interaction. And that's why when they're asking a consultant, an IT person to build the dashboard, the report, it usually takes several interactions. Oh, build this. The person brings the report. Well, can you actually summarize this way? Filter that way? The person goes, IT person goes. Brings back. Well, can you change the color? Can you put a chart? And take sometimes 5, 10 interactions, sometimes hours, even days and weeks to get a report ready? It is what it is. It's a journey. It takes the interaction to do it. Now, these Stanford University professors, they came up with a software engine that helps decision makers walk through the journey by themselves with little or no assistance from it. So let's take a look how that works. So when I click the edit button, I have access to all of the segments of the dashboard. So I have the map, I have the products, and I have the salesperson report. I want to change the salesperson report. I want to see only numbers. I can easily click on a button and select any kind of data visualization technique and only the ones enabled because the other ones make no sense to whatever I'm looking at. So I'm a financial person, I want to see numbers by the penny. So I chose the grid approach. Beautiful. I see sales and gross profit and sales by the penny. Well, I want to break down this by product line. Let's say easy. I come to this data panel, I just find the reporting parameter. Let's say I go to product and when I see the product line and I just drag and drop into my report, I could be using my fingers and get the report right there in my iPad. Salesperson, product line, maybe I want to break down by customer, easy. I go there to the customer list and I can drag and drop into my report, let's say between the salesperson and product line. Bingo. By salesperson, by customer, by product line. I want to see by year, by quarter, by month, by fiscal period, by week. You name it, you just drag and drop the parameters into the report and right there you get the answer. So very easy. Very empowering. Business people can actually do this on the fly anytime, anywhere because we use the best of the brain technology available out there. What if I want to, let's say download information to let's say a desktop or to Excel? I can pick some value here. Let's say this one and I can click View data and then I have access to the underlying data and now I can download that data. Oops, sorry, I clicked the wrong button. So I can see the underlying data with all the records. Now I download the data and then it goes right into Excel. Very quick and very easy. And here we can have invoice number, phone contact every information from the invoice. Just at the click of the button you get into Excel. Alrighty. So we covered the PowerPoint presentation. The product. I hope you have enjoyed the Ferrari drive on the passenger seat. Let's open the Q and A session. If you have questions, Please use the GoToMeeting panel on the right side and type in questions. And we're going to address one by one. So let's see here if we have already some questions. Hold on a second. Okay, we have a question here from Mark. Mark, thank you. So the question is what ERP modules are covered in the out of the box solution? Mark, very good question. Let me switch gears here into my web and go to our website. If you go to our website, which is dataself.com and then you go to the analytics by product and you choose sage 100 then you're going to find here a lot of good stuff. One of it is the sample reports and KPIs and this link is going to show you all the modules that we cover for Sage 100 AP and everything else. So very comprehensive document. This page also has brochure, it has a description of our software architecture. By tomorrow this webinar recording is going to be available on this button here. Right now if you click on it, you're going to watch like a six month old version of this webinar. So tomorrow you're going to receive an email informing that this recording is being posted on this button. You can also request a test drive and so forth. So lots of good pieces of information in our website, but please feel free to contact us. We're here to help, to inform you, to help you decide if our solution is a good fit or not for your business. Mark, that was a good question. Thank you very much. Let's see if we have more questions. Let's see here. Yep, we have another question here from Anthony. Anthony, thank you very much. So the question is, can this application import data from other data sources? Anthony, very good question. Thank you very much. Let me actually use our system architecture which usually let me actually use from the website so you'll know how to get to it. If you go to our website and choose software architecture. My website is a little slow, so let's switch back. So this is our software architecture and how the data flows into our system is the following. Here on the far left you have your sage 100 which out of the box is already pre mapped. A lot of things are pre mapped into our complete solution. However, we can pull data from any relational database. We can pull Data from Sage CRM, from SalesLogix, from many other modules and many of these are pre mapped out of the box. So it's kind of no plug and play. Now if you have other data sources that are not pre mapped, maybe you have data in Excel, maybe in Access files, maybe in SQL Server databases, you name it. We can import the data into our what is called ultralight data warehouse. And this framework allow us to easily and quickly combine data for better reporting purposes and then the information is thrown into our on premises or in the cloud analytics server. The good news is at the end of the day your users will be able to have access to information anytime, anywhere if you give them the rights. Like you can use mobile devices, you can use other frameworks. Unless we have more questions. Anthony, by the way, thank you. Next question. One more question here. I'm going to answer is from John. John, thank you for your question. So the question is, is the old 3.71 version? There was a GL monthly variance report as part of the financials year on year or period by period comparison with percentage variance. Can you show us a financial report and I suppose we can create a similar type of report with your tools? John Good question. A long one. Sorry it took me a while to read it. Yes, we have on the financial I'm not going to have time to show you right now because we're running out of time, but I strongly encourage for us to connect later. But yes, we do financials and we cover various reports. I'm not 100% sure if you will show exactly the way that the 371 was, but usually it can be customized to show information the way that you want with the KPIs that you want. So after hopefully today or tomorrow we can reconnect and discuss and see if it's a good fit for you. Folks, we're running out of time. I really appreciate your questions and we'll get back to you if I have not answered all your questions. If you want to contact me later, send me an email, call my cell phone. My information is over here and I look forward to being in touch. So I really appreciate your time and interest today. Have a happy Thursday and we'll be in touch hopefully soon. Thank you.