Analytics and BI for Sage 300 (Accpac) 140417

Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. This is Johnny Girardi, founder and CEO of Data Cells. We're going to have a 25 minute session covering analytics for Sage 300 or Acpac as it was called before. Before we jump into the presentation, just a quick intro on why the company was founded and what the vision is. So I'm an electrical engineer. In my early career I was a programmer for several years. Eventually I fell in love with the business area. I became a business person and had my MBA and so forth. And to me, reporting and analysis was never really an issue. You know, I was a programmer, I felt comfortable with reporting tools, with databases, I could do it, but most of my business peers, they couldn't. They would have to call a consultant, they would have to call me to help them with their reporting needs. So I decided to join the business intelligence industry back 14 years ago. In 2005, I decided to start Data Self. And the vision was, and still is, there are great technology out there, easy to use, really designed for business people, for empowering business people with their own data. However, they usually come from the Fortune 2000 world and they're usually too expensive and too complicated to deploy for mid sized companies. So my vision was I want to find the right tools in the upper market, easy to use, but that are affordable for mid sized companies. I want to make those solutions easier, I want to make those solutions better for mid sized companies. So I want to simplify and amplify the best of BRI technology. And what you're going to see today is the latest and greatest. Hopefully you're going to find this intriguing and interesting for your business as well. So let's get started. If you have questions throughout the presentation, Please use the GoToMeeting panel and we will address them at the end of the presentation. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about why analytics and why us and then I'm going to show the product and then open a Q and A session. So most people come to us looking for better sales analysis, supply chain analysis and financials. We also cover many other things, purchasing services, payroll. But these three are the most popular on the sales analysis. The most critical need is just have a better understanding of sales and profitability by different metrics so we can help them a lot. Some people have challenges with sales commissions. It's taking too long to process them. We usually can automate the process pretty much 100%. Some people do want to have a better forecasting of their sales, well, how much they're going to Be selling, maybe look in the past looking at data coming from customers, salespeople, you name it, and we definitely can help with that as well. Some people got into some long term large contracts. So having the right price strategy can be critical. And we can help you analyze what the right price strategy is. And sometimes you just need to analyze data, your sales data. And you have data coming from all over the place, from acpac, from Excel spreadsheets, from salespeople, maybe from point of sale systems, maybe from their clients. So the ability to combine all this data to better forecasting or understanding is critical. And we can help with that. On the supply chain, just the most basic need is better inventory management. Look at your items, where they are, how long they have been sitting on the shelves, inventory turnover, should you move them to other warehouses. Things like that can be helped by our technology. If you collaborate with your supply chain, maybe with your vendors, your shipping companies, your customers need to combine this data to have a better understanding of the supply chain. Our technology can help. If your purchasing processes can be more sophisticated, maybe you're analyzing pricing from vendors, which ones deliver better more quickly in different times of the year. We can help analyze those things. Forecasting. If you're going to be able to deliver your products or services, if you're manufacturing them. So forecasting is critical and analytics can help. And again, data integration, your business usually interfaces with many different other organizations and sometimes bringing data from them into your data analysis can be critical. Our technology can also help you with that. On the financial side, Sage 300 or Acpac has a good financial reporting technology that usually is sufficient for most clients. But if you're struggling with your current financial solution, if it's too labor intensive, maybe spending too many hours at the end of the month or the period, too many days, sometimes or weeks, if you have multi company frameworks and you're having challenges consolidating them, or if you want to have sliced and diced capabilities to give to your management on the fly, anytime, anywhere, using mobile devices. If you have any of these three needs, talk with us, because our solution may be a good fit on the financial side as well. So those are the most critical areas we cover. Let's talk a little bit about us. This is an analysis from Gartner. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment from the Fortune 2000 world. And every February they release an assessment for what they call the magic quadrants for BI and analytics platforms. These are the top vendors, BI analytics vendors in the Fortune 2000 the more to the right you are, the better for Fortune 2000. So not so critical for us in the mid market. However, the higher you are on this axis, the better you are, the better the vendor is delivering their vision and delivering their product. So being higher here is good for mid sized companies as well. These two top vendors, Tableau right now is considered the top leader when it comes to dashboarding, analytics and data visualization for business people. So they're by far the best out there. And Microsoft is considered the best BI infrastructure in the upper market. Well what about them? What about us? What about you? Well it goes back to my initial vision. We have selected two years and a half ago Tableau and Microsoft to be part of our solution. So we took right now they are the top two BI vendors in the Fortune 2000. So we took them. We add our own technology that eliminates programming from deploying the best of the technology out there. So we simplify it and then we add more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs that amplify the value right of the box. So lots of value right off the box. So that's what data self analytics is best of the technology. Simplified and amplified. It's easy to use for business people anytime, anywhere. They can use their desktop, web and mobile devices to slice and dice their data for it. It's also very easy to maintain because we simplify it. As I mentioned, it's faster deploy usually takes hours or days to deploy this complete solution and it's very easy to maintain. Our team has been working for more than our core team has been working for more than 14 years working with ActPac and Sage 300, connecting to best of breed business intelligence tools and applying to mid sized companies. So you get expertise from us. And finally our solution actually has a very low cost. If you go with the monthly subscription, it's literally months, it's literally hundreds of dollars per month. So it does not cost you a fortune to get bathroom technology. So that's what we do. We simplify and we amplify the bessel grid technology. And because we use that exciting technology, we compare our solution like a Ferrari among mid market vendors. The other vendors are usually like the Bimmers, the Mercedes, the Porsches. Great solutions, great pricing. But we are the faster, the easier to use, the more sophisticated. However, our pricing is not a Ferrari. It's actually like you know a leasing of a Fiat. So it's affordable. So let's go for test drive. I'm going to break the test drive in three different Components. I'm going to show access to the framework, some simple KPIs and then going to do some ad hoc example. So let's buckle up, put our helmets on, and let's drive our Ferrari. So most of the time when people access our technology, they go to this web portal again using a desktop, web or mobile device. When they log in, they access their own dashboards. So let's say if I'm a scene management like the CEO and I'm not very computer savvy, maybe I'm going to open a dashboard as simple as this one that has some big boxes that tells me by the color where I should be paying attention to. So profitability is good, past due is good, sales is yellow is kind of doing not so good, and inventory is really red. Maybe I have to call the inventory management right away to check what's going on. So for people who are not very sophisticated with computers and, you know, mobile devices, a dashboard as simple as this can be sufficient for them to have good insights and go about their business. Now we also have more sophisticated dashboards. For instance, if I'm a salesperson, I open my dashboard set and I see salespeople dashboards. And when I open, let's say a dashboard like this, it gives me critical insights. This kind of dashboard looks at the tip of the growth curve of major key performance indicators. In this example, I'm looking at the tip of the growth curve of the sales major key performance indicator. So this is showing me which customers are growing the most in sales since last year to date and which ones are declining the most in sales since last year to date. Maybe the growth is not so critical because I pay attention to them. But what about the top customer by sales decline? There may be some problems with some of these customers and if I don't get to know in a timely fashion, and if it doesn't fix the problem, I may lose them for good. So looking at the tip of the growth curve for your major key performance indicators is usually critical. And we have many reports like this one to help you focus on your attention on where it mattered the most. Let's take a look at another important kind of key performance indicator, what we call exception reporting. Exceptional reporting is looking at transactions that are no longer happening and they may be critical. In this example, I'm looking from a sales again perspective. I'm looking at my regular customers, recurring customers. They are no longer buying. They were buying the last 60 days, but not in the last 30 days. Maybe it's okay, maybe it's not okay. Maybe in your business you want to look at customers who are buying the last year, but not in the last quarter. For instance, it's very easy to change the buckets. The point is, looking at transactions that are no longer happening can be critical. And we have many reports looking at those things all over the place from sales, purchasing, receivables, payables, financials, expenses, you name it. Let's take a look at another example and then let's do some ad hoc analysis. We're going to look at from a geography analysis. And many people, they love the geography analysis. This dashboard here shows the map and then sales by state, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. Then each bubble is sliced by colors which represent the aggregation of the deal sizes, large, medium and small invoices. And I can easily now change the period to see if I'm growing or declining over the years. Maybe the quarters, months, fiscal periods, weeks, you name it. So very easy to interact with the dashboard, to get insights from it. Very cool. Now I also have on my dashboard salespeople with bars, Bigger bars, bigger sales. And the color of the bar is represented by the profitability. Not so profitable, more profitable. So I can easily tell among my reps here which ones are very profitable or not so profitable. And maybe I have to add on those things. I also see here what products have been shipped. Now it's very easy to interact with the data, change it dramatically. And let me show an example. Suppose I'm the VP of sales and I'm meeting with the west coast team and I'm using my iPad. I could come here with my fingers and select the west coast states. And when I do that, the dashboard changes to show which salespeople are selling to those three states, how profitable they are with the color schema, and what products have been shipped to those three states. Very cool, very easy. Now, if I click on one of the salespeople, let's say Sam, I further filter my dashboard. Now it's showing only SAM sales in those three states and what products has been shipping. Making changes like this is fairly intuitive. You cannot break the dashboard. And most business people will be able to do this with little or no training at all. And they can do it again on their mobile devices, on their web and desktop devices. Now, if I'm a power user and I want to have extensive ad hoc capabilities anytime, anywhere, then I have this edit button. So if I'm a power user, I click the edit button and then I go into the edit mode and I have here my three dashboards that I was showing before and then I can extensively change dashboards here. So let's say before I show how to change things, just a little explanation. This engine, this software engine that you're looking at was designed by Stanford University professors who studied how business people look at business data to have insight from it. It's a journey, it's a process. They have an idea of what they want to see, but until they see something, they don't know. Exactly. And that's why it takes interaction. They have many questions, they ask a question, they see something, they ask another question, they see something, they ask another question. And sometimes it takes many back and forth until you get to the right place. So if you don't have this tool, every question is usually talking between the business person and a consultant. And it takes hours and days to get the report to where the business person wants. And sometimes they cannot afford to wait. They have to make a decision right now. So this tool helps them walk through this journey without calling for assistance. Let me show how the process is. So right now I'm looking at this dashboard that has salesperson, customer information, product line. I have amount, sales, gross profit by year. Maybe it's too much information. I want to simplify it. I just want to see sales by salesperson. I can drag and drop, let's say I don't want to see product line, I drag out my product line information. I don't want to see customer information. I drag it out. And I don't want to see dates, I drag it out. Just drag and drop. You get out of the view. So right now, very simply see sales by salesperson, by the penny and gross profit. Well, maybe I actually want to see more detail. I want to see by year, by quarter, by month, I can drag and drop into view. So now I broke down by year. Maybe if I want to expand into the quarter level, I just click and I expand. Now I'm seeing the same information by quarter. Maybe I actually want to put the measures after my quarter. So I just drag and drop. So for every quarter, I see sales and gross profit for all years. It's very intuitive, it's very fast. Even if you have a large database, this will run in seconds because it's optimized and it's like a Ferrari. Alrighty. So let's circle back to my PowerPoint. I hope you have enjoyed the Ferrari spin. Talking about Ferraris, we have a very exciting promotion right now. Because you have attended this webinar, you're going to get a ticket that we're going to be drawing in early July for five lucky winners who are going to be having an experience of a lifetime. You're going to be able to be racing a Ferrari on a racing track sponsored by us. So to get more chances to be a winner of the Ferrari spin, what you have to do besides attending a webinar like this is just follow us on Twitter. Just click Follow us. You're going to get another ticket if you follow us on LinkedIn. You're going to get another ticket to win if you interact with our social media. If you retweet to us comment like our post, you get more tickets. If you evaluate data self analytics for your business, you get tickets. And if you buy and subscribe, you get more tickets. So if you want to have some fun, hopefully drive a Ferrari, do this and you're going to increase your chances of racing a Ferrari. Alrighty. I hope you have had some fun. You learned something. If you have questions now, Please use the GoToMeeting chatting box and we're going to be addressing questions. So let's see if we have some questions here. Yes, we have some questions. Question from Janet can this application import data from other data sources? Janet, thank you for your question. Yes, let me actually switch to our website to answer this question. So I'm going to dataself.com and I'm going to go to the software architecture page. So this is how our solution works. We pull data from your ACK pack into a ultralight data warehouse. Then it pushes to our analytics solution to provide information for desktop, web and mobile devices. We can pull data from any other data source. We have, let's say out of the box templates for let's say Sage CRM sales logics. We can pull data from any table kind of data source combined with your Sage 300 data. And then when people are analyzing, they see data as they were all together. So yes, absolutely we can combine data from several data sources. Janet, thank you for your question. More questions, let's see. Question from Peter what versions of Sage 300 are supported? Peter good question. So let's go in the website again here and show how you can figure that out if you forget. So you go to the analytics by product and you choose sage 300 right here you have what version we support. So from version 4.0, which is like now over 10 years old, all the way to the latest, we're going to have a recording of this webinar on this button. So if you click on here tomorrow you can forward this recording to your Peers you can request also test drive view demos. You can see brochures, architecture, some KPIs. Our website has a bunch of materials if you're looking for further information about our business. Also you know, if you want to attend some other webinars next week we're going to have one very exciting about a distributor which is using data self analytics and we're going to be asking the VP of this distributor how they are taking advantage. What are the pros and cons of analytics for them? And by the way, this company, it's very exciting. They built table saws and the inventor of the technology actually put his own finger on an active table saw and he does not get hurt. Very exciting. So if you click on this video you can watch it. It's kind of interesting. All right, let's see. We have more questions. So how do I Get trained on DataSoft Analytics? Question from John. John, thanks for your question. So we have usually we have web based live instructor led training to get the feet wet, but we also have dozens of videos that you can watch yourself. So training is instructor led as well as self trained. We have many people who have learned to use the tool with little and no training. If you're curious enough you can actually poke around and learn it. It's very exciting to have in our backend technology provided by Fortune 2000 companies. There's a lot of forums and support available in the Internet. So if you're looking for a question you can usually just google it and you'll get information either from our own knowledge base and website or from other resources available from these top vendors. Well, I really appreciate your time and interest. We have a few more questions but we will address them on a one on one basis. If you want to contact me directly to just exchange some ideas about business intelligence, analytics, data warehousing, if it applies to you, just feel free to give me a call, shoot me an email or follow me on Twitter. Also just a reminder, if you're going to summit and in Vegas and you want to maybe have Draco Ferrari, please interact with us, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, attend more webinars, maybe get some quotes from us, buy from us and hopefully we're going to see you on the racing track. Have a happy Thursday. Thank you for your time and interest and have a great day. Thank you.