Analytics for Microsoft Dynamics GP

Good morning everyone. Happy Thursday. I hope you enjoy your day. Thanks for joining us. Let's get started with our presentation today. Analytics for Microsoft Dynamics gp. Great place and I'm Johnny Girardi, Data Cell founder and CEO. And before I jump into the presentation I want to give a little bit of background why I started this business back in 2005. So when I left electric engineers, my background in my early career I was doing programming for a few years. I was really happy to do programming and then eventually I moved to the business area, had my mba and for me reporting and data analysis was easy. I was comfortable dealing with tables, joins and programming whatever it takes to meet. Data analysis has always been easy because of my company background. However, my business fears were different. They were not computer savvy and they would struggle with data analysis. They would have to ask someone else to give reports and change reports. Not very efficient. Many times have to make decisions based only on gut feeling, not facts at all or being able to change things on the fly. So when I was invited to join this intelligence analytics world, I quickly realized that my technical and business background could make an impact and could make this better. So make a long story short, in 2005 I founded Beta Self and the main vision of the business is to simplify analytics and to amplify it, make it easier, make it better for mid sized companies. There are great technology out there, but using a great technology is too expensive, too complicated for me sized companies. So I thought hey, I can make it simpler, I can make it better. So I started this journey back nine years ago and we came a long way. We have built outstanding platform with a lot of clients and what I'm going to show you today is the latest technology. So I hope you find this session informative, exciting too. So let's get started. Hold on a second here. Okay, so I'm going to spend about 10, 15 minutes talks covering a few PowerPoint slides, talk about why analytics, why people come to business to us frequently. And then I'm going to show you quick data cell analytics presentation and we'll open a Q and A at the end of the session. So this session will be about half an hour. So why most people come to our organization, you know, most of them, they come because they're trying to improve their operations, they're trying to improve their sales, supply chain, manufacturers, their manufacturing processes. We also people coming from, you know, for financial purposes, you know, sometimes they're not very happy with what the financial framework from Apex provides. And then we can also address, complementing what doesn't have. On the financial side, we can cover payroll, services, you name it, but these are the most popular. So let me give a little bit of insight, a little bit and cover what people look from sales, quantity, manufacturing. So on the sales side, the most basic need is just having a much better, much more comprehensive analysis of sales profitability. You know, you want to see sales by customer, by product, by territory, by products changes those perspectives, seeing growth decline. So that's a pretty basic but still core functionality that we augment significantly compared to what GMT provides. Some companies may have a more elaborate ordering and invoicing process. It takes time and then they want to analyze how efficient the process or where the bottlenecks are. So analytics can help slice and dice the data to find out how can you make it better. Sales commissions if you have more sophisticated sales commission that you cannot do easy from great place, often it becomes a error prone labeling test process at the end of the month. With analytics we can pretty much automate sometimes 100 of the process anytime you can see sales commissions, quotas, quotes and so forth. So it's that nothing right there. Some companies, they have big contracts, big companies like Norwegian retailers, hip art retailers. So they have to be sure that when they come up with a pricing strategy, it's a win win for them and for the client as well. So being able to help them analyze pricing tasks, volumes and come up with a good price strategy is critical. And analytics can support that as well. Sales forecasting, you know, who doesn't wish to have a crystal ball for forecasting? So analyzing past no sales trends can add a lot of insights into forecasting on the sales side. Looking at open sales orders, past sales trends, what's coming from clients and so forth. And finally, data integration. Sometimes part of the sales information comes from other places like grade planes, they come from Excel files. Maybe clients send in your way their expectation of, you know, sales or their inventory and then you have to combine that data with great planes. So using analytics for that good integration is something super straightforward usually. And we have big value on those products. So these are some of the most popular sales topics we help on the supply chain. Supply chain means inventory delivery. The most basic is inventory management. You know, how many items you have in stock, what is the cost? Is it sitting for too long? Where the inventory turnover exchange, you know, or transferring between warehouses, where should items be to fulfill the demand quickly? So inventory management is just a big topic that MND can improve if you have, you know, inbound and outbound more Sophisticated or time consuming routing and logistics. Maybe bringing your supplies from overseas or delivering your supplies. Something critical that you have to help an understanding. We think weather patterns or you know, traffic, Whatever it is, analytics can help with that supply chain collaboration. You know, if you have ways to get data from your suppliers and vendors and shipping companies, you can bring the data in for analytics and book the whole thing with grain planes and their information in a single place. If your purchasing processes also are elaborate and you need to combine the data to have a better understanding, analytics can help you that forecast. In the same way that we can forecast sales, we can forecast what the items are. Are we going to be ready for new cp? So we topic in the same way that integration bringing data from your suppliers, companies or clients to help you with supply change analytics can help you with that. So those are the most popular topics and again we cover many others. If you have questions when I talk about one on one, we can go later to discuss your home needs. But why data self analytics? Well, it goes back to my vision initially. You know there's great technology out there, typically too expensive, too complex for business companies. So what we do is we signify it, then we amplify it and we look for the best to build technology right now our platform, this is our own technology that programming from intelligence. We leverage SQL Server BI framework which is part of great way to pull it. We make it much better. And we also use tableau which right now is the thing of the old platform when it comes to analytics. So we simplify it, we program it and we have a lot of additional features that make it much better. At the end of the day, what we want to do and what we do is make it easy. Makes it easy for business people anytime, anywhere. They can be on the office using their desktop. They can be on a coffee shop with a notebook or using an iPad or a smartphone. They are able to pull the information anytime, anywhere. And the ones who are a little bit more sophisticated, they can change it significantly on the fly without calling for IT support. On average our track record is more than 70% of the end users reporting needs they can tackle by themselves. As easy as that, they can run by themselves. No one exists for now. We also make use of must support. Must have the infrastructure in place. We have a framework that provides it with an easy deploy ease framework. So they are giving the business people a platform that they can become more self sufficient. So ease is one of the most important things in our business. Second is over the years we have built a very Comprehensive, out of the box solution. So when you install our complete package for Dreamwaves, we have more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs looking at different and important business trends that maybe today you're not paying attention to. So that's what we do, you know, simplify and amplify analytics. And because we use this latest technology, you know, SQL Server, platform, tableaux planning tool, we consider a solution like a Ferrari. It's a little bit pricier, it doesn't cost a Ferrari by the way, it's a lot more affordable, but it's very fast, it can be very sophisticated and it's like the top of the notch. If you want to give good users the best, the easiest, the fastest, we have a very compelling solution. So let's take this very first bin. I'm going to break my product presentation in three parts. First of all, I'm going to show secure access to the information. Then I'm going to show some sample KPIs on key performance and details and dashboards. And finally I'm going to show some ad hoc analysis. So let's go for it. So first of all, this is how usually most users will consume information. You'll go to a web portal that can be installed on premises behind the firewall, or it can be deployed in the cloud, you know, private cloud or our own managed services clouds. Anyway, the point is you're going to be accessing this portal to a secure access, highly secure access and only people who know the address and type it have the recommendations to log into it. Such that's the first level security, highly secure framework. Second is when they log in, the tool will look at my user credentials and will give my own dashboards and reports. So let's say if I'm a salesperson, when I log into this portal, it will give the sales team dashboard. If a person from finance, when I log in, I'll see the finance team dashboard. If I'm the CEO, I want to see only the CEO dashboard. So dashboards and reports are user centric. So when I log to these dashboards and I click on one of them, I'm going to just open this first top custom by sales dashboard. Then a third layer of security can click here. For instance, this is a sales dashboard, I'm a salesperson and suppose that I'm the account manager for California. When I open this dashboard, which is the same for all salespeople, I will only view top customers in California. While let's say the account manager in Florida opens the same Dashboard in only fields Florida information. While the big boss opens the same dashboard, it deals the top customer across all territories. So information can be granular, you know, even with the same dashboard, you will only be able to view information that you're allowed to. So the system can be pretty automated into terms of security. So that's pretty much know about security. Now let's take a look at few of the dashboards that we have a little out of the box, out of the 2000 library. And this is just one of them. Very simple, very easy, you know, show top customers, buy sales things year to date. This is what we call a top performer dashboard. We have lots of top performers, top customers, profit by sales, customers, product territory, maybe you know, from purchasing, vendors or quantity of hand, cost of hand or expenses, you name it. And when you look at these dashboards, we try to make it visible, but we try to make it easy. Some dashboards are very chart centric, some dashboards are very number centric. Some people like charts, some people don't. So we have both options. This one is very chart centric. So we have bars for sales, bigger bars, bigger sales. And then we have the color of the bars represented by this color schema showing profitability. So I can easily tell that this client is a top client. But profitability is pretty low. Maybe something that we need to work on to increase profitability. Also we have the profitability as these black dots on the other axis. So very simple but very informative way of looking at top performers by sales and profitability. Another intriguing dashboard we have, sometimes even more intriguing than looking at the top performers is the top change over time, what's growing and what's declining the most in a given period. This is a sales dashboard, but here it's showing the top growth, sales top decline, in this case on a year to date basis, acquired to date, month to date. This is the change since the current unit. So these customers are growing the most since last year. Most likely happy customers, salespeople are working closely with them. It's a win. But how about the pump decline? Why are they declining? Is there something wrong? Well, sometimes what happens is you realize a client is done when it's too late. Maybe something was wrong, competition was knocking the door, you were not happy and you left message to the client, called back. And when you see it, they're done for good. So looking at the top growth, decline from sales, from inventory, expenses, payroll, whatever, using the top of the row sheet is important and being able to easily analyze them and see if something is Wrong is critical when we have lots of those dashboards coming out of the box. To help you with the rest of the process, let's see some other dashboards here. Out of the box. Exceptional reporting Exception reporting is another way of looking at important trends. Exception reporting shows operations or things that no longer happen. This is an example from a sales side which is usually easy to convey the message of exception reporting. This dashboard shows regular customers or recurring customers who are no longer buying. In this case, you are buying the last 60 days, but not in the last 30 days. This could easily be who's buying the last 90 days or the last 180 days and not in the last 60 days. Or maybe. But the point is looking at exceptional reporting, why an item is no longer moving as much as before, looking at things that no longer changing the same pattern as before is again usually important. And knowing who they are as the first step towards identifying which ones need to attach. So anyway, there's a lot of dashboards that we have out of the box. Let me show now an example of how easy it is to change things on the fly. So let me go to this geography analysis, sales by geography. By the way, I'm showing sales dashboards because it's usually easier to convey the message. But we have, we cover po, payables, receivables, GL and other modules. But let's take a look at this geography analysis in here. What I have is, you know, sales by state, with bubbles, bigger bubbles, bigger sales, and then they are sliced by the size of the deal. So, you know, let's say this large deals mean all the invoices above $10,000 and how much aggregation is by state. Then I have the account managers, I have the sales account manager and the profitability of the sales and also some product information, detailed product information here. Now this dashboard, if I would be building it from scratch, if I have the biggest dashboard from scratch, it takes a few minutes to build it from scratch. And I do not need to be a highly technical person, a business person. And we have salespeople, even CEOs building dashboards like this from scratch on their mobile devices. So it's very easy to do that. Not in the scope of today's presentation, but anyway, these dashboards are pretty dynamic. I can come here and I change the time of the map and see. Very straightforward. Now what if I only want to see sales, let's say for the west coast, because I'm meeting with the west coast team, I can select the west coast using the mouse or my fingers On a tablet. When I do that, the dashboard changes to show only salespeople sent those states and what products were sold. If I want to further analyze the dashboard and click the same one salesperson. So now it changed to only show what that sales first is selling those three states and what products are being sold. Don't necessarily select one people. I just click and choose and the dashboard keeps on changing. Very easy, very fast. Anytime a business person can make that. Okay, you know, suppose if I'm a more sophisticated user and I have the power to extensively slice and dice the dashboard on my mobile device. For instance, if I'm that featured, I can click the edit button. With the edit button. Now I have almost full authoring capabilities. I have here all of the pieces of my dashboard, the chart, the actual products and salespeople chart. And now I can extensively slice a dash. Let's say suppose I'm not a chart person. I want to see numbers by the pending. I can come here and say show me different charts or just numbers by the pending. There it is. Beautiful. Okay, now what if I want to break down salesperson by I don't know, by product. I come here to the product list. I get the item description and then drag and drop. I see this, let's say on my iPad. There it is. Buy salesperson by product. Sales gross profit. Can I put it down by customer? Sure. Go to the customer list and drag and drop. Whatever you want. Let's put it on between salesperson and product. There you go. Buy salesperson, buy customer by product. Very easy. Drag and drop. You know, a business person with little training can do that. If you want to sit here a month, drag and drop. Right there you have information, easy. The point is, business people with little training can actually do things that today you have to rely on it. And this tool will empower many business people to become a lot more self sufficient. They make decisions using facts. Plus that feeling, of course, but using facts anytime, anywhere. So that's what we do. Alrighty. We're right on track. Pretty much. That was the presentation. Let's go for questions and answers. So because we have many people on the GoToMeeting, we're going to keep all of you on mute but use the GoTomedi panel on the right. There's a chatty box to write the questions so we can answer them. Let me see if we have questions already. Okay, we have a question here from Peter, which is what is the price of data? Self analytics. Good question. The price varies significantly. We have a very broad range of options and we have created a schema that pretty much tries to fit the budget of mid size companies. We have no subscription pricing, you can actually purchase a solution. The pricing varies by user by how many data source you have. So it could be, you know, it could be literally down in the four figures if you want to just get a free graph to see how things are then you can go to five figures if you have a much more sophisticated framework. So price varies significantly, rarely it goes over six figures. So usually low five figures to high five figures. The good news is when it comes to pricing, people usually ask about the typical return on investment. And we have several opportunities where when people decision makers started to look at the out of the box reports, the dashboards right off the bat they found initiatives that were very poorly declining customers or I can see for too long and they were able to tackle those things in a matter of days and pay for the investment actually in the early days. So sometimes it can be that fast. On average the return on investment is months. But the point is when you give decision makers the ability to make more informed decisions in a timely fashion, usually these people can move the needle and improve the bottom line quickly. And the cost of it itself doesn't become an issue. It's more about the Much appreciated for the question. Another question here. Let's see. So a question from Kathy about the comparison about our technology with the Jet enterprise. So Jet is one of the most popular, a very popular reporting platform in the great lanes overall and actually I probably should show another slide to back it up a little bit. Start. There it is. So let me show what we do and then I'll circle back to Cat. This is Gartner Magic Quantum for BI analytics. As you may know, Gartner is one of the most reputable companies analyzing technology out there. Necessity value Making long story short, this quadrant here, you know the more to the right the more BI tools you provide. So for Fortune 2000 the more to the right the better. For MTS companies it doesn't really matter into the right this much but this other axis means how well the company is executing and vision how successful they are. So being hired here on this Y axis is definitely important. Being hired on this scene. So what about it? So Tableau and Microsoft are the two top from this execution standpoint. Microsoft as you well know, they have one of the most expensive, affordable BI framework using SQL Server and other tools. And Tableau is considered by now the king of the field when it comes to analytics. In data visualization they just Went IPO last year, very successful ipo. So these are the two top companies when it comes to BI analytics. What about them? What about us? Well, what we do is we take Tableau, which is the top media visualization company. We take Microsoft's SQL Server framework which is one of the best BI framework. We add our own technology to remove the components programming out of this equation and we had a very comprehensive out of the box. So what you have is the best of the new technology, simplified and amplified. That goes back to our vision. Where does JET fit into the puzzle? Well, Jet as far as we know is not yet even considered by Gardner. So it's not like a top notch technology. Is definitely a great solution by far they're using more affordable than ours. We call them like dimmer and multiple Mercedes. They go like the Ferrari. We are faster, we are easier to use and we design the best computer approach for. So we are running out of time. I'm really sorry about that. We have a few more questions here. We will address them on a one on one basis. We'll get back to you before I wrap up. I just want to show that later tomorrow you're going to receive an email from us telling that you can actually go to our website which is unicef.com and if you go to the learning section here and you go to the recorded webinars, we're going to have a recording of this webinar so you can watch later on and share with other people. Happy a webinar like this. You can also go to this analytics by product and choose Dynamics GP and there we're also going to eventually post the same recordings webinar recordings here and here. You also have brochures, a sample of the out of the box reports. We have the 2000 ACE requests for test drive and so forth. Alrighty folks, I hope you have enjoyed the presentation. We let me put here my contact information if you want to contact me to discuss our technology or our business needs or any kind of discussion about analytics, data warehousing in business intelligence, we'll be here to educate you. I hope you had a great session. Thanks for joining us. Have a happy Thursday and hope you look forward to contacting you again in the near future. Have a good day. Thank you. It.