Analytics for Sage 500 140501

Good morning everyone. Happy Thursday. This is Johnny Giorardi, CEO and Founder of Data Self. Thanks for joining us. Today we're going to have about a 25 minute session. Hopefully very informative for you and exciting. Before I jump into it, a quick introduction about the vision of the company and why I found it back in 2005. So I have an electrical engineer undergrad and in my early career for many years I was a programmer. Eventually I fell in love with the business area. I became a business person and for me, reporting and data analysis was never really an issue. I was a programmer. I was comfortable with complicated reporting tools and databases, but most of my business peers, they were not. They would have to ask a consultant, an IT person, or even myself for help when they wanted a different report or sliced a report. I decided to join the industry, the business intelligence industry, about 14 years ago and in 2005 I thought that I could make it better. So my initial vision still today is there are great technology out there, easy for business people in the Fortune 2000 environment, but they're usually too expensive and too complicated to deploy for midsize companies. So my vision was I want to find in the upper market best of the technology that fits the mid market from a pricing standpoint as well as from a technology framework standpoint. I want to make them simpler, I want to make them better. So the vision is that we want to simplify and amplify best of breed technology from the upper market. So what you're going to see today is actually the latest and greatest and I hope you're going to find it very informative. So first of all, all lines are muted and if you have questions, Please use the GoToMeeting chat in box and we'll be addressing at the end of the presentation. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about why analytics. I'm going to show the product and then open for Q and A. So most companies when they come to us looking for analytics for Sage 500, they're trying to improve their sales, their supply chain or financial areas. We also cover services, project costs and so forth. But these three are the most popular ones. On the sales side, the most popular need for analytics is just a better understanding of your sales and profitability initiatives, what's growing, what's declining, what's profitable, what's not profitable, what you are selling to who. So being able to analyze that quickly and easily, anytime, anywhere is critical. And analytics can help you with that if you have between ordering, invoicing, it can take some time and you may want to pinpoint what the issues are. Analytics can help you pinpoint those problems. If you have a sales commission that is complicated, time consuming at the end of the period, analytics can usually automate 100% of the process. So that also can be very helpful. If you're trying to do better forecasting of your sales, look at your past sales or maybe information coming from your customers or salespeople. Analytics can help as well. If you get into large contracts like with big boxes such as Walmart and Target, and you need to find the right pricing strategy and analyzing the pricing components can be critical. And analytics can also help you with that. And finally, sometimes analyzing sales and profitability involves bringing data from other data sources, maybe from Excel files, maybe from a point of sale systems, maybe from clients or salespeople. And we have a framework that can combine the data for analysis. And it's really impressive on the supply chain inventory management, looking at your inventory turnover for how long items have been sitting, where are you shipping products from to which locations? Many ways to look at data that analytics can help you fine tune your process. If you have inbound and outbound routing logistics, maybe you're shipping products from overseas and it's been challenging forecasting when they're coming in. Analytics can help you with that. If you exchange information with your shipping companies, your vendors and customers want to combine that data for better analysis. Our framework can also support and provide value. If purchasing process are sophisticated, you need to analyze better pricing. Who's going to be delivering in time? Analytics can help you with that as well. On the forecast, in the same way as in sales, if you need to combine information from purchasing quantity on hand, open sales orders to see if you're going to be able to deliver your products or services, analytics can combine up all the data easily. And the data integration goes in the same line of the ability to combine data for better analysis is critical for some companies and we provide a framework for that. On the financial side, what comes with sage 500 is usually sufficient for most companies. However, if you're spending too many hours to close your months, quarters or years, talk with us, we may be able to help you and facilitate the process significantly. If you have multi company frameworks that you're having challenges consolidating your financials, we may also have a much better solution for you. And if your users are trying to be able to slice and dice your financials anytime, anywhere using web and mobile devices, we can also probably provide great value for that. So those are the main values that we add for companies. Now let me talk a little bit about the technology side and why this is so impressive. What we have. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies providing technology assessment in the Fortune 2000 world. And they just released the latest they call Magic Quadrant for BI and analytics platforms or in other words reporting platforms. And making a long story short, the more to the right you are on this axis, the better you are for Fortune 2000. So not so critical for Sage 500 companies. However, the higher you are on the Y axis, the better the solution is, the better the company is providing value to the market. These are Fortune 2000 BI and analytics vendors. The top two highlighted here. Tableau. Tableau is considered the king of the hill when it comes to analytics and dashboarding. Right now by far they're the best and Microsoft is considered the best one when it comes to BI infrastructure. What about them? What about us? What about you? Well, it goes back to my initial vision what data self analytics is. Our solution is we took the best of the breed right now Tableau and Microsoft the top two leaders in their own categories. So we take them, we add our own technology that eliminates programming from these other two tools. So we simplify them and then we add more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So we amplify their value. So it goes back to my vision. Best of the breed from Fortune 2000, simplified and amplified. Now it's easy to use, you know this tool. The solution is designed for business people. They can be using their desktop, web and mobile devices anytime or anywhere to look at dashboards, slice and dice them. It's easy for it to maintain. So really simple usually takes hours or days to deploy. So it's really fast to deploy this high end technology. We also provide expertise. Our core team has been working for more than 14 years using high end BI solutions for Sage 500. So we know the BI tools, we know Sage 500 and we know how to combine the data for companies that use sage 500. So you get also expertise from us. Finally is low cost. Our solution, you know from a cost standpoint, if you go with the monthly subscription, you're going to be paying literally hundreds of dollars per month. So it's inexpensive. We also offer yearly subscription as well as you can buy the solution. The point is the cost is a fraction of the cost. If you try to get and build your own solution using these bessel grid components. And because we use the best of grid components, we call our solution like A Ferrari. Among the mid market solutions, it's the fastest, the nicest, but by far is not a Ferrari cost. As I mentioned you can start with literally hundreds of dollars per month. It's like no like leasing a Fiat. So let's go for the product presentation. I'm going to show secured access, simple KPIs out of the 2000 and show some ad hoc examples. So let's buckle up, put our helmet on and take a spin on our Ferrari. So most of the time people will access the solution using a web portal. They can use a desktop, a web or a mobile device. When they log into this portal they would only be able to see their own dashboards. So let's say if I'm the CEO, I would see the CEO dashboards. And these dashboards can be very simple or very sophisticated like CEO or C level people. Some of them, they're not very computer savvy people, they're building businesses, they're managing people. So they need something very simple, very insightful to tell them where they should be focusing their attention. And this is an example of a CO dashboard. It has four main areas that the CO is interested in and they have the green, yellow and red color. So hey, green is good, I don't need to worry about yellow. Maybe red, I gotta call someone to see what's going on. And these dashboards, if you click on them you can go into more detail information if you are more sophisticated. So very simple yet very informative and insightful dashboards. Let's say if I'm a salesperson and I log into the sales team dashboards and let's say I go down on this list here, I have a lot of dashboards and let's say I click on this one top customer by sales dashboard. The tool can be designed in a way that when they open the dashboard it would only show my own sales. So if I'm the rep for California, this would be the top customers in California. The rep in Florida opens the same dashboard and views top customers in Florida while the VP of Sales opens the same dashboard and views top customers across all territories. So the information can be granular based on your user credentials. Now we have, as I mentioned, thousands of reports and dashboards available out of the box and we make them very insightful so you can focus on getting insights, making decisions and move about your business. Let me give an example. This dashboard is fairly simple. It shows my customers, my top customers. It shows bars, bigger bars, bigger sales. The color of each bar is represented by gross profit. So not so profitable to very profitable. I also have this black dot telling profitability on this other axis. Now, once I learn how this dashboard works, next time it's going to be very easy for me. It's going to take me seconds to realize among my top customers which ones are not so profitable. And if that's something that I want to improve, I can make a decision quickly to work with those clients. So, so these dashboards were designed with that in mind to give you insights quickly so you can make better decisions, more informed decisions. We have other dashboards that are even more intriguing sometimes. This dashboard, it looks at the tip of the growth curve of your major key performance indicators. And this was an example of this perspective, is looking at the tip, tip of the sales growth curve for your top for your customers. So these customers are growing the most in sales since last year to date. These ones are declining the most in sales since last year to date. And maybe if these are recurring customers, some of them are not very happy and you may need to figure out why and fix before it's too late. So looking at the tip of the growth curve of your major KPIs like this example can be critical for your business. And again, we have lots of these reports to help you to focus on the right initiatives. Let me show some other trends here that are usually very critical as well. Exception reporting. Exception reporting is another critical way of looking at your data. Exceptional reporting looks at transactions that are no longer happening. And this again, on the sales side is a good example. If you have recurring customers, why these ones are no longer buying, Maybe it's okay, maybe it's seasonal, maybe it's not okay. So knowing who they are is the first step towards knowing if you need to do something about it. And this particular report is showing customers who are buying the last 60 days, but not in the last 30 days. And it's very easy to change the buckets. Maybe you want to see customers who are buying the last three years, but not in the last year. Very easy to change and have that kind of insight. And actually those reports are available out of the box. Let me show one last example and then I'm going to show how easy it is to change reports on the fly. So let me open sales by geography report. So this dashboard shows me a map and it has bubbles, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. And the bubbles are sliced by colors that are represented by the size of the deal, the size of the invoices. And I can easily change this dashboard with slicers here I have by year and I can just click and see am I growing my sales in let's say, large deals over time? I just click here and I see if it's growing or declining. Very insightful, very easy. I also have on the left sales by rep. So I have my rep, bigger bars, bigger sales, and the profitability is also by the color scheme. And I also have my top five products by sales quantity shipped. Now if I'm the VP of sales and I'm meeting the west coast team, I can, let's say, take my fingers on my iPad, select only those three states. And when I do that, the report changes. So now it's showing only the salespeople selling to those three states and what products have been shipped to those three states. Very easy. If I choose one of these salespeople, let's say Sam. Now I see how much Sam is selling to those three states in what products is be shipping. So making changes like this is fairly straightforward. Most business people will learn how to do this with little training, maybe no training at all. Now, if I'm a power user and I want to extensively change a dashboard or create a new one from scratch, so if I'm a power user, I'll have the edit button. So if I'm a power user, I can use the edit button on my mobile devices. And when I click on the edit button, I go into the edit mode. And now I have full capabilities that I can change the dashboards extensively. I have all the dashboard, all the quadrants of the dashboard over here. And I can just come here, start to slice and dice and move things around. So let's say I see this report that's showing me sales by salesperson, customer name, product line, season, gross profit by year. Maybe it's too much information. I want to see less. I can just drag and drop. I don't want to see product line. There you go. I don't want to see customer. I just drag it out. I don't want to see even year, I just drag it out. Very easy to just drag and drop, maybe. No, I actually want to see some of those things I want to see. Let's seal my product. I go to the product list and I get item description. I just drag and drop whatever I want, let's say in my rows. So there you go. Buy salesperson by product, sales and gross profit. Maybe when I see, you know, again by year, by quarter, by month, I can just drag and drop, let's say to my columns. So there you go. I have by year, sales and gross profit, maybe you want to change the order? Put it over here. This tool was designed by Stanford University professors who studied how business people look at business business data and have insights from it. As you may know, it's a journey. It's a process. Business people, when they want to see a new report, they have an idea of what they want to see. But until they see the report, they don't know the details. And that's why it takes interaction with the data. And that's why if you're not using this kind of technology, you have to ask a consultant, an IT person. It may take forever, it may take several interactions until the report is ready to. It is what it is. It's a journey. This tool was designed by these Stanford University professors who came up with this software engine that helps decision makers to walk through this journey with no assistance from it. In our experience, more than 70% of the customer reporting needs of the average business user, they can do it by themselves. They can take this tool and just slice and dice it and build new reports and dashboards from scratch as needed. It's very impressive. All right, so that was my quick presentation. I hope you have enjoyed the Ferrari drive. Talking about Ferraris, we have a promotion and right now, because you have attended this webinar, you're getting a drawing ticket to race a Ferrari on us in Vegas in July. So if you want to increase your odds of driving the Ferrari on us, racing a Ferrari on us, you can actually do the following. If you follow us on Twitter, you get an extra ticket. If you follow us on LinkedIn, you get an extra ticket. Join ticket. If you mention us in social media, you get more tickets. If you evaluate us, you get more tickets. And if you buy, subscribe, you get even more tickets. So if you want to have, you know, increase your chances to drive or to race a Ferrari in Vegas in July, you know it's going to be during Summit, Sage Summit, interact with us and increase your chances. That's going to be a very fun event. Well, if you have questions now, please use the chat in box on GoToMeeting and I'm going to be addressing some of these questions. Let's see if we have questions. Yes, we have some questions here. First question is from Philip. What Sage 500 versions do you work with Philip? Good question. Actually, let me show you the answer by. Oopsie. Sorry. Going to our website. So even if you don't remember my answer, you'll be able to find that later. So go to our website, datasoft.com and you go to sage500 solution we have here. We support sage500 from the version 5.0, so older version all the way to the latest. Philip, thanks for your question. Another question here. Question from Laura what is the price of data? Self analytics. Laura, thanks for your question. So pricing as I mentioned can vary significantly based on your needs. We have three pricing models. You can subscribe on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, or you can buy the solution. And if you go with the monthly subscription, which is the more affordable one, you can literally start the solution paying hundreds of dollars per month. So it's really affordable. Also you'll be requiring some services to deploy the solution. So if you go with the monthly fee, most likely going to be spending a few thousand dollars between the licenses and the service to get installed, tested and trained. So it's really affordable for the kind of functionality you get. And by the way, pricing is influenced by number of users, how many data sources you have. Maybe you have Sage 500 and you have sales logics and things of that nature. So all of those components influence pricing. And if you don't know more details, I'll be glad to talk on a one on one basis. Laura, thanks for your question. Let's see more questions here. So one question here is can users create new measures? The question is from John. John, thanks for your question. So absolutely there is a desktop client which is the author tool and the users who are desktop client that use the desktop client, which are considered the authors, they can create new measures. They can create new measures and then publish them to the server and then people will be able to use those measures for new reports and dashboards. John, thanks for your question. Well, we are running out of time now. We'll be addressing other questions on a one on one basis. I want to thank you for your time and interest. You can find here my cell phone information, my email, my Twitter. Please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Interact with us. Call us if you have any questions about our solution or about analytics and data warehousing overall. We'll be here to assist you. I hope you have a great day, a great Thursday and looking forward to interact with you in the near future. Thank you. Have a great day.