BI for MS Dynamics - DataSelf and Tableau
Johnny Girardi demonstrates DataSelf's data warehouse and Tableau analytics for Dynamics customers. Labor costs dominate BI spending, and success requires the right platform, BI expertise, and engaged decision-makers. The demo covers sales dashboards, geographic maps, and cash-flow reporting.
Chapters
Get started. Let's start with. You know this. The total cost of BI will surprise you. Hopefully this session will shed some light into that perspective and also educate you about some options. And also about Data Self and Tableau. The session revolves around BI for Microsoft Dynamics. We cover all Dynamics products, you know, 365AX, GP, CRM, NAV, SL. We also cover other products such as Salesforce, Sage and whatnot. But this session is mostly focused on the Dynamics world and talking also about Data Self and Tableau. Thanks for joining. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm Data Self's founder and CEO and we'll start talking a little bit about the successful BI journey. Then I'll jump into Data Self and then we'll have a Q and A session. First of all, welcome. If you're embracing BI, it's a great time. I'm passionate about BI. I've been doing this for 17 years, myself and my team in dataself for 12 years and we're finally seeing a great momentum in the mid market. Embracing bi. Companies now have their systems, their dynamics, collecting data, providing some functionality, some reporting. But people are really trying to get more out of the systems, have better information, more informed decisions about the operations. And BI can really help your management, your decision makers to go to the next level, having Data anytime, anywhere make more informed decisions. So it's a really great time. Now let's talk about the cost of BI and how that might surprise you. Recently a Tableau did a research in the Fortune 2000 world, checking how much money a company invests in BI software in labor in the course of three years. This particular survey, and there's a link at the bottom here that you can find more details and I'll share this information later by email with you. But this research also compared the same scenario looking at Tableau as the analytics software versus Power bi. Anyhow, as you can tell here in this chart, in the course of three years, the investment in the platform is a small section, a small portion of the total investment. Most of it is in labor. We did our own research in our client base and what we found out at the end of the day is for every dollar that a company invests in the BI software, in the course of three years, it will take three to 35. That's not a typo. Three to $35 in labor to get the job done. Is that good or bad? It depends. If the project's not very successful, that's horrible. It's a lot of money not being really used. However, What I have seen, and we have done hundreds of BI deployments, is if the company is really getting user traction, their decision makers are really using BI to get better, more informed decisions in a more timely fashion. Boy, that's exciting. The decision makers, the people who set the budgets, they'll see BI one of the best tools to provide them with insights into trends that are critical to make the operation more efficient. So they will do investment in bi. They'll put more labor, more software as needed because they're getting the return. So, you know, it may be bad if it's not successful, but if it's successful, it's normal for business. Put a lot of money into it in labor and services. Now, why three to 35 in labor? Throughout this presentation, I'll talk a little bit, a little bit more, and hopefully I can help you bring your labor investment to the lower end of the curve, not so much to the high end, which is usually the standard. So one of the main things I like to talk with people about is the ingredients for a successful BI journey. Of course the BI platform is critical and is what a lot of people focus on is the BI platform. In last week or two weeks. Last week I was in Nashville at Microsoft's summit event in speaking with many Microsoft Dynamics clients and I asked them what they were using. They're saying, oh, we're using Power bi, of course. Saying, of course. Why? Well, it comes with the Microsoft is the perfect fit. Well, it might be, yes, and it's inexpensive. But is it the right fit? A lot of people didn't have made an assessment to see if Power BI or JET or Data, whatever it is. If it's. They just picked a platform that came along because someone told them and they just moved along with it. And that's not the right assessment. You should look at the options. There are many options, different pricing, different investment, and you should see which one will make the best for your business. So selecting the right BI platform is critical and don't take it for granted looking at only cost, there's a lot of components to look at it. Second is, do you have BI expertise to get the job done properly? I've seen a lot of BI projects failing because the organization didn't have the right expertise to put the job together. Some companies hire people, some companies get a third party to help. The point is, be sure to select the right BI platform and then be sure to have the right expertise to help you get this deployed properly. Otherwise it can take a long time and a lot of frustration. If you don't have the right expertise. Finally, and actually one of the most important components is to have decision makers properly engaged. It looks funny, it looks obvious, but quite often it's actually not. Many decision makers are not very tech savvy and they think BI is just another of these complicated IT projects that they don't really understand. So just tell me what kind of money you need and I'll say yes or no. No, that's not the way to go. Actually, BI is one of the few IT projects where decision makers should be heavily involved because at the end of the day, they are one of the top beneficiaries of this investment. They need to understand the options, the pros and cons of the options and the cost so they can set the right budget. If they are properly engaged, they're not going to give you too little or not too much money. They're going to give you the right money because you understand the pros and cons of the options and get the project moving forward. It's not about the cost, is about the benefit. And BI can give you a lot of benefit if you have decision makers properly engaged. So be sure that you have these three things really well covered and if you do, I can guarantee you your odds of success are going to go right up to the top. If any of these things are not proper, it might not be so successful. The cost goes up and failure rates goes up as well. So these are very important ingredients. Now most organizations, when they start with bi, they can start quick and easy. They get a product like Power, bi, Tableau, Domo, Jet and whatnot. They connect with the data source and they get the ball rolling. Yes, at the beginning works, but pretty much organizations have many different data sources. They have the Dynamics erp, they have a CRM, could be again, Dynamics, Salesforce, you name it. They have Google Analytics, they have payroll and Excel sheets and SQL databases. They have a lot of data sources. Systematically, as you move forward, you will need a data warehouse to bring the data together. You need to bring all of these different data silos into a single data repository where all the data will come from for the decision making process. It will be very easy to see everything together for a 360 view of the organization. In the data warehouse, you can define the rules so you have a single version of the truth. If you look at revenues, gross profit, there's a single place you can define in the data warehouse how those KPIs are calculated. Now every report and dashboard will derive those calculations from the single location. So you can guarantee a single version of the truth much more easily using a data warehouse speed. If you want to see your reports running in seconds, pretty much you'll need a data warehouse. And finally, overall it's much easier to do reporting than analysis. If you have a data warehouse now, users will usually access your information using some kind of UI tool like an analytics platform. Now most business users, they're not IT savvy and they need something that is first of all easy to use. Most business people, if you give a tool that requires too many clicks, they will not learn it, they will not use it, will be a waste of your time, a waste of your money. So try to find the easiest to use tool to empower these busy people so that they can focus on what they know and and not necessarily in learn complex BI technology. So ease of use is the number one criteria when selecting the BI tools to push information to your users. Second speed people are not patient today. As a rule at Data Self we tell if a report or dashboard will take longer than 10 seconds. Most business people will not wait in this report. That will be a waste of time. So you have to guarantee that most reports will run in a few seconds regardless of how much data you have. So be sure you have a data warehouse in the right analytics platform to guarantee speed is also very critical. Finally, you need to have a platform that will provide information in different formats. You know, people have different working styles, some people sit on a desk on their computer all the time, some people have notebooks, they use web browser on different devices or they use mobile devices. They want to receive information by email and whatnot. So be sure that your analytics platform will deliver information in different ways. Provide people with self service consumption of data, provides alerts and all kind of functionality so they can consume the data that they want that they are okay with. Not the way that you want to push them, but the way that they feel comfortable with. So variety of options is very critical. Now when you have all of these great BI pieces in place, again you need BI expertise. You need people that know your data sources, your dynamics, your erp, your CRM, Google Analytics, your payroll and whatnot that knows how to bring this data to a data warehouse, massage the data consolidated, optimize it, then knows your analytics platform then knows how to put all of this together and give value to decision makers and business users. So expertise is very critical and be sure you have that as part of your team or as a partner to augment your BI initiatives. So those slides were a little bit about generic education, about bi. Now let me talk about Data Self and I'm showing here Gartner Gardner Magic Quadrant. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment for Fortune 2000. In every February they tell how well BI Ventures are doing the Fortune 2000 world. Make a long story short, Tableau and Microsoft for several years in a row have been considered the leaders, the best platform out there overall. The most mature probably are very familiar with Microsoft. Maybe not so much with Tableau, but Tableau has been considered the gold standard in the analytics platform for five years in a row. They have set the bar when it comes to analytics platform in pretty much everyone's trying to catch up with them, but so far they continue to be the gold standard. And that's exactly what we do, that's what we bring to the market. Let me show our architecture. So looking from this architecture that I just talked about, we use SQL Server for data warehousing. So very industry standard, one of the best platforms out there. However, instead of using SQL programming, stored procedures, integration services, we have built our own extraction transformation loading tool that allow us or whoever's maintaining this data warehouse to do the job in a fairly code free environment, so easier and faster to do all of the benefits of data warehousing then on the analytics platform about six years ago we have chosen Tableau. Tableau was not yet back then the gold standard. They were not yet, but when we assess them with many other top BI vendors by far we thought they were the easiest to use by a far margin and one of the fastest when it comes to deliver information to end users. So we embrace them and we're so happy that since right after we embraced them they became the gold standard and since then they continue to be the gold standard and anyone else is trying to catch up with them. So it's awesome to have one of the best technologies out there to empower decision makers. Now we've been doing this for 12 years as a team and in the course of 12 years we've seen clients asking us for different reports and dashboards. And early on in our business we decided to hey, let's just start building these reports and dashboards out of the box so when a client gets data self, they don't need to start new reports from scratch. They just keep on getting the out of the box, hopefully addressing a lot of their questions and they can easily customize them because we started to build those reports and dashboards out of the box in 12 years. Today the out of the box has more than 5,000 5,000 reports and dashboards covering payables, receivables, financials, inventory, purchasing, sales, sales order services, manufacturing, CRM, opportunity, contact management, Google Analytics. There's a lot of reports to get started. So we dramatically reduce the time it takes for companies to have a 360 view of the organization. A lot of things out of the dynamics world and other systems are covered out of the box so you can focus on analyzing your data and not building things from scratch. Everything from scratch. So in a nutshell, that's what we do now when I'm going to jump into the product to show Data Self analytics with the tableau user interface and I'm going to talk a little scenario of one of our clients. The CEO and the CIO called me a few years ago and then what they told me in a nutshell was for the CEO told me, johnny, we are a very, we're growing aggressively year over year. My management team is very data driven. We love to look at data before we make decisions and it's been challenging. You know, we ask for a lot of new reports, a lot of dashboards all the time and quite often we have new questions about our operations and we don't have the report ready and we ask it and it's going to take hours, sometimes days to get that report. So too often we have to either wait until we get the information to make decisions and that can be a long time, or we have to wing it. Either way, waiting or winging is no longer working. We got to get out of this and get something that we the decision makers can easily start to spin different reports and dashboards, license them, do drilling down, creating reports without having to wait for someone else. The CIO told me, sorry Johnny, we don't have an issue with expertise. You know, my team, I have a great IT team in many of them are working pretty much all the time with reports and dashboards, trying to keep up with the demand from the management team. But it's being very labor intensive, very slow overall and most importantly, it's such a pity to have these highly skilled IT people doing reports and dashboards all the time. I mean they have studied for so long, college and all of this experience to be building reports and dashboards is something that we want to push to end users. So both of them put these main problems on the table. Make a long story short, Data self was a good fit. They invested into it and now years later, they are very happy. What I'm going to show you now is some of the things that they have been doing. I'm also going to show a little bit of the financial side for the CFO and how easy the framework is. So what I'm going to start with the presentation is actually one of the reports, one of the dashboards that the CEO uses every month. He goes to a board meeting every month to show the status of the business and one of the dashboards that he's using before Data Self was done by it. And every month at the end of the month IT marketing other people would spend about two days to get that dashboard properly refreshed with the latest information. I'm going to show how the CEO actually created the dashboard by himself in how that's working today. So I'm going to show you that first, the CEO building a dashboard. Some do it, some will not, but some CEOs will take the time to learn and do it. So once we deploy Data Self, he came to the Data Self desktop could be also done on the web and mobile devices, but he came to the desktop and he needs to build this dashboard that has three main pieces of information. One is detailed sales this month, sales by customer, by product. They sell products in the US and Canada. So they need to see detailed information this month by customer, product and invoice number. Then he needs to see sales and website visitors trends and see how website campaigns are affecting their sales in the long run. In the third part of the dashboard is a geography analysis change checking how much they're selling by state and how are the big, small and medium sized businesses or deals across the territories. Everything on a dashboard. I'm going to show how he built this from scratch. So he came to this data cell desktop. The first thing is he has to select what is the data source he's going to be working with in here I'm showing some of these data sources available out of the box. As I mentioned we have a par, CRM, Google Analytics, gl, inventory, manufacturing, purchasing, whatnot. He chose revenues. All of these three pieces of information come from the revenues of his business. And then he sees his dimensions, customers, products and the measures. Now that he's connected to this data source pretty much as a matter of dragging and dropping to build these new reports and dashboards. So the first report is detailed sales by customer this month. So he comes to the dimension list, find customer. He take customer name drags and drop into the report. So these. Oopsie, Sorry. Before I do that, let me just show something. This sample database has 31 million records. I'm just showing you this because even though I'm going to be building things from scratch here and it's going to run in seconds is because, well, we're working with a framework that runs reports in seconds regardless of how much data you have. So 31 million records on the fly right now. So back to my exercise. Sorry, a little bit of the distraction, the detour. But I want to see customers. So customer name, I drag and drop. These are all customers that I have in the sample database. I want to see sales. Sales is here, drag and drop in the report. So what I'm looking right now is total sales by customer in the whole company history. Let me see my top customer at the very top. So these are my top customers in the whole company history. Well, I want to see sales this month. So let me take invoice date and add to my columns. So right now I'm seeing by customer sales in the whole company history. Well, I want to see by month. Well, I can expand from year and expand the year to go to the quarter level. So now I'm seeing sales by quarter. I can expand quarter and I'm seeing sales by month. And I can expand to go to weeks, to days, to hours, fiscal period, whatever time bucket that you want to drill down from the top to the bottom, we can build those structures and allow decision makers to easily drill down from top to the bottom, from any direction to any direction, just by using this expand functionality. Very intuitive and very fast. Now, the CEO wants to see only this month's data. They want to see everything. So I want to filter this report. I just come to the invoice, date, drag and drop into my filters and then the tool asks me how I want to filter this information by date. I can choose different time buckets, but I'm going to choose relative date, which is very popular because I can tell to show me month in always this month. And there it is. Now, this report, we always show this month, regardless of what the month is and why. Well, the CEO goes to the board meetings at the end of the month. He doesn't need to change the filter. It's always showing this month worth of data. And if he wants to change the report later for a different period, he just clicks here and hey, I want to see last month instead. There it is. Maybe the last, I don't know, three months, four, two months maybe. I want to see, you know, quarters, years, weeks, days. Very easy, very intuitive. Just pick and choose and you get the answer. But let me go back to this month. Okay, so I'm seeing sales by customer in this month. I want to see sales by customer, by product, by invoice number. I just have to drag and drop. So I go back here, I find product, I get product description. Let's say drag and drop between customer and sales and there it is by customer by product I see my sales. What if I want to see invoice number, salesperson, warehouse, whatever. You just drag and drop. Invoice number is right here. I drag and drop between my customer, product and that's it. Many of my clients users have learned how to build a report by watching my demo. If you know how to drag and drop it, you can do it. So pretty intuitive, pretty straightforward. This report that I'm showing you right now, it has 317,000 rows. It's a very huge report, but still is running seconds because I'm working with a top notch, super fast engine. If you try to do this 317,000 rows in another tool sometimes good luck and wait. And will your business people wait until it finishes to load it? I don't know. With our framework it's much faster, it's very fast. All right, this is the first report. The second report is geography. I'm sorry, the second report is the CEO wants to see website campaigns affecting sales over time. So what he did, he double click sales. This is the total sales, the whole company history. He double clicked invoice date. So right now he's seeing sales by year and then I want to see actually by month. So he chose show sales by month and now he sees the whole company history, sales by month. Well, he wants to see how website visitors from Google Analytics are affecting sales. Because when they have website campaigns, website visitors have spikes and then they see the changes in sales down the road. This is not their data, I'm just showing the idea. But it's kind of similar. Before data self, his IT team and marketing were working more than a day getting data from Google Analytics put into Excel, getting sales from their ERP system, putting Excel, massaging the data and plotting and eventually getting into the hands of the CEO was a slow, time consuming process. With Dataself we actually brought website visitors from Google Analytics into the sales or the revenues connector. We use invoice date equals to website visitor and also the geography from the client with where the click came from on Google Analytics. Once we connected those dots, then we only added website visitors or website visits as an additional metric. In the revenues connector is a completely different data source but in the data warehouse is blended into the decision maker. Once it's blended, once it's vetted, it's automatically refreshed every day. And now the CEO just have to drag and drop. That's what he did. He took website visitors, he added to the report. So these are website visitors or visits. He chose a bar to make it really clear that it's different than my sales. And he told let's put this on a dual axis and that's it. Orange bars, website visits, blue line sales. And now he can see that when they have these spikes in website campaigns, website visits because of the website campaigns, how long is taking for actually that translate into sales. So completely automated report. Now every day they can open this and see what's the latest. The last report is geography analysis. Anything that has an address you can put on a map. So he picked the customer state it could be shipped to. Could be anything that has an address. He picked invoice size to see how big the deals are in sales and told put this on a map and there it is on a map. Let's make the bubbles a little bigger. So bigger bubbles, bigger sales. And the bubbles are sliced by these colors that are the aggregation of small, medium, large invoices on each state. So in a few clicks, in a few minutes, he actually built these three different views. And then he came and say, hey, now I want to put all of these views in a dashboard. So he comes here and I want to see the map drag and drop, I want to see the trend analysis just drag and drop. Let's put at the bottom and let's put the detailed report on the top left corner. In a few clicks he built from scratch this dashboard. And then now it's completely automated. He published to his web portal. And now when they are in these board meetings, sometimes a board member would ask a question, hey, you know, I'm visiting the west coast, how are we doing over there? In the past, you know, if the CEO didn't have this question answered, he would have to make notes and I'll get back to you. Nowadays sometimes this question doesn't even come up because that board member already has access to the dashboard, to the dashboards and he can find the answer himself. But some of the board members are kind of old fashioned paper based so they don't have these devices and they still ask sometimes these questions. And then the CEO he actually uses an iPad. He comes here, oh, you want to see the west Coast. He just on his iPad he selects the west coast and then automatically the dashboard will change to whatever he selected. He take export this into a PDF sends to that board member by email, answer the question and what's next. So with this framework now, they are so much more empowered that the CEO told me that a lot of their questions that in the past you have to rely on it to get an answer. Now they get the answer on the fly using the mobile devices and computers, completely independent from the IT team for those ad hoc analysis. Very empowering and very fast. I just showed you how easy it is to build something from scratch. In this case, I used a CEO example. But let me show you how most people will consume reports and dashboards. They go to a web portal, it can be a cloud web portal, it can be a our SaaS cloud can be tableau, it can be your own private cloud, it can be on premises. We support cloud on premise and hybrid deployment. So we support whatever you need. We have different pieces of the puzzle to support you there. Anyhow, a user, let's say, is going to be using the web browser as a way to connect to the portal. So they come and they sign in using a secured portal and then they would land into their main page. You can select every user, can define what will be the landing page. What I'm showing you right now is the CFO landing page. This is actually from a different company, but this CFO dashboard is a very interesting story. This other organization, about six months after they deployed Dataself, the CFO was the champion of the project and he actually got fairly involved in a lot of the pieces and coordinating them and he learned how to build reports and dashboards. In six months into this project, he decided to build his own CFO dashboard. And he already went through a lot of learning and attending some of our webinars, talking about best practices. And to me, this is impressive of this dashboard. First of all, it's kind of busy. Yes, when you look at the first time, it's kind of busy. But keep in mind is a focused dashboard for a person who looks at this every single day. So eventually it becomes simple as you look at the same thing over and over and over. What he did on this left column is what is called leading metrics. They have key performance indicators looking into the future. And one of the main things is the cash flow projection. So what he has is these are the open receivables in the next 60 days. These are the open payables in the next 60 days, how much is expected to pay in payroll, how much money they have today in the bank. And when he combines all of this inbound Outbound money. He has the projected cash flow for the next 60 days. And this is like a line of credit. So as long as the projection doesn't go beyond his line of credit, no worries. So right there he has very quickly a simple glimpse into the next day, next six days cash flow projection. And sometimes he got a call, hey, the payment that was coming on this day actually is not coming because something is wrong. And he comes here and say, well, let me see, what if I exclude this payment? And then, oh, we are over the credit limit. What are we going to do about it? So very interactive, very simple for him to do what if scenarios in his cash flow to be sure they're not going to run out of money. Now this whole left column has also some other things into the future that you can still affect your leading KPIs. This is orders to ship by customer. This is hot new opportunities from the CRM. New opportunities that are above 75% chances of closing the next 60 days. This is AR aging things that I'm supposed to receive and how are the aging of them. This other section here shows this whole right side is about lag. KPIs, KPIs looking at your past or today's performance. Things you can no longer change. They are settled. This shows revenues last year and this year side by side. Some averages, some geography analysis. All of these things very interactive. So right now I chose only the East Coast. I can see more details. I can easily drill down in to see what's going on with the website visitors. There's also financial information, kind of balance sheet information, expenses, colors. If it's red, meaning something is not good, it's beyond my budget, so I have to work on it. Another red meaning my inventory on hand is beyond my maximum. And if I click on these things, very interactive. Now I go into inventory, assets. I see again the status not good. I seen on my financials how the assets are by different business unit. And this is the actual cost on hand for my top 10 products. And if I put the mouse over, it changes things and it shows how much I'm having of each one of these top products in each one of my warehouses. Anyhow, this is a dashboard the CFO created himself. In the course of a month, he spent about 16 hours going through the discovery, plotting, changing the look and feel, trying to simplify. And he told me that he uses this every single day. When he opens his browser, he pops this dashboard. He has a glimpse of how things are doing, he takes some actions and then he Goes about his day. Very simple, very straightforward. Again, a little cluttered or busy for people who are not used to, but once you use this every day, usually very quickly, he look at this, he knows what's going on and he can make decisions. So a very simple report dashboard completely built by the cfo. Now, the data Cell framework, we cover several different types of analytics. We can have financials, product and losses, balance sheet, you can look in web browse. You can also use an Excel format. You know, some people prefer to have their financials or some reports in the Excel framework. We absolutely support Excel as well. Even though the Tableau web mobile framework is usually easier, faster, more flexible. But it's not our decision, it's whatever the client wants. We can have what if scenarios, actuals and budgets, all sorts of different analysis. Alerts is a new functionality that has been built more recently into Tableau. And to me one of the most important things of BI is being easy to use. When I look at the Alerts functionality that Tableau did, I'm really impressed by how easy it is for a decision maker to make the whole process completely without assistance. Let's say I look at this dashboard, it's showing revenues, oopsie, revenues and gross profit. The gross profit are the orange bar or the orange bubbles and the revenues are the blue bars. And suppose I want to set an alert that every time the gross profit goes above or below a certain threshold, I want to receive an email. I don't have to come back to this dashboard. I want to receive an email with a notification. When that happens, what should I do? I click gross profit. That is my criteria. And there's an alerts icon right there on my face. There's no way to miss it. Even if I didn't pay attention to the training, I can see, hey, there's an alert. I click alerts and then there's a very simple wizard telling me, do you want to set the condition above equal to below? You just change the condition of the alert. You put the threshold 0.6 and, and as you change the threshold, you can see the red bar here changes accordingly. So I'm going to put 0.55. So that's the threshold. What's going to be the subject of this email? It's alerts, gp, whatever. And when do you want to receive it? Only the first time it happens. And then who's going to be receiving it? Well, I'm going to be receiving it plus Joe and that's it. Completely self service. I do not need even training to do this by him, by myself. The good news is when these alerts happens, I'm going to receive an email like this one. So I'm just simulating what happened. It shows I received the alert, it went above 55%. And suppose that as the user I say, okay, great, I no longer need this alert. Do I need to tell someone else to disable it? No, I come here and say, removing from this alert. Or maybe I forward this alert to someone else. I send it to Mary. Mary, check this out. And Mary, look at this alert. Oh my God, I need to be part of this alert as well. Does she need to ask anyone to be added to the alerts? No, she just clicked add me to this alert. And now from this point on, she will also receive the alert. But maybe you want to change the alert. You just click edit this alert, you go right back into that little wizard, you change the parameter and that's it. Completely self service. And it's very, very intuitive. This is one of the beauties of Tableau. They really work hard and think deeply before they incorporate new features. But when they do, they make it easy. They make things that business people can actually do it without sometimes training or with very little training. Alrighty, that was my presentation. Let me go Back to my PowerPoint now. At the very beginning, I told you that the total cost of BI will surprise you. And I talked about that. It takes from three to $35 of labor in the course of three years or for every dollar that you invest in software. If you go and read this survey in this study, it actually shows that Tableau in this particular survey was about $9 of labor for every dollar invested in Tableau. The company using Power BI was actually about 35 for every dollar invested. Is that the rule? No, of course not. Power BI is also a great tool. And when it's the right fit is just the right fit for this organization. Tableau was the right fit. And that's why it was so much more efficient. Even though Tableau is significantly more cost in a way than Power BI in this case. But because was the right fit in three years, $9 versus 35 is a big change. So the total cost of ownership in this case of tableau was about 25% less than power BI. So the message is don't pick a tool because it is cheap or because it came with my product. Pick a BI tool that is the right fit. Be sure to have people that knows BI to help you select the right tool. Embrace it and good luck because it's going to be awesome. Now what about the $3? Well, when we got this survey from Tableau, I was like, no. Wow, this is amazing information. In my 17 years in this industry, I became an expert in BI, passionate about BI. And I always heard from many organizations that a lot of their costs in BI was actually labor. And this kind of put some figures to it. And then I was thinking, what about Data Self? What's happening with our client base? Is it the same ratio? You know, 1 to 9, $1 in software to 9 in services? I was pretty sure it would be better. And then we actually did our own Data Self total cost of ownership survey among our clients in the course of three years. And we have the result from eight of our clients. We have hundreds, but only eight of them answered. The good news is, you know, from very large clients to small clients, investment and every line of this bar is from a particular client in the colors show how much money they invest in three years. So blue is actually the analytics software that mostly is Tableau but we also have some others, but mostly Tableau investment. The green is how much they paid for our own software. And then the orange, different colors is for different type of services invested. Very interesting information. So you can help look at your own projects. And this can be very insightful as far as allocation of resources as moving forward. Now the interesting thing is for every dollar invested in the analytics software in three years, which is the same thing as Tableau did organization invest in BI from 9 to 35 looking at purely Tableau and Microsoft. And with data self, 2 to 5. So with data Self is a lot less labor to get the same value. The question is why? How can we do it? Well, how can we deliver lower tco? First of all, because we have top ranked enterprise grade bi. So if our framework is a good fit for you, if you need SQL Server data warehousing, if Tableau is a good fit for you, well we have a great top ranked framework. Second, we have the Data Warehouse that is already mature and developed for Dynamics, erp, CRM. A lot of different systems, you don't have to start from scratch and we have more than 5,000 reports that's with KPIs. So a lot of that plumbing work, developing a new report, security, starting everything from scratch, a lot of the work is done. What you need to do is to just specifically make adjustments based on your unique needs. I'm sure you need, if you're looking at, if you sell products to customers, I'm sure you want to see a lot of sales report by customer, by salesperson, by territory, maybe by product, by services. Is it growing? Is it declining? Do you have any inventory? A lot of those questions are answered out of the box. That's why it takes so much less effort and labor in the course of three years to deliver value. Because a lot of things are really pre configured. And finally, my team is expert. You were expert in the dynamics, data sources and other competing data sources. We're experts in data warehousing. We're expert in tableau. We're expert in putting all of these pieces together. We're experts in delivering value to decision makers. I tell people that if this platform is the right fit for you, my team is the best out there. We are far from perfect. No, we're not perfect. We're not perfect at all. But I can guarantee you we are the best. We are really, really good at what we are, what we do. We rarely ask for more money in our projects and we usually deliver on time and on budget. So we're really good at it. Having said that, you can tell I'm passionate. I'm going to open questions. Please use the GoToWebinar panel to ask your questions and I'll be addressing them right now. Let's see if we have questions. All right, there are questions here. Question from Peter. How do you compare Power BI and Tableau? Peter, awesome question. Actually in Nashville I had a session which was Tableau versus Power bi. Actually was called Power Bi versus Tableau and Data Self. And I make a comparison side by side of the pros and cons of both products. Both Tableau and Power Bi are excellent products. Make a long story short, Tableau has been around for about a little bit over 15 years. Power BI for a little over 2 years or so as a standalone product. In the enterprise world, maturity plays a big role. Tableau is super stable, super fast, super easy to use. Again, for the past five years in a row it has been considered the gold standard. All. I wouldn't say all, but most other analytics platforms trying to catch up with Tableau because of their being successful. Power BI is improving fast every month. More features, better, but still has a lot of limitations. I'm actually recording a video comparing both side by side based on what I covered in the summit event. And if you go to our to data self YouTube video and you subscribe, you know, be sure to subscribe. You have a lot of good content. And by the way, let me go there very quickly. If you are in the bi world, I highly recommend you to poke in our YouTube channel. There's a lot of good content. Let me go to Data Self here very quickly. Sorry. Go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. Every month we have videos about different things that are valuable. We might have too many videos for you to watch here. So I also tell people, go to our website, dataself.com go to resources and go to demo videos right here. Going to find a few videos that are very informative, like Data Visualization 101. This is a recording for about a month or so ago that shows simple tricks and techniques that you should use when building reports and dashboards to make them more engaging, insightful. So be sure to subscribe to our YouTube and visit our website to learn about those things. Anyhow, back to your question, Peter. I'm sorry. So we are currently always assessing BI tools. Which ones are becoming better than Tableau, Power bi. I'm very excited because it seems to be going the right direction, but there's still many pieces of it that are in our assessment are still not ready for the kind of clients that we work with. For now, we are very happy with Tableau. It's a little bit more expensive. Yes, but it's a little bit more expensive. It's. Oh, it's so expensive. No, no, it's not so expensive. It's a little bit more expensive. When you look in three years, the cost of the software, if you go with Power BI and Tableau is dropping the bucket. The cost of the software is not your main investment, it's labor. Be sure you select the right BI platform. If it is Power bi, go for it. If it's not, you better go with something else. So choose the right BI platform and then I can guarantee you the odds of being successful go so much higher because value to business labor to get it done. So make a long story short, watch out for our videos that I'm going to make this comparison very comprehensive comparison of of both tools and you can make your decision of which one might be a good fit for you. Most importantly, I tell to all of the people who ask me questions, again, I'm an expert in the subject and I love to talk with people about BI and I love to tell people, hey, if the best fit is another product, is it Jet is a Microsoft BI is Domo. I'll tell you, go with them. I don't do business with you unless I am the right fit. If my platform is not the right fit, I will tell you who else might be. And if you are the right fit. Boy, I'm passionate And I'm excited because we can help you get the job done much more quickly for a much lower cost than if you try to do it using any other approach. So feel free to send me an email. Hey Johnny, I'm still confused. I watched the webinar, but my needs are specific. Give me a call, I'll be glad to talk and I will learn a little bit from your projects, from your experience, you learn a little bit from mine and hopefully we'll make the world a little better. All right, Peter, thanks for your question. Let me see more questions here. We have a bunch of questions. Let me see here. So who is asking this? This is coming from George. Are there other non Microsoft SQL database sources that your ETL platform integrates to out of the box? You mentioned a few names here, George. First of all, our ETL can work with any non SQL Server database. It's a pure etl. We can pull data from any data source. I'll send you an email specifically to talk about your needs because I think this conversation is so much better covered once we talk on a one on one basis. So I'll contact you later and we'll take the conversation offline. But by the way, George, thanks for your question. Next question, there's also from George, your TCO chart. 3 years 39,000 to 850 what drove costs to 100k and beyond, employee count, secure requirements, number of data sources. George, I can tell you've been around, you already started to poke into the right components. So let me go back to this chart here. And again if you learn more details about why some are so much bigger than others, it's a combination of factors. Our smaller clients, you know how many BI users they have? One. So our smaller clients, they have one. Our largest clients, they have thousands. So it's a wide range of user counts. So right there there's a big range of cost. Some clients, they only have a very simple data warehouse framework, let's say only sales analysis, they have nothing else because they only care about sales analysis. It's a very simple framework. Some other companies like you know, these bigger ones, they have erp, they have CRM, they have Google Analytics, they have payroll from someone else, they have some cloud based source, more complex projects, therefore more cost. So I'll be glad to discuss in more detail. I think most importantly is I can learn about what your environment is and give you an assessment based on our experience with hundreds of clients to tell what I believe your three year journey, how it might unfold. George, good question. Let's move to the next question. There's a question here for from Gary. So Gary is saying that he has a Navision 2009 asking if we support Navision 2009. Gary, thanks for your question. Actually, the way we have built our framework, we pretty much support all source systems that go all the way back to 1999. So if you have Dynamics, Sage, whatever system there is, pretty much starting about the year 2000 and forward, our framework will work with you right off the bat. So we have designed it to be backwards compatible. Is designed to be, you know, when you upgrade your nav from current version to a future version, whatever the versions are typically a good chunk of the the work is done automatically by the etl. So the ETL adjusts itself to the new version and pretty much we only have to tweak it manually for custom work. So that usually makes the upgrade process something that is completely automatic or usually very low demand in maintenance. The last thing I want to tell you guys is if you want to know what our out of the box solution looks like, you can go to my website, dataself.com and comes to Solutions and click 5000 KPIs. So click on this 5000 KPIs page. You get to this page, we explained a little bit about the reporting package we have for CRM for core financials, distribution, whatnot. You can click this download full list. It will download an Excel file that will show all individual reports available you have out of the box. So if you want to see, let's say sales, you click on sales, you go to this framework that shows here on the left how the data connector looks in the tableau framework. And here you have the list of all reports and dashboards. So if you expand this, you can see the name of the reports. So it's one way to take a look at the out of the box solution. If you click this Dashboard samples, you'll get a page with dashboard samples. So that's also informative. So there's a bunch of samples. But most importantly, what I really want you to do is if you want to learn more about data self about tableau data warehousing power, BI about your BI project, I'm excited to talk with you about it. You have my cell phone, my email here, feel free to contact me. I'm here first and foremost to be a source of education based on my experience to help you move forward more successfully. And again, if my framework, if my business can be a good fit, I can guarantee you we're going to have a great time. We're going to help you be much more successful regardless if you're in it, if you're a cio, if you're cfo, if you're CEO. We're here to augment your BI expertise and make it more successful. Thank you for joining us. I hope you have a great Wednesday today and feel free to contact me. Be sure to answer our survey after the gotowebinar to tell how we're doing and if you're interested in data self, be sure to contact me again. Thank you very much. Have a great day and thanks for joining us.
