Business intelligence for Sage X3 (Tableau / DataSelf) (v2)

Thanks for joining us. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm Data Sales founder and CEO and today we'll talk about business intelligence for Sage X3 and pretty much covering how to make a successful BI journey. Myself and my team, we've been doing BI for 17 years. We have deployed hundreds of successful BI projects and I want to share some of our learnings with you. So from an agenda standpoint, the initial part of the presentation, I'll talk about how to make a BI journey successful independently of what tools you use. I want to share what we have seen, pros and cons of different approaches. Then on the second part I'll talk about data Self's approach, why we do it, how we do it and how it works overall. We'll have a Q and A at the end and also we'll have a few polls to get some feedback from you. So typically, how does it start, how a BI journey starts? This is a pretty typical scenario of clients when they get to a point where they need to invest in bi. I'm just giving an example of one of our clients. When they called me a few years ago, distribution company here in California, the CEO and the CTO called me and pretty much what they told me was they had or they have several different data sources. They have an ERP system, actually was a Sage ERP system, CRM system, Google Analytics, payroll system, social media feeds in several Excel files. In all of these data silos they were source of information for reporting. And then the management people in different departments would be asking data and reports from all of these different data sources. It was a very slow process, very labor intensive. And the CEO told me in a nutshell, we need to have better access to data faster. We need to make decisions, informed decisions in a timely fashion. Can you help us? The CTO told me they're spending a lot of hours doing all those things and actually they have resources, they have many people working in it, but it's frustrating to actually tackle the business people requests. So in a nutshell, that's a very typical scenario where the goals of this BI journey, there's two sides. One is the business goals, one is the IT goals on the business side. Typically management want to easily access their data anytime, anywhere. Doesn't matter what device you're using, a desktop, a web browser on a notebook, or a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone, they want to have access to their data anytime, anywhere, securely. Also, quite often they need to change reports. You know, reports and dashboards might not give exactly the perspective that they want to. So they should be able, you know, the business people should be able to slice and dice reports, drill down, download the data, and even build new reports or dashboards from scratch. So it must be really easy so they can be empowered to make informed decisions anytime and anywhere. At the end of the day, decision makers want roi. They have certain money to invest in it, but most importantly, they need value from it. And every business has a different budget and pain points. So the ROI can vary significantly from company to company. But ROI at the end of the day is very critical for the it. The main goals is, first of all, they want something that is easy to deploy and to maintain. If it's complicated, if it's difficult, well, guess what, again, when business people are going to ask some requests that are not covered yet, it's going to take a while, it's going to be hard for it. So something easy to maintain is usually a big requirement for it. It's something that they can rely on, it's going to run, it's going to be up all the time. So reliability, a product that is really solid is very critical. Something like scale. A lot of the business that when they ask for bi, it means they have pains and usually growing pains. So being able to go up and wide and cover a lot of users really quickly, really fast is very important. And finally, you know, the tool must cover a broad range of BI needs. I mean, if you got a BI tool that, you know, when someone asks for something different, the BI tool doesn't support and you gotta add another product, it becomes eventually like a little monster with a lot of different pieces. So the wider the broader needs, the better. So there's a balance of finding those things. So these are the kind of the main goals for the BI journey. Now, one of the things I've seen consistently to make the BI journey successful, first of all, there are three ingredients. The first one is decision makers must be engaged with it. And this is kind of interesting. A lot of the times when people start into the BI journey actually is the IT people or the accounting people that are actually struggling to keep up the reports. So they initiate a search for a BI tool. So it's very natural. Maybe it's not the business people requiring a BI investment, but the people delivering the reports and they want to make their lives easier. But overall, the BI journey will be very successful. When the decision makers are engaged, they see the value. They understand how this BI investment will add value across the whole organization, not only for one department, for everyone, and they will Help IT define what the actual solution is. It knows the data, knows the databases, but they don't know the business usually. And it's the opposite for the business side. They know the business, they don't know the IT and the databases. So once you have the decision makers engaged in helping define the BI platform, that's an important ingredient to have a successful BI journey. The second component or ingredient is the BI platform. Sometimes people start with a BI platform that seems to fit the needs for now, the next month, maybe year or two, but at one point it becomes completely outdated, too small, too clunky, too slow, and they have to revamp, scratch and start all over again. So the right BI platform for your needs is also usually a critical component to make the BI successful journey successful. And third, and usually one of the most critical also is the expertise to deploy and to maintain the BI platform. We see many companies where when they start selecting the bi, they try to do it all by themselves without getting assistance from some people that really know bi, know their data sources to find the right fit. So expertise is critical. Having people that knows bi, that knows your data sources, that know business like yours to get you on track on the right BI platform, on the right journey early on is usually very critical. At the end of the day, it's all about results. So I'm going to start a quick poll if you don't mind entering. Please pick. What are your main reporting challenges? You can select as many as you feel you have. Be sure to click the submit button. Submit button. Five more seconds. Thank you very much. Just sharing quickly the results. So the crude use is the biggest. Slow performance data silos are the other two. Thank you. Okay, so what is the most common beginning of a BI journey? This is like no natural. People just usually go for it because they have, let's say ERP, Sage X3. And then reporting is now working. The reporting that comes with it is now working for your needs. What usually people do, they call the Sage reseller and they ask what can we do better? And the most default, without much thinking is, well, let's check what CX3 has for BI and let's just add it. It's completely natural for people to do. This is the path of least resistance. Just get what you have in the system. But with this approach, what happens is you have several systems and you're going to be asking for each of those systems for the ERP system, for your CRM system, for your payroll, whatever you have for, for each vendor you're going to ask What BI they have and what's going to happen. You're going to be ending with a lot of different BI tools, each one with their own framework, their own user interface, their own training, their own licenses. Users will have to learn sometimes more than one. So even though it's a natural process, it's better than nothing. It's usually it has challenges. So the pros of this approach is, well, if you don't know better, that's just what you're going to do. Ask for the vendor of each product and get the BI from them. So it's natural in a way, quite often at least the initial license cost is potentially more affordable. So kind of just go with the flow. The cons, you'll continue to have data silos, every system with its own bi. If you're not crossing information, sometimes it's impossible, it's hard. And actually the cost can be significantly higher because for every system you have a different user license and many users are the same across all packages. So license can become expensive. Your team will have to maintain 2, 3, 4, 5 different BI systems. Usually it's not the best scenario. Only for a few organizations, this approach works really well. For most, a little bit more sophisticated. This approach here has too many costs, too many headaches. The second most popular approach is, well, let's find a tool that actually across all data sources. So at the beginning you find this tool that works well with your main data source, let's say Sage X3, and it also should cover all data sources. So eventually, as the time passes by, you can get all of your data into that particular BI solution and send to users. So cleaner, simpler, faster, simple, you get fast results and overall you have lower investment than the prior one. Each user will have one license, sometimes pulling data from different data sources. You can match the data so better overall than the first approach. One of the things you should be sure when you're selecting this unified platform that will be pulling data across all of these systems is be sure that it can actually work with all your data sources. So ask the vendor, ask some references, check documentation, because sometimes people say it will, but actually the solution is really specialized only in one data source. So check possibilities to be sure it's going to deliver. Now there are long term challenges when you go with this approach. One is if you're pulling data from different data sources into this analytics platform, just as is, what happens is quite often people building the report the dashboards on the front end tool, they'll start having different views of data. Let's Say you're going to look at your revenues. Two different people build the revenues report and when you compare them, you think you're comparing the same revenues, but one person, let's say is using taxes as far the revenues and the other one is not using. And then you start comparing apples to pineapples and you don't even know about it. So when you do this kind of framework, using an analytics tool, pulling data from all different data sources is very hard. To have a single version of the truth, very challenging. So this is one of the biggest challenges in the long run is keeping data consistent. You know, when you look at the metric, is it coming from the same calculation for all reports? Very, very challenging. Second is poor performance. Quite often these systems, when they pull data from the data sources, they pull a lot of data and they can slow down your Sage X3, your ERP system, whatnot. So you have performance issues in the source system and you also have performance issues in the reports. They start to run slowly. Things should take seconds, it takes minutes, sometimes hours. So overall, this architecture, as you grow, tend to become slow on both sides of the equation. Slow performance is pretty, pretty critical sometimes. And primarily because of those two other problems, it becomes time consuming to maintain. If you change people over time, it becomes a mess. Who built this? What's the rule? What the rules created? So overall this approach also becomes difficult to maintain. Now what is a more structured BI journey that usually can meet the needs performance in the very long run? Well, is when you add a data warehouse to your system. Typically before you get data from your data sources into a easy to use reporting tool. The best thing is to put a data warehouse where you combine the data into the data warehouse. You blend the data, you make all the information together. Let's say you can see revenues from a customer as well as looking the open opportunities. How much was billed to this customer? What is the pending receivables? All the data can be together in the data warehouse. Now when you put the analytics platform, the reports will run fast, will be simple and there are many pros when use a data warehouse. One of the most important ones is the single version, the truth. So the data warehouse you define how revenues are. And if you have revenues with taxes and without taxes, you label this one is revenues with taxes, the other one is revenue with no taxes. So it's clear for users when they're building the reports to pull from the data warehouse the right metrics. So across the board, all reports will have a single version of the truth. Much easier to Compare apples to apples in reports than if you don't have a data warehouse. High performance with a data warehouse, you pretty much eliminate performance issues with your data source and you make reports run really fast, most of them in seconds, regardless of the size of the database. Data warehouse helps a lot with performance issues on both sides of the equation here. Better data governance. So with data warehousing, you'll have people that will be vetting the data, validating, be sure that it is accurate before users pull data out of the data warehouse. So there's a much better control of who can have access to the data and is the data accurate or not. Finally, and we have learned this over the years, when you structure a data warehouse in real time access, at the same time you still can give users fast results even though the framework is more structured and more sophisticated. So you can still blend fast results with very structured results as long as you do this framework in separation of data through the data warehouse and real time data properly. Where are the cons? Well, it will require higher investment, it takes more effort, it takes more licenses, it takes more pieces, so there's a higher investment. And you also need people that know data warehousing, know data warehousing with the kind of business you are, with the kind of data sources you have to make this project really successful. So expertise is a critical component of this project in timing. You know, one of the questions that I've seen a lot and we help people decide is, sorry, should you get a data warehouse now or should you wait until you get to a point where you think you need it? So discussing the pros and cons of going now or waiting in how long it's going to take to get the data warehouse going to make our life easier or harder. How long is going to Timing is a critical component. So it's an important thing, part of your decision making process. And I'll talk more about that later. People ask us on the BI deployment, should we go public cloud or not? Not means on premises or private cloud. A lot of considerations. I'm going to cover the biggest topics. First of all, check legal repercussions if you can have your data, your critical data in the cloud. If the answer is yes, then you might go to the cloud or not. Sometimes the answer is no, and that's easy. You cannot go to public cloud, so check with the legal side first. Second is where are your major data sources, the biggest data source that you need refresh constantly. If your major data sources are already in the cloud, then cloud is definitely A good possibility if they are on PREM or in private cloud. Well, most likely you're better off putting your BI really close to your major data sources because the data transaction between the two can be intense. So that can also influence the decision to go public, cloud or not. And finally, is BI a mission critical application for many companies? At the beginning it's not, but eventually it might grow into it. While mission critical. While it's not mission critical, cloud or no, cloud is not a big component. But eventually when you go into mission critical, the pros and cons of being cloud, public cloud or not can factor into the decision to go into one way or the other. There are many considerations, I just give you the high level ones. If you want to discuss more your details, your needs, I'll be glad to discuss with you and share some of our thoughts and learnings over the years about these things. So when people engage in the BI journey, many decisions, should you go with a more regular approach? Should you go with a more structured approach? Should you go cloud on premises, private cloud? So many questions. If you do not have expertise in house to make those decisions, look for experts. And I always tell people, yes, we are BI vendor, yes we're going to tell the best we can about our solution. But at the same time I like to be a source of information. I'll try to be unbiased as possible about the pros and cons of different approaches. And I will only want your business, let's say if we are a good fit, if we're not a good fit, I'm going to even tell you what competitors of ours that can be a better fit for you. So feel free to use me and Data Self as resources to discuss your options and help you make a better decision. At the end of the day in this life we're here to help each other even if we don't do business. So feel free to contact us and meet to discuss your ideas. Now, what is the team to make your BI a successful journey? And to me this is usually one of the most critical components. If you have the right team to drive this process, you will be successful. If you don't have the right team, sorry, it's going to be bumpy, it's going to take a long time, it's going to be expensive and probably frustrating. So having people who know what they're doing is critical. So expertise in the BI platform, how to select them, There are so many options. I see so many users looking for BI and they get confused. All of these vendors, they look the same, they talk about the same things and I don't know exactly how to fell apart and they still compare feature by feature. It's very hard. It's not rocket science. No, but it's very hard. So it's hard to select the right BI platform if you don't have the expertise. It's hard to deploy it if you don't have the right team. Training users can be also challenging. Should you hire an external company? Should you have someone in your team that is going to be trained, train the trainer kind of idea and who's going to maintain it? I usually tell people one of the most important factors in making a BI journey successful is is having people in this journey that know bi, that know data sources, that know business like yours to assist you, at least consulting people outside or even people that will be actually doing it. So focus on people. It's one of the most important components of the successful journey. How to get user adoption BI will only be successful if people are using it. So you have two main approaches. Top down, meaning let's say you're replacing a previous reporting platform, so you just push it to all users. The new reporting platform, maybe you have this BI platform where you can embed the reports and dashboards in their workflow. That's a great approach. Usually with top down you get quick user adoption. At least people will be pulling reports from the new system. Maybe they're not going to be using all the slice and dicing, drilling down, but at least accessing the reports they will easily be able to. It requires a higher initial investment, but sometimes there's also a very quick return on investment because you have a quick user adoption. Many companies go the grassroots approach, which pretty much because hey, BI is a journey, we're still learning it. We don't know exactly how the possibilities are. So let's start slow and go up and go broader as we learn more about it. A very popular approach. So they experiment the BI tool with a small number of users and as they understand which other users can benefit from the solution and which other users only need some kind of more aesthetic kind of reports, they start to expand. So it's a more taste investment, it's a slower investment, but for many companies it's a wiser way because they understand bi's journey. They don't know yet the repercussions, so they go more slowly. Both approaches can work depending on specific needs. What about cost and roi? Well, I like to tell people, look in a five year period, you know, BI is for Forever. As long as you're a business, you're going to have BI once you start engaging in it. So don't look at your first few months or year or two years, look in five years how much it's going to cost you and see what the return will be. From a license standpoint, when you look at the BI players working with Sage X3, the most popular ones in the Sage market, including Data Self, Sage Intelligence, Power, BI Domo and one other BI360, there's so many BI players, pretty much the license Range is from $10 to $150 per user per month in five years. That's pretty much the range of price you're going to find. Pretty much all vendors they provide license that are more expensive, less expensive, no cost. There's a wide variety of options. So that's kind of the range of pricing per user per month in a five year period. What I found that is one of the most costly parts of the BI solution actually is services. Internal people in your organization working to maintain it, to train users to keep up with the demands of the business as well as consultants and outside people that are required to make customizations in your solution in the long run. So services is usually a major component of your cost and, and you need to evaluate in this five year period to have a total cost of ownership and the third and sometimes the hardest to calculate. But sometimes the biggest cost is missed opportunities. For me, the easier to use the BI platform is, the more empowering it will be for the business people in more the last missed opportunity you're going to have. So quite often this is the biggest cost component, the easiest to use solution, the biggest the value and the less missed opportunity. So those things usually should be factored when you're making the decision from an average cost in those five years. So at the end of the day the ROI is mostly driven by the actual value delivered by the BI solution. Again, easier to use, more empowering the more value get out of it how much it's going to cost you to maintain it. And funny or not, the actual license cost is usually a small fraction of the cost. I would even tell many people it doesn't even matter in a way because if you look at this cost, even you know the range from 10 to 150. If you look, if every user you're giving better reporting, they're making better decisions, does that cost 150 per month? Usually yes. I mean 150 is almost nothing per month from a business standpoint. So I Usually tell people the license cost is one of the least important factors when making a decision for which platform to choose. All of the other components are usually bigger factors and more important. Let me open quickly the second poll, so if you don't mind selecting all the options and clicking the submit button. Five more seconds. All right, I'm closing and sharing it. So inventory and sales are the most popular. Thank you. So let's talk about Data Self. So first of all, when I started Data Self I saw all of these variables of people having challenges finding the right BI tool, selecting a BI tool and having challenges implementing and scratching, starting all over. I thought, well my team already had several years experience doing BI for mid sized companies. Well let's start Data Self and find the best of the breed tools out there. Let's select a great BI platform and let's be experts in it, let's grow it, let's make it easy, let's make it fast, let's make it affordable. So we've been doing this for 17 years as a business again we have deployed hundreds of BI systems and we use the top technology available for Fortune 2000 companies. This is Garden Magic Quadrant, the latest so not perfect technology, but by far some of the best available out there. When you look from an architecture standpoint, one of the decisions we had early on was should we always have a data warehouse or not in our solution. And we decided, well let's see if we can make a very easy to deploy data warehouse solution. So every single client will have it. It's simple, it's inexpensive and they get from the start. So as they grow and they become more sophisticated, they don't have to transition from a known data warehouse into a data warehouse approach. With dataself you start already having one simple, comprehensive and yet affordable. We use SQL Server for data warehousing but we avoid programming. Most of the deployment and maintenance is done with our etl. So it's easier, faster to have data warehousing benefits. We use Tableau as a client tool and for the past five years in a row Gartner has rewarded Tableau as the gold standard for analytics platform. It's really an incredible tool. In over this 17 years doing business with mid sized companies, we have learned how to do a lot of reports and we have added more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs as part of the solution. So you don't have to start from scratch everything. You start from a very comprehensive out of the box covering AP, AR, GL, inventory, purchasing, sales, CRM, opportunities, I mean we have a lot of things ready out of the box. You don't have to start from scratch. Why did we choose Tableau? Most BI vendors, they created their tools. Pretty much software engineers decided to create a better, flashier, faster bi tool, Tableau. Actually, they were Stanford University professors studying how business people go to data and make and have insights. They hire psychologists, graphic designers, and at the end of this process, at the end of the study, they realized, huh, let's make a software permit. And then they hire software engineers to make Tableau, which became one of the easiest to use platforms out there. So let's take a quick look at Tableau. I'm going to go through and show a few examples of dashboards and how to build reports from scratch. I'm going to show how to build this sales month's details, report market deal sales trends, regional sales by deal size, how to put in the dashboard and make it available to other users. So let's do it. I'm switching to the product. This is the data self desktop which is powered by Tableau. As a business user, I have to select which connector I want to work with. You can have several connectors. GL revenues, CRM information, payroll, they're all listed. You just pick one of them and then you start to drag and drop. So if you want to see sales by customer this month, what you do is you go to the customer list, you pick the customer name, just drag and drop. All my customers are right there. If I want to see sales, I got sales drag and drop. This is the total sales by customer, my whole company history. Hey, I want to see sales this month. Well, drag and drop invoice date to my report. So right now I'm seeing sales by year and can expand year to go to the quarter level. I can spend quarter to go to the month level. So I have all of my history here. Well, I just want to see this month's data. Well, I can easily filter the report. Again, just drag and drop invoice date to my filters shelf. You can select different time buckets. I'm going to choose relative date. Very popular. Choose month this month and click ok. There it is. This report will always show this month and next time. If you want to see another month like previous month, that's it. Maybe the last two, three, two months, whatever. When I change quarters, years, weeks, days, very easy to change very fast. Hey, what if I want to see sales by customer, by product and invoice number. Who sold warehouse all drag and drop. If I want to see sales by Customer, by product, WiFi product, drag and drop between customer and sales. So by customer by product, I see my sales. If I want to see invoice date, just find the field drag and drop and you see so very easy. Very, very empowering. Many people have learned how to use this tool just by watching a presentation like this. Drag and drop and you get the result. What if I want to see information on a map? Easy. I come over here. I choose customer state. Let's say I want to see my invoice sizes, my sales and I ask the tool put this on a map. Very easy. We got the map in a few clicks. Again, you do not need to be a technical person to be able to build these reports from scratch. What if I want to see some trend analysis as easy? Double click sales, Double click invoice date. So right now I'm seeing sales on a yearly basis. Maybe I want to see on a monthly basis. There are all of these different options for how to navigate timeline when I choose month. So this is sales on a monthly basis. Maybe when I compare with my website visitors, they come from Google Analytics, a completely different data source than Sage X3. Doesn't matter. We just blend the data, the data warehouse put it together. Now as a user I just drag and drop. So these are my website visitors. When I make a bar sales align, I can even put them on a dual axis and orange bar, website visitors, sales, blue bar. All together. Very straightforward. What if I want to put all of these dashboards together on all of these views together on a dashboard. Let me just put here, just drag and drop. I want to put let's say the map, I want to put my trend analysis at the bottom and I want to put my revenues here on the right corner. Just drag and drop and you make your report ready. In all of these reports they become interactive using the desktop web, mobile devices. If I'm on a mobile device, I could take my finger on let's say an iPad and let's say I want to only select these states here. When you change, the whole report changes. Very dynamic, very intuitive, very impressive. And then you publish the web portal. You go to a web portal and where you can retrieve your reports. You can use again web browsers, mobile devices. And you have a lot of drill down capabilities. For instance, you can open report I'm showing like a financial report and you can sometimes only see reports. You can drill down to reports. You can slice and dice. There's so many possibilities. In this example, if I click the Atlanta bar, I can Drill down into different reports, completely different reports. I could go from this Atlanta bar into more detailed reports or maybe into a CRM report. Because of the data warehouse in Tableau, it's almost limitless where you can go with your data analysis. So this case I'm going to drill down to my balance details. A completely different report only for Atlanta. And I can keep on drilling down and slicing and dicing the data. Okay, well this is just a quick demo. Let's go to the next part of my presentation. What is the profile of a typical data self client? Well, typically clients that have revenues above $20 million per year, we have many clients way below that, but typically above $20 million. It's a good fit. About 70% of our clients are in the distribution manufacturing business. So we have a great out of the box solution. If you are in these verticals with more than 5000 reports National KPIs if you are not, we might still be a great fit. We have a lot of value with less reports out of the box but still very comprehensive overall. I tell people we're a good fit. If you're starting your BI journey and you need to have more visibility and control over the time it will take to deploy it, how much money you're going to be investing in having expertise to get the return. We do this every day, day in and out. We know Rel well, we know data sources like Sage Products, Salesforce and similar systems and we know how to put it together for mid sized companies. So more control. Visibility is something we deliver a lot. Let me open the last poll if you quickly could give me a feedback about what you'd like to do. Five more seconds. All right, thank you. Questions, Please ask us questions using the GoToWebinar Questions Panel and I'll be glad to answer. Question from Mark is what versions of Sage X3 data self supports? Mark, thanks for your question. We work with all versions. We have developed a BI solution that works across different databases, different versions. Our templates have been designed to be flexible as you move from one version to another. Quite often there's nothing to be done in data self. It will automatically adapt itself to new version and if there's some work requirement it's usually a matter of hours tops. Days? Never. Usually no, never weeks. Mark, thanks for your question. Other questions here. Question from Susan, do we work with sales? Yeah. So Susan is asking if we work with Salesforce in AX3. Yes. We have out of the box solution for both systems and we blend the data not only with Salesforce but on other data sources we cover. You know, we have a data warehouse so we can bring pretty much any data that you have into the data warehouse, blend it with other data and report out of it. But yes, out of the box we have for Salesforce, I think about 1500 or so reports and dashboards. For X3, it's about 5000. So there's a very comprehensive solution for both of them. Folks, we're running out of time. I'm going to wrap the presentation. I just want to be sure that you guys feel free to contact me if you are assessing your BI needs. You know, exchange some ideas. You know, I'm not here only to sell. Absolutely not. I'm here to educate, to share my knowledge, to learn from you as well. Help each other in this, in this big world. You can see my email here, my cell phone. Feel free to contact me. This session is being recorded. We'll be sharing with you. Feel free also to share with other folks and anytime if you need our assistance, please contact us. Thanks for your time. I hope you have a great hump day and hope to hear from you soon. Thank you.