DataSelf Analytics for Sage 300 ERP (Accpac)

Self Service bi. Sorry, what is Self Service bi? Well, it's when users take care of their own reporting needs anytime, anywhere without calling for an expert. And that's usually not what happens today in the sage 300 market. Typically today when people need a report, a new report or a modified report, what happens? They have to call an expert and they have to wait, typically for a long time. So quite often users won't be able to make the most informed decision because they cannot gather information anytime, anywhere. And that's what we provide. We provide a Self Service BI solution that allows users to be anytime anywhere using desktop, web and mobile devices to build slice and dice change reports without calling for an expert. That means liberation, liberation for everyone. Meaning users now can find answers to their questions without calling for experts. So they are liberated to make decisions by themselves, while people who usually are building reports like IT and accounting now those people can also focus more on tasks they are really experts at. So everyone is liberated. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today is Self Service BI using Data Self analytics. My name is Johnny Girardi, I'm the founder and CEO of Data Self. So let's jump right into the product to take a look at how things work. So first of all, our solution comes Pre configured for Sage 300 to cover the most popular modules such as financials, payables, receivables, purchasing, inventory, sales receivables, order entry and so forth. Now in my presentation here, to make it simpler, I'm going to be focusing on order entry analysis, which is kind of sales analysis, which is easy to understand to most people. And I'm going to build two kind of reports here. One is in a transaction level report to show detailed sales information including let's say invoice number. And the other one is I'm going to be building a dashboard for management purposes, so two different types of needs and I'm going to show how easy it is to tackle them without being an expert. So let's go for it. So here on the right I have what is called a connector. In this case it's a sales connector that shows my dimensions, which are the things I want to aggregate my reports, customer product, invoice information and so forth. At the bottom I have the measures that I want to summarize things. You know, the sales, cost of sales, gross profit and so forth. Well, let's build the first part of my presentation which is a detailed report showing sales information. So let me take my sales and drag to my report here. And let me put my dates in my rows just to have an idea of my total sales. So by year I have three years worth of data in my sample database. This is the total sales. I can expand from year to quarter, I can expand to quarter to month and I can go to the day level if I want to. So very straightforward. Let me go back to the quarter level in my last quarter in my sample database is Q3. So it's last quarter of 2014. Now let me just show the last quarter of 2014. So let me filter this information by the date. I'm adding date to my filters and I have many ways that I can filter dates by different segments of my dates. But I like to choose the relative date because it looks at periods compared to today's date. So let's say this would be looking at days, weeks, months, quarters or years. Let me choose year, maybe quarter, could be this quarter, previous quarter, last X number of quarters, next quarters, whatever. So let me choose the previous quarter because of the last in my sample database. So when I click ok, it's going to only show the last one here. So there it is, only that one. Let me put this actually in my columns instead. So the dates in my columns. Now I want to build a detailed report showing customer information, invoice number, invoice date and a bunch of other things. The good news is you just drag and drop. It's very intuitive. So if I'm going to see customer, I find customer in my list, I drag to my rows. So there it is, all my customers in total sales in the third quarter last of this year. Maybe I want to see invoice number. I go to the invoice details and drag invoice number to my report. So there it is by customer invoice number and the total by invoice. Maybe you want to break down by, I don't know, something for my products. And I have here item, brand, which would be a optional field, a custom field in the Sage 300 database. Well, just drag and drop. So there it is, customer invoice number, item, brand. Maybe when I put the product information, I just keep on dragging, dropping these fields into my report and I get information. Maybe the date. Let's put the date actually after my invoice number. I drop it right here after my invoice number. So there it is, customer invoice number, invoice date, item, brand, product, sales. Let's put also quantity shipped and let's put the measures below my quarter. Sorry about that. So there it is, very Easy, very straightforward, drag and drop. I do not need to be an expert to build a report like this and have the insight that I'm looking for. So this is one simple example that I built looking at detailed level information. Now let me show how to build a dashboard like more from management perspective. And this dashboard will have three main components. One will be sales and number of meetings from CRM by month and by company. My sample database has a multi company framework. Then I want to see sales on a map showing bigger sales by state and also how large the deals are by state. So let's build a dashboard. So I'm going to create a new sheet here. In the first report will show sales. So I'm going to put sales here and I want to break down by month. So I'm going to put my months in my columns. So there it is. By month I see my sales growing. Now in my sample database I have a multi company framework. Four different Sage 300 databases that have consolidated into a single one. Well, I want to split sales by each individual company. Well let's put the company then into my color shelf. So right now for each company I have a different color and I see the sales by each one of them. The other thing is in my sample here I already have combined Sage 300 data with Sage CRM or sales logic information. I mean CRM information combined with my ERP information. So I want to see number of meetings in my report. I just drag and drop. So this is sales from Acpac Sage 300. This is the number of meetings for my CRM and to tell them apart I'm going to make bars for the number of meetings and I'll keep lines for my sales. Okay, so this is one piece of information for my dashboard. Next part I want to build a report that shows sales by state and I can choose the bill to information, ship to information. Anything that has a geography component can be part of this mapping capabilities. I'm going to choose customer address here. I'm going to choose state. I want to see the deal size in my sales amount. I'm going to put all this information on a map. Let's make the bubbles a little bigger. So in this example I have bigger bubbles, bigger sales. So by state I have a representation of sales by state and each bubble is sliced by these colors which are the aggregation of sales by deal size, large, medium and small deals. And finally I want to get the same information, I want to duplicate it and see this information on a grid approach without the deal size, just the total Sales by state. And finally, I want to combine all this piece of information, a single dashboard so I can send to people who are, let's say on the field, meeting with clients. When I drag my map, I want to put my sales by month at the bottom and the last piece of information on the right here. As you can tell, everything is drag and drop, fairly straightforward. I do not need to be an expert, I do not need to spend days, weeks, months getting to learn how to use this tool. We have many of our clients where the company owner, the president, the CEO, salespeople, CFOs, controllers, people who before they were only report consumers. They're now taking ownership of their own reporting needs. These people, the decision makers, are the people who know the business, who know the problems, the opportunities and they have the questions. And if you give them this tool, the self service tool, that they can find the answer to their questions, they're more quickly, be able to make more informed decisions, hopefully better decisions and move the needle, improve the business operations. So that's critical. Give the people who need information a tool that they'll be able to find their answers and make more informed decisions. Now let me show you here a little bit of more PowerPoint concepts. So our tool as I mentioned, is a user centric tool. And why do I have this picture here? Well, this is my mom and my dad. A few months ago I went to visit them in Brazil. I'm originally from Brazil by the way. My mom was turning 80 and my mom, she never used a computer in her life. You know, computers are too complicated for her. You need to be an expert to use a computer. So every time she would try to Skype with me, she would have to call one of my siblings to make a Skype with me because. Because computer was too complicated. Well, I gave her an iPad last year and as you know, an iPad is a user centric computer. It's designed for average users. Since I gave her the iPad now mom, she Skypes directly with me and other people by herself. She checks the news, she even uses Facebook. And why? Because an iPad is a user centric computer. And that's what our solution is from a reporting standpoint is a user centric reporting technology that allows anyone, anytime, anywhere to become self sufficient. So that's really the focus of self service. Bi the other main value that we provide is our core team has been working with Sage 300 and ACPAC in the past, as it was called, for over 14 years now and out of the box we have more than 5000 reports dashboard. KPI's built for Sage 300. So not only this is a self service BI meaning easy to use, easy to customize, easy to slice and dice, but there's a lot of great reports built out of the box. Let me show some of them right now. When I showed you this tool here, that's the desktop client, most people would be accessing reports and building slice index reports using the web portal, using web devices or mobile devices. When you log to this portal, you'll see your own dashboards. So if you are the CEO, you'll see only the CEO dashboards and reports. If you are from the sales team, you'd see the sales team dashboards. Now let me show you an example here. If I'm from the sales team, let's say and I open one of the sales dashboards like this one, the tool can be configured in a way that it will show only your own information. So in this case here, if I'm the wrapper, California, these would be the top customers in California, while the rep in Florida opens the same dashboard and views only the top customers in Florida, while the big boss opens the same dashboard and views the top customers across all territories. So security can control what kind of information each person can view even though it's the same dashboard for everyone. So security is pretty important and it's pretty smart. Security layers here. Now of the out of the box reports, the 5,000 that we talked about, let me show some examples of how we built these things. So this is again is a sales dashboard. We have the sales customers here. Every customer has a bar, bigger bar, bigger sales in the color of the bar is represented by the gross profit theme here. Not so profitable to very profitable. And the black dots also show profitability. Now if one of my main metrics is trying to improve profitability, this dashboard could be useful because next time that I look at it, it won't take me much to understand which one of my top customers are not so profitable and maybe I need to act on to improve profitability. So very insightful dashboards. We have lots of top performer dashboards like this other type of important dashboards is looking at the tip of the growth curve of your main key performance indicators. And this is another example here on the sales side. This one is showing the top customer by sales growth since last year today and the top decline, top growth in this example maybe are not so critical because they're probably sorry about that, they're probably being taken care of. So maybe in this report it's not so Critical, but the top customer by suicide decline. Maybe it is critical. Maybe some of these customers are leaving your business and if you don't act in a timely fashion, they may be gone for good. So knowing who these clients are is the first step towards addressing issues, if there are any. So looking at the tip of the growth curve of your sales, of your expenses, quantity on hand, payroll, whatever it is, is usually critical. And this tool has many ways that can help you focus your resources on what matters the most. Another way of looking at the out of the box solution is this is a sales commission example. So this is a very simple sales commission report showing for my current month for every day. It shows the sales accumulating throughout the month on this gray line and this is my target. So hopefully by the end of the month I'm going to be crossing my sales target. And the blue would be how much I'm accumulating in sales commission throughout the month. Now, if I'm the salesperson, I may want to receive this dashboard every Friday evening because I may want to know how well I'm doing as far as commission goes. And if I want to do something extra over the weekend, spend some extra money, I want to know beforehand so I can come over here and click on this subscribe button and tell hey, I want to receive a copy of this report in my inbox every Friday evening so it becomes self service. Now I no longer need to go to this report here to see what the status I would be just receiving in my inbox. This report refreshed every Friday evening. I can check what the status is and if I have enough money, do something extra over the weekend. So the whole idea of self service is to provide tools to users so they can find information that they need anytime, anywhere. Let me show some other concepts here on the out of the box solution. Another kind of important analysis is what is called exceptional reporting. Exceptional reporting is when you want to analyze things that are no longer happening. And I'm showing a sales example. This is showing customers who were buying before but no longer buying. And here we're looking at four different time buckets. Buying the last 60 days but not in the last 30 days, or buying the last six months but not in the last two months. Buying the last three years but not in the last year. Buying the last five years but not in the last two years. I mean, I'm not sure which one would be important for your business if any of them. But the idea is if you look at transactions that are no longer happening, some of Them can be critical. And this tool provides different ways that you can look at that. All right, so this was a little overview of the product. Let me go back to the PowerPoint now. So how do we accomplish such a self service user centric technology? Well, Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment at Fortune2020 and their latest assessment for BI and analytics platforms that was released in February 2014. They defined that Tableau is the leader in ease of use and dashboarding in the Fortune 2000 world, while Microsoft is the leader in the BI infrastructure for the Fortune 2000 companies. What about these two companies? What about Data Self? Well, what you get from Data Self analytics is actually the two leaders as Gartner defined them. So we get Tableau, we get Microsoft bi, we add our own technology that eliminates programming from these two vendors and we add more than 5000 reports dash using KPIs to the solution. So what you get from Data Self analytics is an enterprise level self service BI user centered technology that uses nothing but the best that is available for Fortune 2000 companies. It takes usually hours, maybe days to deploy. We have been working with enterprise level technology for over 14 years with Sage 300. So we know Sage 300 really well and we know enterprise level technology really well. And this technology costs a fraction of the cost if you try to build this technology from scratch. So really inexpensive. So that was pretty much a presentation. I'm going to open the questions and answers. If you have questions, Please use the GoToWebinar panel. You write a question, send it and I'll be addressing the next two minutes. So let's see if we have questions. We have questions. So question from Peter here. What versions are what Sage 300 version supported? Peter, thanks for your question. Good question Peter. Let me go here to our website. If you go to analytics by our website is dataself.com go to analytics by product and choose sage300. So here you have a bunch of materials related to Sage 300 including what version we support. And actually this page should be updated because we support version yes from version 4.0 all the way to the latest. So we go back almost like 12, 13 years ago supporting old ACPAC versions up to the latest. We also have here recorded webinar if you want to learn more about it. There is software architecture ROI browser brochure. This link has a list of the out of the box reports included in the solution. So feel free to use this page to learn more about our solution. Peter, thanks for your Question. Let's see more questions here. So a question here from Denise. Is it possible to have connectors into the live Sage 300 database to capture for example orders that have an expected ship date of today? Denise, I'm not quite sure your question. I'm a little sick today so maybe my brain is not working really well. But overall I think I'm going to be able to convey the messages. This is a technology designed for reporting. It's an enterprise level technology design for reporting. If today you are working with reporting using Crystal Excel Access reporting service, whatever it is, and you can do it in a cumbersome way, time consuming way, labor intensive way, but you can do it this way, this technology usually will make it much easier, much faster and will allow business people to take ownership of the reporting. So if there's a way to do it, absolutely this can do the work. Sometimes there's some additional massaging required let's say. I think Denise, you mentioned here about capturing sales order with the expected ship date of today. Sometimes you need to go to the ACPAC database and system to set up some additional optional fields or configuration to capture information that may not be captured today. The point is once the data is in the system or somewhere, maybe the information is an Excel file or somewhere else we can combine data. Let me show the architecture here. We can combine data from any data Source. You know, Sage 300, Sage, CRM, SalesLogix, whatever. We can combine the data into our ultralight data warehouse, then provide information using the web portal. So pretty much it can be done through a reporting tool. It will be better done by this. It will become self service once the mapping is done. Well folks, we schedule this meeting to be of 25 minutes so we're going to be wrapping it up. But we have more questions. We will be addressing them on a one on one basis after later today or tomorrow. I really appreciate your time joining us. If you want to talk with me more about our technology or comparisons of our technology with other vendors, please feel free to contact me here. You have my cell phone, my email and my Twitter account. I really appreciate your joining us today. I hope you have a happy Thursday. Thank you and we'll be in touch. Thank. You.