DataSelf Analytics for Sage ERP

Self service bi. Self service BI is such an interesting concept. Business people, the people who manage the business are usually the ones who need reports, who need dashboards. Those are the people who need to make more informed decisions. Quite often many of them are not so IT savvy. They use computers, but they're not really computer savvy people. So typically when they need reports, when they need dashboards or modify reports, or modify or create new ones from scratch, what happens? They cannot do it. They got to call an expert. It's not self service bi, that's expert centric bi. So self service BI is what we're going to be talking here today. My name is John Egiordi, I'm the CEO and founder of Dataself and actually I've been working with Dataself BI since I founded the business back in 2005. The vision of the company from the beginning is quite simple. Decision makers in mid sized companies, companies who are trying to make better processes, be more efficient, grow more quickly. These decision makers, they need information so they can make more informed decisions. And typically sometimes they need information right now and they don't have it. There is no report to tackle that particular question or they cannot dig into the data because they need an expert to help them building reports and modifying reports. So the vision from the beginning of the company is there is in the Fortune 2000 World Business Intelligence technology that is really designed to be self service, that is really easy to use for the end user. But typically those enterprise grade technologies are too expensive for mid sized companies and it takes forever to set them up. So there is just very little traction of that kind of technology in the midsize industry. So the vision of the company from the beginning was I want to find in the Fortune 2000 world BI technologies that are really self service, but they can be addressing mid size needs. I want to make the technology simple, I want to make the technology easy to deploy, easy, fast deploy and I make it affordable. So for 10 years we've been working with this vision and we came a long way. Our latest solution actually uses what is the best from the Fortune 2000 world. And that's what I'm going to be showing here today, the idea of providing decision makers with self service bi. So first of all I'm going to jump right into the product presentation to give you an idea of how this works and I'm going to do a presentation, starting a presentation showing two parts of the solution. First of all, I want to show how easy it is for an average user to Take like a blank report and build a detail oriented report from scratch, showing detailed information. Then the second part of the presentation, I want to show how easy it is to build trend analysis, showing charts growing over time, showing information on maps and things like that, and put everything on a dashboard. So I'm going to start with that. So the first thing is suppose I'm a business manager. I want a VP of sales and I want to see how my sales for a given quarter were for my customers. So I just want to build that report from scratch and I could do this using a desktop, a web or mobile device. And I'm going to be showing here on the desktop approach. So I come to this data self analytics and I have my sales connector which is connected to my sales data. We have sales connectors, purchasing connectors, receivables, payables, financials, we have a lot of different connectors out of the box. I'm going to be showing sales in this example. Well as a VP of sales I want to see my customers. So I come here to this dimensions and I find customer and I simply drag to my fields, my rows and there it is. I have all my customers in my report. Well, I want to see sales by customer. So well let's find sales in my measures and just drag and drop in the report and there it is. I have total sales by customer in my company history. Well typically when I'm looking at data I want to see for a given time period. Well let me drag dates to my columns and when I do that right there, it breaks down my sales by year in my sample database I have only three years and I could quickly expand year and see sales by quarter or I could expand quarter and see sales by month. So just by clicking I can drill down to more detail level information. Let me go back to my quarter level. Well in my particular example as a VP of sales, I just want to see sales for the third quarter 2014, which actually is my last quarter in my sample database. So I wanted to have a slice of data for this analysis. Well, I can easily drag my date into my filters shelf and when I do that I have options how I can filter my information by by year, quarter, month, days, weeks, fiscal periods, whatever that you want to filter by. Typically relative date is a very popular way of filtering my dates. Relative date means buckets compares to today's date like years, quarters, months, weeks, so forth. And I can choose this year, previous year, last three years, two years, whatever. Very intuitive way of slicing your data by time periods. Well I Want to see by quarter. I want to see the last three quarters which actually in my sample database will get the third quarter, 2014, which is my last sample period. So I narrowed down my report to a very thin slice of my timeframe. Could be any period. Okay, so now I have sales by customer in that quarter. What if I want to see invoice number, invoice date, product, region, whatever you want. Everything is drag and drop. I don't need to be a computer skilled person. I just have to learn the basics of dragging and dropping, which is usually pretty, very pretty intuitive. So if I want to see invoice number, I come to my invoice details, I find the invoice number field and I drag to my rows and there it is by customer. I have invoice numbers that I sold in that quarter. Maybe I want to see the actual invoice date again, just find the field drag to the report right there I got the date and then you can switch, let's put the date and then the invoice number. For instance, just switch the order. Now I have the date and then the invoice number. I want to see product information. I mean you just have to learn how to find the field on this list and drag and drop it to report and you get information right there. So building detail oriented reports is just like this. You filter, you drag and drop and you get your data. You can easily sort this list, you can summarize, you can put total subtotals. It's all kind of drag and drop. Pretty intuitive. So that's one way of showing how to build a new report from scratch. And again, I'm using the desktop approach. But if you'll be using, let's say a mobile device like an iPad, you'll be pretty much no drag and dropping with your fingers. So it's about the same concept. Now let me build a dashboard type of a trend analysis kind of report and then I'm going to put everything into a dashboard view. So let's say I want to see sales, I'm going to drag my sales to my rows and then I have a bar showing my total sales in the whole company history. This sample database has a multi company framework, several ERP databases that have been consolidated into a single view for corporate management, let's say. So I want to see, actually I want to see sales over time first, by month. So I'm dragging my dates to my columns now right there by month I see how sales were doing, how I'm growing over, over the years. But I want to break down the sales by company. As I mentioned, I have a multi company framework. Well, I'm going to drag my company to my color shelf here. And when I do that, I break down my sales by individual company and I see how each one of them is doing. Very nice. Now I have already consolidated in my sales connector information that comes from the ERP system as well as from the CRM system. That kind of work is kind of an IT work once it did its magic and added the information. Now as a business person, it takes little effort, little learning for me to just use that information. So here I also have number of meetings which comes from the CRM system. It could be from an Excel file, it could be from another database. It's just sales data that is consolidated altogether. Maybe point of sales information I just consolidated as part of my sales connector. And now as a business person, I'm going to drag my number of meetings to my report. So here I see sales amount and number of meetings and so I don't get confused, I'm going to make the number of meetings as bars. So next time that I look at this report, it's going to be very quick to me to know which one is the sales figures and, and which ones are the number of meetings figures. Okay, that was a simple and easy report. Now I also want to see sales by geography and geography could be any address kind of information. It could be billing address, shipping address, ship to whatever. So I'm going to choose state for my customer address. I want to slice my sales by the size of my deals, small, medium and large deals. And I actually want to see sales everything plotted on a map. So I'm choosing map capabilities here. I'm going to make the bubbles a little bigger. So what I have here is bigger bubbles, bigger sales by state. And then I have the bubbles sliced by all the aggregated sales of small, medium and large invoices. That's it. I got all the information that I needed. Well now let's say that my sales team use tablets, iPads for their sales efforts. I want to build a dashboard that takes everything we just did and put on an iPad screen. So I'm going to build now a dashboard and I'm going to choose the iPad size, could be any screen size, but my salesforce uses iPad. So I'm going to choose the iPad landscape and that will make this dashboard fit very nicely in that format. And then again I just drag and drop the queries that I created so the map and I can just drag and drop into any area and the tool would automatically adjust itself to fit the pictures. And then I'm going to put also the first query right on the right side here. A little bit more room and that's it. In a few minutes I was able to build a fairly sophisticated dashboard from scratch. And as you can tell, it was not rocket science. It's fairly intuitive, it's very easy to use. And the reality is most companies management, some of the managers, they are data hungry. These people, if you give them the right information at the right time, they will make more informed decisions, they'll make better decisions and they're going to help grow the business. And as this smaller group of managers start to become more successful because now they have more information, what happens is that typically the other managers, which often are not so computer savvy and they sometimes don't even trust computers, they start to see why are those guys doing so much better, why I'm falling behind. What is going on? Can I catch up? So one way to get your whole management team raising the bar is giving the data hungry ones, data hungry ones a better tool for them to make more informed decisions. These people are going to do much better and naturally everyone else will start to follow. So it's natural, it's just human behavior, no one wants to be behind. And this technology will help your management become so much more productive with better information anytime, anywhere. So this goes back to the self service bi. Let me talk a little bit more about the next PowerPoint slide. Self service bi at the end of the day is user centric and this is a picture of myself with my mom and my dad. My mom she turned 80 last year and she live in Brazil. I'm Brazilian American but also Brazilian as native Brazilian when I was born there. So last year I went over there for her birthday. But my mom, she never used a computer in her life and when she want to skype or exchange messages with me or my siblings, she would have to call someone else, you know, one of my siblings or one of her grandkids to help her getting the computer connected through Skype or messages. You know a computer is actually an expert tool. You have to have a lot of training to be able to use a computer properly. Well, about two years ago I gave my mom an iPad and an iPad is a user centric computer. What happens since then? Well, now mom calls me by Skype, by herself. She checks the weather, she writes some emails, she even has a Facebook account. Why? Because an iPad is a user centric computer. That's what we do with reporting. We make reporting something user centric. It's actually a very sophisticated solution. Data self analytics is very sophisticated. But the front end, the client side is something that most people, with little effort they can do so much more. And we want decision makers to make more informed decisions. They need information anytime, anywhere and that's what we provide. So being user centric is a fundamental value of being self service bi. Not only that, but when we created the vision of making this technology from Fortune 2000, over the years we built more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs. So for about half of our clients, this out of the box solution is all that they need. They get out of the box reports and KPIs, they build new ones from scratch and they're just free to go. The other half may require more assistance. They are more sophisticated and we are here along with our resource channel to support clients to become very self sufficient in empowering self service BI's to your clients. Typically, most of the users, especially the beginning, would be consuming reports using a web framework, using desktop, web or mobile devices. And they would log on to their portal and they would see their own dashboards and they would just point and click and open pre configured dashboards. So to get started using data self analytics, you just have to learn how to open a browser and click a dashboard and read the information. So very easy to consume information even on mobile devices. And this is an example. You can see charts, you can see grids, summaries. Whatever it is that is relevant to you would be available through this approach. You can also subscribe as a user. If I want to receive this dashboard every day, every Friday, every month, you can click the subscribe button and you choose how often you want to receive this dashboard. This dashboard will be emailed to you automatically so you don't have to go to the tool. The tool will send information as needed. And as I mentioned, we have a lot of reports out of the box. One way that you can see the 5000 list you can come to our website and if you go to Solutions Report and KPI templates, you come to this page and will list all reports available by module. And if you click download the full list, you get an Excel file that will show all the reports and dashboards. Let's say sales, I think we have about almost 1100 reports for sales. If I click I go to this list and then you can choose okay by customer. You expand and then you see all reports that are customer centric available out of the box. All right, how do we do all of this? Well, it's because we're leveraging top notch technology from the Fortune 2000 world. Currently our technology uses Tableau and Microsoft, which according to Gartner they are the leaders in their own frameworks, BI frameworks. We're using nothing but the very top leaders from Fortune 2000. And what we do is we put them in a box, we make them simpler with our own technology, we eliminate programming from them and we add more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs. So you get is the best of the breed user centric technology. It was going to take sometimes only hours to deploy. We have been doing this for over 10 years. So we know Sage products, we know enterprise grade BI and we know how to connect them together to provide you with very good reporting. And the solution costs really really little money. So everything enterprise grade technology for low cost, key benefits. First of all and most importantly is giving your decision makers information anytime, anywhere. They can easily retrieve reports they can modify, they can create new ones without calling for experts. Give this to your data hungry management and you'll see in not much long time all the other management will be falling because everyone wants to be better nowadays. And this technology also reduces the reporting labor by over 80%. Usually all the manual intensive reporting labor that probably your company is doing today is going to be dramatically reduced because this technology automates a lot of the process. We're almost running out of time. We have three more minutes to go. I'm going to open the Q and A session. If you have questions, Please use the GoToMeeting web panel and I'm going to be answering some questions now. So let's see here if we have questions. We have a question here from Tani. Thank you Tony. So how much does it cost? So Tony, thanks for your question. Typically the entry level solution is going to cost you a few thousand dollars worth of investment to get started. We have money back guarantee of 60 days and we also sell or subscribe the solution. So we try to make the financial decision of embracing data self analytics as little as possible. If you don't like the solution in 60 days we can return and we'll give you the money back. So overall there is a cost. It's not inexpensive, there is some cost to it. But the good news is if you get your management team to be more effective, usually the cost is not the issue, what matters is really the benefit. And enterprise grade BI is really critical to get your people the best of the breed. Easy to use technology. So give us a shot that can give you some more detailed information about pricing for your business and we'll take it from there. Thank you for your question, Tony. Let's see if we have more questions. Question from Mark does it work with Sage? Sage x3? Mark, thanks for your question. Yes, it does work with Sage X3. If you come to our website and you come to analytics by product, you'll see all products that we have already available out of the box solution and AX3 is one of them. We can work with any product. These ones that are listed are the ones that we have. A very comprehensive out of the box solution that includes thousands of KPIs and dashboards out of the box, but any ERP and CRM and database we can connect to. Folks, we are running out of time. We schedule for 25 minutes so I'm going to wrap and we'll be answering more questions individually. I really appreciate your time. I hope you found this webinar informative. We'll be emailing you links in the next day with the recording version. If you have other questions about data self analytics, about how we stack against other competitors, please feel free to contact me. You'll find here my cell phone, my email and my Twitter account. I hope you have a happy Thursday. Thank you for joining us and have a great day. Bye.