DataSelf Analytics for Sage ERP X3

Talk about Self Service bi. What is Self Service bi? Well, pretty much is when users can take care of their own reporting needs anytime, anywhere, without the need to call for an expert. And that's not exactly what usually happens with the X3 product line. You know, when a user needs a new report or a different report than what's available, they usually have to call an expert and wait. And that's sometimes not efficient. People have to make decisions and usually the decision makers, they're not highly IT savvy, so they have to call someone else, ask for a report, a modified report, and sometimes they just can't wait. They have to make a decision and if they don't have the right information, well, they may not make the best decision. So Self Service BI is a technology that empower users to become more self sufficient. Typically, Self Service BI comes with lots of reports that covers a lot of needs, let's say out of the box. However, it also enables people, decision makers, people who are not IT savvy, to take care of their reporting needs, change reports, modify on the fly, by themselves, anytime, anywhere. And that drives liberation for everyone. So now the decision makers, the people who know the business problems, the business opportunities, they don't need to wait. They can just do things by themselves, find out information about what's wrong or what's right and make decisions. While IT and accounting, which usually have the burden to be building reports all the time, they can focus on more of their area of expertise. So everyone is liberated, the whole company, the whole process becomes more efficient and with more informed decisions, usually there's more growth and everybody's happy. So that's what we're going to be talking about here today. We'll talk about data self analytics, which is a self Service BI solution for Sage ERP X3. My name is Johnny Giorardi and I'm the founder and CEO of dataself. So let's jump right into the product to give you some ideas of how Self Service BI works using our technology. What I'm going to do is to build a few reports to show some very, let's say, tabular type of report, down to the detail, and also trend reports like using charts and bars, things like that. And I want to put everything on a dashboard. I want to show how easy it is to build things from scratch. And I'm also going to show how typically regular users will consume this information using web and mobile devices. So let's go for it. In my presentation I'm going to show mostly sales information just because it's easy for anyone to relate that kind of information. But our solution for AXE 3 covers sales, purchasing, inventory payables, receivables, financials, pretty much all the modules. So let's start building a report showing sales information and just to show the mechanics. Everything is kind of drag and drop. So if I want to see sales, I'm dragging sales to my report. This is the total sales that I have in my company, the whole history. If I want to break down by date, let's say invoice date, since I'm looking at sales, I just drag the date in the report and in my sample database I have three years. So now this is the sales by year. And if I want to drill down to the quarter level, I just expand the year and now I have it by quarter. If I expand the quarter, I go to the month level. If I expand the month, I can go to the day level. And if I am looking at transaction on an hourly basis, I could go all the way down to the hour, minute and second. Now in my example I'm going to go to the quarter level and I'm going to build a report only for information in my last quarter, which in my sample database is the current quarter. So in order to filter this report, filtering is very straightforward as well. Again, it's kind of drag and drop. I'm going to drag my date into my filter shelf and then I have a few options how I want to filter dates by. I'm going to use the relative date because it's usually the most popular. Most people when they're doing data analysis, they're doing comparison to today's date. Let's say this year, this quarter, this period or last quarter. Year to date, quarter to date versus the same quarter last year, you name it. So it's relative to today's date. And when I choose relative date, I have this wizard which is very user friendly. You can choose time buckets, years, quarters, months, weeks, days. And you can choose let's say quarter in our example and then you can choose this quarter which will always be this quarter regardless of what day it is. Because in my sample database, my last quarter is the quarter. 3 I'm going to choose previous quarter and I'm going to click ok. So this report will be always showing last quarter information. Let me put the year in the quarter in my columns here. Okay, so that's total sales in this quarter here. What if I'm going to see sales by customer or by anything else? Very easy. You just go to the list of options Here and just drag the fields around. So if I miss a customer, I take my customer and I just drag into my rows. For instance, there it is. I have sales by customer in the third quarter 2014. Maybe I want to break down this report by more details. Let's say I want to see invoice number. Well I go again to the list, just find the field that I want. Here it is. Invoice number, make and drag. Let's say put after my customer. So now I have by customer, by invoice number the sales. Maybe I want to see the invoice date. Again, drag and drop. Let's put date after my invoice or maybe before kind of, you know everything is drag and drop, point and click. Very straightforward. I'm going to break down by product, everything is drag and drop. So I'm going to put product in my report and there you have by customer, by date, invoice number, product sales in 2014, third quarter. Maybe I also want to add the quantity shipped. Again drag and drop and you get the report. Put my measures below my quarter date. So quantity shipped and sales amount. So building reports is fairly straightforward. It takes little time for a non IT person, a decision maker, a company owner, CEO, the VP of sales, sales people to learn how to drag and drop, how to apply filters and how to read the list of reporting parameters. And once they learn that they become a lot more self sufficient building their own reports. So this is one example of we call it like a tabular report, like a crystal reports or reporting service kind of report. But let's also build a more trained kind of analysis using dashboards and using charts. So let's do that. I'm going to create a new sheet and then I'm going to start dragging, dropping and building a report. Here you know when it says sales. So this is my total sales in my company history. I want to break down my sales by month. So I'm going to drag here my months and then I see the sales growing throughout the years. In my sample database I have a multi company several companies in the X3 database. I want to break down these sales by company. So I just drag company to my color shelf for instance now every company has a different color and I can see how I'm doing by company. Now also in this example we have combined information from SalesLogix or let's say Sage CRM along with the sales information from X3 and I want to combine this information in a single report. In this example we have the number of meetings coming from The CRM side and we're going to just drag and drop into my report. So now I have sales here, here in number of meetings. So I don't get confused. I'm going to make my meetings as bars. So meetings are bars, sales are lines. Okay, so this is part of my trend analysis that I'm building here. I also want to see a report showing geography analysis. I can use ship to bill to any kind of address information. In this case I'm going to use the customer address. I want to see sales by state, by deal size, small, medium and large deals. And I put everything on a map. So let's do that. I'm going to choose the mapping capabilities and I want to make the bubbles bigger because they represent sales amount. So bigger bubbles, bigger sales and then each bubble is sliced by total sales bigger by this kind of deal size. Very easy, very straightforward. The tool actually helps you figuring out how to plot the information. So now that I created these three reports, the detail level report, this monthly analysis and the mapping capabilities, I want to put all this information on a dashboard and I can share with other people. So now I'm going to build a dashboard and I'm going to say automatic here. So I want to see the map at the top. Let's say I want to see also the trend analysis side by side and then I want to put at the bottom my other detail report. And then let's put all of these legends here on the bottom side so we have a little bit more room on the top. Everything is drag and drop. It's fairly visual. Again, you don't need to be an expert, you don't need to spend tons of hours to learn this tool. We have many companies where the CEO, VP of sales, people of that kind of caliber that are usually not it at all. They barely use computers. They start to do these things on the fly using mobile devices such as, let's say an iPad. So you got detailed information, you got trend analysis, you got geography analysis and I showed sales. But the same kind of drag and drop is available for all modules, all reporting packages, financials, balance sheet, profit and losses, receivables, payables, purchasing, inventory, payroll, whatever you want is drag and drop. Now let me go back to my PowerPoint here and talk about some concepts about this self service. BI is about being a user centric technology. I have here a picture of myself with my mom and my dad. By the way, I'm originally from Brazil and a few months ago I went to my mom's 80th birthday. Interesting story. My mom, she never used a computer in her life because it was too complicated for her to use a computer. You need to be an expert. So in the past when she want to send me a message or Skype with me, she would have to call a sibling to help her get that thing going. So she would need an expert to help her with the computer. Well, last year I gave my mom an iPad which is a user centric computer. And what happened since then is, well now mom, she checks the weather, she checks the news on the iPad by herself and she Skypes with me and with other siblings anytime she wants. She even has a Facebook account. And that's because it's a user centric computer. It's not an expert centric like a regular computer. And that's what a self service BI is. It's a reporting platform that has been designed for regular users to be able to do things that today only experts could do. In reality we have some companies that once they get data self analytics, they pretty much no longer need an expert or reporting expert in house. The users just take care of their own needs. Some of our companies, they still keep an expert in reporting to do more elaborate things. But the good news is with the self service BI which is using centric pushes, a lot of the reporting needs to the end users, the people who know the problems, who know the opportunities, and they can dig into the data if they have to tell someone else that is like an IT expert. Well, the IT expert knows the tool, knows the database, but they don't know the problem. So it becomes an inefficient process to get reports. Moving forward now, not only our solution is self service, but out of the box. We have more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box for Axe 3. So there's a lot of reports covering all different modules of AX3. And that's what I'm going to show a little bit more next in my presentation. So what I showed you before is actually how to build, build and change dashboards from scratch. That's typically a power user functionality. Usually a few people in the organization will have that kind of capability and they can do things like this using desktop, web and mobile devices. Now typically in an organization, a lot of the users there will be only what we call viewers. They just want to receive reports built. They just want to open and maybe change filters, slice and dice slightly, but not go extensively. Those are what we call the viewer users. And most of those people they will use a web or mobile device to consume the reports. And this is an example. I'm going to a web portal and when I log to this web portal, it will only show my own reports and dashboards. So let's say if I'm the CEO, I could have my only for myself, a set of reports and dashboards. If I'm a person from the finance team or from the sales team, let's say I would open the finance team dashboards and reports or salesperson dashboards and reports. Now when I go through my list of reports and here I have all sorts of different reports. I have financial reports, I have CRM, I have, I mean, it's a pretty mix of different kind of reports. But let me open a sales report because it's easier to convey the story when I open one of these reports. In this case, I'm looking at the top customer by sales. The tool can be configured that this report is the same for all account managers. However, it will only show you information that is my own information. So if I'm the rep for California, these would be the top customers in California in this year. If I'm the rep for Florida, these would be the top customers in Florida. If I'm the big boss, these are the top customers across all territories. So a single report would give information to different users based on their user credentials. Now, as I mentioned, we have thousands of out of the box reports covering different reporting areas. And when we're building these reports, we try to make them very insightful so people can look at them, have an insight from the trends and make a decision and move on with what they're supposed to do. This is a simple example. We have here our customers, and every customer has a bar. And the bar is related to the sales here in the bottom. So bigger bars, bigger sales. The bars are also coded with this colored schema that represents gross profit. So red is not so profitable, green, very profitable. And we also have this black dot using this other scale which also represents gross profit. So once I learned this, if in my business profitability is something critical, next time that I open this report, it's very quick for me to see which of my top customers are not so profitable. And maybe I have to work on those accounts to make them more profitable. So it becomes easy to get an insight out of this information and do what you're supposed to. You know, don't spend time analyzing, spend time fixing or improving your business. That's what we kind of try to help businesses with. Another type of reporting that we have a lot which also usually pretty critical, is analyzing the tip of the growth of your major key performance indicators. Typically, things that are growing the most or decline the most are very important and you should be keeping track of those things. And this is an example on the sales side. So these customers are growing the most in sales since last year to date, and this is the sales increase. So if you have recurring customers, that's awesome. Maybe you don't have to touch because the account managers are really working closely with these customers. However, how about the top customers by sales decline? Maybe some of these opportunities are not being well served and if you don't fix the problem in a timely fashion, they may be gone for good. So looking at the tip of the growth curve of your sales, maybe if you have inventory cost on hand, on expenses, revenues, all of this, the tip of the growth curve is usually critical. And we have lots of reports looking at these trends to help you focus your effort where it really matters in these reports. Let's say if you want to receive these reports in your inbox on a schedule basis, you don't want to go to the portal. You can click this button here and subscribe so I can tell, okay, I want to receive this dashboard refresh on my inbox every Friday evening. And you subscribe and there you go. Every Friday evening you got the email in your inbox and you're off to go. Other kind of reports that are also very important besides the top and the tip of your growth is what we call exception reporting. Let me talk about exception reporting because it's a very important concept for some businesses. Exceptional reporting is when you look at transactions that are no longer happening. And this is again a sales example showing customers who are buying in the past but not in the recent times. And we're having four different buckets here. Bought in the last six days, but not in the last 30, bought in the last half a year, but not in the last two months, bought in the last three years, but not in the last month, and bought in the last five years, but not in the last two years. I mean, these are examples of customers who are buying but are no longer. And maybe it's an opportunity for you to go back and see if you can retrieve the account again. Again, exception reporting can be used for, let's say if you look at your inventory, what items have been no longer moving in the last whatever. Time is so very helpful for that kind of analysis. All right, let me wrap up here. My last PowerPoint slide. So how do we deliver all of this self Service BI user centric technology. Well this is Gartner Magic Quadrant. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment in the Fortune 2000 world. And every year in February they release the best of the breed BI and analytics tools in the Fortune 2000 world. So this is the latest. They defined that Tableau and Microsoft are the leaders. Tableau is the leader in dashboarding and ease of use self service BI and Microsoft is the leader when it comes to BI infrastructure. Well, what about them? What about us? So what data self analytics is is actually in a box. You get Tableau which is the leader in ease of use, self service bi. You get Microsoft BI as a SQL Server ultralight data warehouse. We add our own technology that eliminates programming from this high end super cool technology and we add more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So what you get is a super best of the breed user centric technology. There's nothing better out there than this in the Fortune 2000 world. It's fast to deploy, usually takes hours or days to deploy this great technology. We have been working with enterprise level technology for 14 years in the Sage community and for actually a couple of years. So we know the products, we know how to connect to the ERP package and overall it's going to cost you little money for all the benefits you get. So that's what data self analytics is. It's best of breed, affordable, fast and user centric. All right, we have two more minutes to cover to wrap our presentation. If you have questions, Please use the GoToWebinar panel. I want to see if we have questions here. Yes, we have questions from Peter. How this compares with the Sage Enterprise Intelligence. Peter, very good question. Sage Enterprise Intelligence is a great product. The main differentiator of data self analytics is that we are really self service bi, really user centric. People will be able to do a lot of the reports changes by themselves. While usually Sage Enterprise Intelligence and pretty much all other bi Solutions for X3 they're more expert centric. The decision makers will often have to ask the experts to change things and create new things because it's not really the best of the breed. Like Garner said, the top notch technology even for Fortune 2000. So that's the main differentiator of analytic outer solution versus Sagent Enterprise is more self service BI folks. Unfortunately we budget our time for 25 minutes so have to answer other questions on a 1:1 basis. I really appreciate your time for being here today. You can see here my information, my cell phone, my email, my Twitter account. If you have more questions, if you want to learn more about self service bi our technology and how maybe we compare with other, please contact me. I hope you have enjoyed the session, you have a great Thursday and hope to contact with you in the near future. Thank you.