DataSelf - Customizing ERP Analytics

Hi everyone, this is Don Farber and Johnny Girardi speaking on behalf of Data Self analytics and I'd like to welcome you to this webinar on customizing analytics for your ERP application. This webinar will take approximately 25 to 30 minutes. We will start with an overview of the Data Self analytics technology and we'll follow that with a detailed technical demo. Note that this presentation is for techies. As we're going to be getting into the guts or plumbing of Data Self analytics, we'll be taking you through the process of implementing it, setting it up, configuring it, and customizing it. And with any luck we'll be able to show you all of that within a 20 minute time span. So without further ado, let's get right to it. Let's start off with a little bit of history about Data Self. We've been around since 2005 started by CEO founder Johnny Girardi who has joined us on this webinar. Today will be taking us through the technical product demo. Our mission since then has been to enable clients to make more timely and more well informed business decisions and the method by which we enable that is through a combination of next generation data optimization technology, industry leading business intelligence, and the industry's largest, largest, excuse me, report and template library. So let's talk a little bit more in depth about this. For folks using ERP applications, applications such as Sage X3, Acumatica and lots of others, there are a number of challenges that you often face in the reporting process. First of all, the time it takes to simply create new reports or modify existing reports. Once those reports are created, then the amount of time it takes to actually run them. A lot of folks will actually wait until nighttime to run reports because they take hours to complete. Once those reports are complete, there's the process of distributing them to all of the people within and in some cases outside of an organization. For example, if you have multiple salespeople, probably each sales rep needs to receive a separate report showing just his or her specific data. Additional challenges include the need to blend data not only from your ERP app, but perhaps from your CRM app, from an HR app, or perhaps even from Excel spreadsheets. And last but certainly not least is the challenge of enabling managers and executives to actually run their own reports. Do ad hoc queries of information in your ERP database, enabling them to do it themselves and not have to rely upon ask and wait for a techie to actually create that report for them. So let's talk a bit about the Data Self technology because as I mentioned earlier, it's a unique combination of three aspects. And the first of those really, the underlying architecture relies upon a robust Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse linked with a proprietary next generation technology that we call ETL plus. ETL stands for Extract, transform and Load for Data. And it optimizes your ERP data so that it is quick and easy to retrieve and to analyze. That ETL plus combined with the underlying SQL Server data warehouse gets done automatically for you, gets created automatically for you so that you don't have to worry about all of the underlying plumbing to set up an analytics solution. The second component is the use of the industry's top two BI or business intelligence technologies, those being Tableau and Microsoft Power. BI Data Self supports both of those. Ensuring a user interface that is quite quick and easy to use, but also providing such technologies as nlq, natural language querying. In plain English, that's like a Google search technology for your ERP data. And that's what allows managers and executives themselves to go in and retrieve the data that they're interested in. And the third and final component of the Data Self analytics architecture is an underlying report and dashboard library, a library of over 8,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs specific to virtually all ERP solutions on the market. Now, out of the box, you can use some of those report and dashboard templates for your particular ERP solution. You can modify those templates and of course, we're always adding to that library. So with that, let's take a look at Data Self analytics for your ERP solution. We're going to be demonstrating an initial configuration, an initial setup of Data Self analytics for your ERP solution. And we'll be walking you through the process all the way to the creation of a useful analytics report. This will be done by my colleague, Johnny Girardi. So, Johnny, you've promised to show us this and understand under 20 minutes. So the stopwatch starts now.

Oh boy.

You'Re under pressure.

Thank you, Don. Let me know when you can see the website.

Yep, we can see it. Thank you.

Perfect. Appreciate it. So again, this is Johnny Girardi, Data Sales founder and CEO. I'm going to walk you through deployment of Data Self quickly. Deployment and then how techies, you know, business analysts and report designers can actually configure the plumbing, you know, the server side that usually business users don't have access to. I'm going to go over an overview here on the Data Self website. These are the source systems ERP and CRM Systems that out of the box we can connect quickly and do what I'm going to be showing you today, I'm going to show one example using Sage Intact as a data source, which is a cloud data source. But the framework overall, and I'm going to be talking about it, is similar no matter what your source is, can be on premises, can be in a private cloud, can be in a cloud solution. The Data Self deployment works in a very similar framework. So first of all, to deploy Data Self, the first step is you have to order, order it, you know, order it through your Data Self var or contact Data Self directly. You know, we usually talk about your needs and how we can help you, what kind of, you know, license you need. But let's say that all those things have been already taken care of and you want to deploy Data Self. So first of all, let me just show you quickly here what we're going to be doing in this product presentation. Like Don mentioned, you know, I'm going to be showing how to deploy the Data Self solution, which is mostly driven by ETL plus. And eventually the idea is to show how to customize reports and then eventually I'm going to go back and show how to customize the back end, the server side where usually business users don't have access to only the tech is have. Now as I mentioned today, right now I'm going to start showing the deployment for a solution like Intact, which is a cloud source. When you're deploying a cloud source or any data source, you know you're going to get an email from Data Self with instructions and those instructions will take you to the Data Self Knowledge Base page. So let me go there just to show you an idea what happens. And primarily you know, you're going to be Getting instructions for ETL4 is going to be a page about ETL+4. I'm going to press enter. If you have HubSpot, there's a page for it. If you have QuickBooks, Salesforce, Netsuite, Postgres, SQL, Sage X3, we have instructions for several systems of how to deploy the system. If you are with, let's say intact, which is our case today, primarily you have to add a user to Data Self. There's some specific instructions you have to do in your Intact to give access to Data Self to extract your data. Once you do your part and you tell us I have done it, that's it. Usually within a few hours or maybe by tomorrow, sometimes a little even longer, you get an email from Data Self telling you're done now you and your business users can access your data in Data Self. All the deployment behind the scenes with data warehousing, with Tableau and Framework and out of the box, everything happens automatically. So what I'm going to show you now, by the way, if you were to have a on premises system like I don't know, Sage 100, Sage 300, AX3, then again in this process here you're going to get the instructions, you're going to download quickly an application. I'm going to show you later and get that part of the solution covered, usually under an hour and usually the most complicated part of the appointment itself is security related user credentials, being sure that we have a tunnel between your source system in the data warehouse, whatever the data warehouse is, can be on premises, can be in your private cloud, can be in our cloud. Security is usually the most complex part of deployment. Like anything today, security is always very critical. What I'm going to be focusing here today is once security has been taken care of, how the actual BI works. And that's my next step in my demo. First part is deploy. The solution was being deployed already for your intact and now you get an email telling log to the Data Self portal and see your reports and dashboards. So right now I already have logged to the Data Self portal and I'm using Tableau as the engine. Tableau is part of the Data Self package you don't need to order outside of Data Self is all encompassed in the Data Self license unless you want to order directly out of the product. But anyhow, with Data Self you get everything self contained, easily deployed. So when you log to the Data Self portal that has Tableau with your data, you get to the homepage and right now I'm going to go to the explorer to see what I have available and go to my main project and then I can see what's available out of the box. And this is an example, you know, you can see the cylinders that are areas covering your data. You know, your AP aging, your AR aging, GL inventory, sales order, whatever and whatnot, all already deployed in with your data. All right. As a business analyst, one of the things you might want to do is I want to build a new report. First of all, like Don said, there are thousands of reports pre configured out of the box. So maybe you don't have to build a new report. Maybe what you need or maybe what many reports that your business users need are available out of the box. But let's assume no, I need to build a report from Scratch and want to learn the basics of the report creation. I'm going to use sales invoice because most people can relate to kind of questions and answers you get in a sales report. I want to create a new workbook. A new workbook is like an excel sheet that can have multiple tabs for different reports. And let's say that I would like to build a report showing sales by customer by year. On the left panel you can see the structures available out of the box that are already pre configured for sales. So I see customer information, document information, invoice information, item information and also measures that are popular when you're looking at sales report. Well if want to see sales by customer, I can take my let's say customer name, put in my rows, those are all my customers and then I want to see sales. So this is the sales and I want to see by invoice date. There it is. And let's only look at one year. Let's show here and only select 2020. So simply drag and drop. You can build a report showing sales by customer by item. You know if you want to break down by item, you just drag the item into the report and you see by custom by item sales. Now let's say that for this exercise in my business I really care about the currency of the customer. You know, is it US dollar, is it Canadian, is it Euros? Right now in my report if I look for currency, currency is not available. So how can I add currency to my mappings here? This is where it really takes a business analyst or report editor that knows the power step of data self to bring more fields that are not available out of the box, more tables and more systems. And I'm going to show you now how to do that part. In this part I'm going to be showing now applies to all systems no matter what the source you have. If you need to customize the back end, if you need to deploy it, you need to go through the ETL plus configuration which is really straightforward. So if you were to do, you know, Sage ETL plus for Sage intact for any other system I already showed you how to search and find the page that has instructions. So I'm going to click Sage Intact in this case and just read it. You know, it's not a long document but because I already know how to do it, I'm going to go straight into deploying ETL and get the job done. So I'm going to deploy ETL plus to my computer. So right now I'm deploying ETL plus, Sorry, I'm going to run it. So I accept the EULA and I'm going to put my credentials over here and then I got to create the password. And then I log in and sorry, I gotta run it again. Login, there it is. Went to my other monitor. So this is ETL plus connected to my Sage intact in here on this ETL user interface. On the left panel I have the sources, which right now I only have intact in my data warehouse or your data warehouse as the source. More source can be added. You can add Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, whatever it is. But right now I have Sage intact. And if you want to see the Sage intact settings, I can right click and look at the properties of my Sage intact and it shows there is a connection right now through a node dbc. Anyhow, once I click connect then actually it will show all of my intact tables available in the cloud and I can pick and choose anything that I want from intact into my data warehouse. So left panel are my sources. Center panel are the tables available out of the box, pre mapped from intact. So we have a bunch of tables, a par, GL and some others. And if you choose a table here, you can see on the right side the SQL service statement pulling the data from intact all the way into the data warehouse. Now if I look at my customer table, if you look over here, the currency field that I want to drive, the report that I was doing before in tableau is not available, it's not listed. How can I add a column that is not available out of the box? This is plain SQL. If I go over here and I write currency, which is the name of the field in the database and you might need to have the metadata, but you just add that table and that's it, you add it. Now you go to what's called the jobs. The jobs is what drives the refresh of the system. And I say refresh my data. So now what's going to happen is ETL plus is going to take the intact data from the cloud and go through a procedure to refresh all the data into the data warehouse automatically. By default the data warehouse is in the cloud, the data self cloud. But we can configure, or you can configure your data warehouse to be on premises if you want to, or in a private cloud. And once the data warehouse configuration has been changed in case you want to, you run the refresh and that data will automatically be loaded all into the data warehouse. By the way, the intact extraction can be slow because it's over the Internet in the first load, as you can tell, you know, right now we're loading all the tables, all the data. So the first load can take quite a while, can take hours, can take even days if you have a lot of data. The good news is after the first load is done and we run the second load, we only bring deltas. We call the upsert refresh upsert. And by the way, let me go back here and see if I have an example of the upsert pre configured. I think I have in some tables like in this table here, the AR invoice item, it shows the upsert, which means bring updated, I'm sorry, update modified records. So any record that already existed was changed, bring it over again. Updating the data warehouse in all new rows. And this is a very simple configuration that comes out of the box. You don't have to worry, it just works and it makes the ongoing refresh runs usually in seconds or in minutes. It's very, very fast. All right, looks like it already finished. Let me just take a look at the log. The log shows me that all the refresh ran in my invoice sales invoice report has been refreshed and now I should be able to see my currency new fields from the customer in my report editor. What I just did is I went here, I changed the etl, I installed ETL on my computer, I added a new field to a table, I refreshed everything. It means it refreshed the data warehouse, it refreshed the tableau sales data source and the report should be ready for my analysis. Just before I show you that in SQL, this is the SQL data warehouse. If I refresh my SQL database, if you're familiar with SQL Server Management Studio, you're going to be seeing that the tables that I refreshed in my ETL are now shown here in SQL Server data Warehouse for further reporting in case you want to go directly to SQL to do reporting. Anyhow, back to my report designer in Tableau where I had a customer item invoice date and I didn't, I couldn't find the currency. Right. I still can't. Why can't I find my currency? Well, Tableau has cached the data and right now currency is not in the cache. So let's refresh and get the latest data from out of the cache. So let's just pull whatever that is in the server when I press refresh and I search for currency and maybe I missed something. No live demos, right? So the customer. Oh There it is. Currency is here. Just see if it is bringing currency. Yep, currency came over. And be sure to just refresh the guide again. All right. Ah, you know, demos. I missed something in my in my configuration, but I'm going to just move on in production. Once you figure out what the mistake you've done, you should be able to see the currency field available on this list. And then once you find the currency, you know all the new fields that you have added. Primarily you just pick it and drag and drop into the report. That would show by that field that you added just a new one by customer by item. And all of these things is pretty much drag and drop. If you put the field after, you're going to put it at the end of it, not in front of it. Once you finish your report customization, you can easily publish it and make available to other users. Usually you just have to. I press the publish button over here sometimes in my tests, if I don't set up security correctly, this might fail. Let's see if that is going to work. Right now click publish and it works. So everything is good. So I just created a report from scratch and I publish it, meaning now business users can have access to it. So let me show you. I'm going to get out of the report editor mode. I'm going to search for test 1, 2, 3 and that is my report. I'm going to open it. There it is. I see exactly the report that I created before. And because I'm no longer in the edit mode, it's cleaner. I don't have all of those controls. And as a business user, that's my answer. Hey, I want to see things. With all the years, you just pick and choose and you can interact. If you or someone wants to automatically email this report on a schedule, you know, do a report distribution automatically. Primarily you come to. I think where is it? I think my security is preventing me from clicking. There is a button here that I think the security is now aligned. But there's a button here that we click and it opens a wizard for email subscription. Email subscription is a feature on the UI that even business users can select who should receive this report by email. And you just put that person's name. You know as many people as you want. You put the people name and then you define how you understand the report. Should should be an image, should be a PDF. You choose make that choice. In the last option is what is the schedule? And you can say daily, weekly, monthly, what time? And once you make that fill out that form that even users business can do. You click subscribe and that's it automatically. All those users that you gave you know that you listed will receive this report and many other reports if you have chosen on schedule, automatically in their inbox. And that's how report distribution can work in Data cell. Very straightforward. And with that, back to you, Don. Thanks.

Thanks very much, Johnny. Appreciate that. And let me make sure my screen is shared once again. You know John, as you were going through, that demo question popped into my mind which is if we've got a situation of an organization, let's say with 20, 25 or more salespeople and we want to give each of those sales reps their own report for just their territories, for example, just their clients, as opposed to a sales manager who might want a single report that shows all territories and all clients. If I have 25 sales reps and I want them each to receive their own report showing just their activity, I need to configure 25 separate reports.

Good question. Nope. We can control security in a way that we can have a single report that automatically gives to every user the data that each one of them only has access to. We call role level security, row level security, and then someone configuring the row level security tells what the rule is. Let's say each salesperson can only see sales based on their accounts and the accounts can be defined on the customer record or on the invoice header. For instance, once the rule is defined, what happens is, let's say when the VP of sales logs to data self and runs this report, this person gets all sales. If your sales has access to everything, while let's say the rep for California opens exactly the same report and it only shows California sales. This idea works for both the self service when people go to run the reports on the web, browser or mobile devices, as well as emailing the reports automatically. So once you secure a setup reports, we'll take care of giving every person only the data that they have rights to.

Excellent. Thanks Johnny. Thanks for answering that. I'm so glad that the answer was a yes too, because it just popped into my mind out of the blue and I didn't give you any preparation for that. So thank you very much for detailing how that works. All right, so let's spend just a couple moments talking about pricing and licensing data. Self analytics comes in a number of different license types, number of options that are available to you, kind of everything included, or you can select specific areas of functionality. Very popular are our three basic editions starting with the Advanced Edition for just under $400 a month going through our mid tier, the Pro or Professional edition, all the way up through Enterprise Edition. Now we're at the end of a year so I strongly want to encourage you to go to the Data Self website, contact us via phone or email because we have a number number of year end promotions that are currently underway including for both the Advanced and Pro edition, a 13 month year that is you would purchase an annual subscription and we would throw in an extra month at no additional cost. But again these are just a couple of the promotions that are currently available. We have promotions for both new clients as well as existing, so please do reach out to us to get full details on on the promotions that are available through the end of 2022. I do also want to encourage folks to try out Data Self analytics for yourself and see if they meet your needs. The software is available for free evaluation, that's the full function software. You can sign up for that from the Data Self website. And of course if you need any assistance in terms of setting up getting it going so that you can evaluate the value of dataself to your organization, we will be glad to help. I don't see any questions in the current queue, so let's just move on and call this a wrap. On behalf of both Johnny Girardi, Data Self Founder and CEO, and myself, Don Farber, I'd like to thank you very much for listening to this webinar, attending this webinar and we very much look forward to working with you. One last comment. In addition to this presentation which will be available in its recorded format from the Data Self website, you can also access business level recordings about Data Self analytics that talks more about some of the different dashboards and reports that are available to you, how you can manipulate the data within them. So for your business users, please do point them in the direction of those specific recordings. Again, on behalf of Data Self Analytics, I'd like to thank you very much for your time and interest and we very much look forward to working with you. Thanks again.