Empowering Data Heroes with DataSelf Analytics

Good morning and good afternoon everyone. My name is Johnny Giordi, Data Sales founder and CEO. Today we'll talk about empowering data heroes with data self analytics. Tom, if you want to introduce yourself.

Yep, Tom Fitzpatrick, BI solution engineer with Dataself and looking forward to giving you a quick demonstration of the platform in just a few minutes.

Thank you Tom. I'm a big data geek. I was a software engineer, my early career became a business person and for the past 20 plus years I've been helping mid size organizations look at their data in their systems and make more informed decisions. That's my license plate, it reads data Geek. All right, the agenda we'll talk about first of all why people are looking for analytics, why data heroes don't feel the power that they need, sometimes will show quick product presentation, we'll talk about the technology behind it and also some promotions we have for year end in case people are interested in ordering data self. We cover a lot of different ERP and CRM systems out of the box, meaning the analytics that we can plug and play into all of the systems that I'm showing on screen. And also if you have data from other data sources, payroll, Google Analytics, pos, whatever can also be done. We can also assist with better information out of out of it. We have clients in several different industries so usually if you are looking for better data insights from your data, no matter what your industry is, analytics can help. A lot of people are looking for getting more information out of the systems because they're pretty much developing, creating, developing their data driven culture and making firm decisions. Today is becoming more challenging and if you don't make informed decisions, quite often you don't make the right decision. So people are coming to data self and analytics because of that and behind the scenes from a technology standpoint, the main reason is you do have a lot of reporting tools in your portfolio today. If you use an ERP system like Sage, Akumatica, Netsuite Dynamics and whatnot, it comes with a lot of reporting tools, Excel and whatnot. But these tools are really focused on the ERP transaction problem. You know, it's really staff oriented, it's focused on the transactions, focus on small data sets. What do you need to do today? Those reporting tools do a great job focusing the perspective we call the microscope reporting when things are transaction based, more data sets, you have amazing reporting with your ERP system. The problem is when people are trying to look at the big picture, the big numbers, the KPIs, the trends across, you know, multiple days, weeks, periods, Years, quarters, you're working with large data sets. That's when you're working with management or render reporting and KPIs. You're looking strategically, predictably, you work with large data sets. Quite often when you need the telescope reporting and you only have microscope reporting tools, things are complicated and that's where usually there are challenges. So usually those kind of, you know, telescope reporting is where people complain. You know, what are the challenges? Slow. Quite often slow means pressing a button to refresh your report and taking too long. Now the definition too long is 10 seconds. If something's taking longer than 10 seconds to run, it's too long for many people. Sometimes you just have to wait next week, next month, you have to wait until you can actually process information. It's just too time consuming. So that's also a slow challenge. Difficult. Many times changing reports, licensing reports is something that only highly trained people can do. Training tables and reporting tools, management can't do it because it's too difficult. So difficulty is another challenge. A lot of manual process involved in refreshing some reports and distributing to different users. Validating data security and sometimes also data privacy concerns. If you're emailing reports, let's say in Excel format, what if you email the report to the wrong person? Or the wrong people can also have data breaches using the kind of report distribution method. Those are the main challenges we hear. And the wishes of data heroes is the opposite. You know, when I want to see the report, I want to see it now. Not an hour from now, not two minutes from now, I want to see it now. I press the button and within 10 seconds I see the result. That's usually analytics can deliver fast reporting and automated reporting easy. If I'm a business person, I want to change the reports licensed dice it. I want to do it a lot of it without calling the experts. So also analytics help with giving business people more power to be more self sufficient. Automation. A lot of the tasks that are usually repetitive, you know, manual, a lot of them can also be automated using analytics. And finally, with the proper security in analytics, analytics being many security layers, you can control who can access what information and when. And usually that dramatically reduces risk of data privacy, you know, risks and having data leaks. All righty, I'll let show how that works and how that looks. You're muted.

Thank you so much. So you all should be seeing my screen now. So what I'd like to do is just walk you through a handful of the different reporting templates that are available within data self. The first few are going to focus primarily around the sales. But please note that all of these templates, at their core they are a template so they can be leveraged in a variety of other business use cases. First template that we're going to be highlighting today is our slicer template. And the slicer template is really built to give you quick answers to ad hoc questions. So on the right hand side here we have our filters. This is where you can just very easily point and click and apply. So maybe I want to do some comparative analysis of my sales data across multiple years. I can easily do that. Or maybe I want to drill into the months within this year. Okay, I can do that and I can also through filtering, adjust the time frame. So maybe I just want to see Q1, 20, 30 sales information. Okay, up at the top we're looking at our various slicers. So right now we're looking at sales broken down by item. But I can just select this slicer here. Now this dropdown, this is just a default listing in our, in our demo instance we would be able to teach you how to add additional data points or we could add those for you. But really within Data Self we're going to be able to pull in an unlimited number of custom fields. So if your ERP system is heavily modified or configured for unique business needs of yours, we're going to be able to extract that data into the data self data warehouse which can then be leveraged for reporting. Okay, just to continue on here with the demo, I'll select salesperson. And here you can see in just a second or two. Now we're seeing our sales broken down by our salespeople. Maybe now I want to expand upon this. Okay, I want to look at this by customer. We see customers already selected up at the top maybe now I want to pull in that item information. I can select my drop down and here now we have my item details. Okay, so very intuitive, very easy to learn, simple point, click functionality. And the data is going to instantly render based off of the refresh frequency or the the information is going to be automatically refreshed. So you're not having to import and export this data back and forth. So you can have this data refreshed automatically. Whether that's daily, hourly, even down to the minute if you would like. Okay, what you're seeing here is this information broken down by sales. But I can also select this drop down and I have various metrics here so I could see the cost of sales, the gross profit, net profit, variances, quantity sold. And again it's just as simple as selecting the checkbox and applying it's a multi select and now I can see the quantity sold with my sales data. So again, being able to give business users a quick and easy way to slice and dice your data. This has a look and feel very similar to like an Excel pivot table, but we like to call it on steroids because that data is automatically going to be refreshed at a refresh frequency of your choosing. Again, very easy to learn. Generally takes like 5 to 10 minutes at most for business users to understand this. And although what it lacks in you know what you would think of from a BI perspective of the glitz and the glam of it being a it's one of the less sexy templates. But certainly from a functionality perspective and ease of use, it really delivers for our customers. Okay Johnny, anything that you'd like to add or compliment in regards to Slice?

Yes, just a quick comment you kind of mentioned. But just to make it clear, when it comes to reporting there is usually two layers associated to a report and there's what's called data modeling which is knowing tables, linking tables, knowing the rules that define your business metrics. And then there's the actual report publishing which is putting that information in a format like people can understand. What Tom did is pretty much is using the part of the tool or the framework where the data modeling already is done behind the scenes out of the box. You know sales, purchasing, financials and whatnot is already the basics are already covered out of the box with Data Cell and that's the part where it can be customized by someone more technical, adding more optional fields, more tables to the data modeling as a more technical work. But once the data model has been defined as a business user, if you need to change the report, if you need to create a report slice and that's a report can be this easy. You know just this example here. If you don't have data self pretty much every click that Tom did using a traditional reporting tool usually requires a technical person to go back and change and and spending quite a bit of effort to do the equivalent of what can be done easily, quickly by non techies. And that's the power of BI in analytics is allowing business users to be a lot more independent, finding answers to their questions, taking the report schedule, the reports to be distributed automatically to them or to other users without having to call the experts all the time. Back to you tomorrow.

Great. So the next template that I'd like to highlight here is our natural language query. So this is really where Data Self is going to be leveraging artificial intelligence, AI and machine learning. That's certainly the talk of the town in the tech space right now. This is just one, only one example of the artificial intelligence that Data Self is going to render. So from a use case perspective, this is going to look and feel very similar to like Chat gbt, if any of those on the webinar have interacted with ChatGPT. So you know, really just being able to ask a question and then based off of what you've asked, have the system spin up a report that previously did not exist. Okay, and just like in ChatGPT, maybe the answer that you it provides you isn't exactly what you're looking for. You're going to be able to tell the system, just simply write in or respond, you know that you want it to change in this manner and the system is going to take action based off of what you've asked. Okay, so do just want to show you what that's going to look like here. So this is where I can just simply type in sales by sales person in 2024. Okay, once I have that all typed out, I'm just going to simply select enter. And here you can see instantly and accurately it's provided me my sales broken down by my salespeople in 2024 in a descending bar chart format.

Okay.

Now maybe I want to expand upon this. Okay, I want to see this now broken down by month. Once I type it in, I hit enter. And here now we can see we're looking at our sales by our sales people represented in a line chart by month in 2024. Okay, so it's changed the visualization of this report. Maybe I want to see this in a row and column format. I can come over here to this drop down and I can say I want to see this data rendered as a text table. And here you see now that row column Excel like look and feel. Okay, so again, just plain English asking a question and then having the system be able to spin up a report that previously did not exist. Okay, now it's important to note that with artificial intelligence in general, it's not going to be perfect out of the box. That's also where that machine learning comes into play. So as you start to work with this template, it's going to going to understand you and what you you like to see or what you like to analyze. It's also not a magic wand. So it's not going to be able to answer all of your questions, but certainly is A very valuable tool for kind of low hanging fruit analytics that, that you need to analyze. Okay Johnny.

Yeah. Artificial intelligence, like Tom said, is something that you, we hear all over the place and the reality is what is of value and what is not value. What is the fluff? What is the benefit in reporting and analytics? KPIs kind of, you know, more informed decisions. There are a lot of, you know, different tools offering AI and machine learning for assisting the decision making process. One of the cool things about Data Self is we use a modern framework that leverages industry standard also AI tools. Like right now we're showing kind of tableau power bi in Excel Copilot. So there's a bunch of things available and quite often is what should we invest next towards your, your AI journey and machine learning journey? If part of this journey involves Reporting and analytics, KPIs we definitely have a framework that starts, give you a head start into many options and we can also assist in which direction you go in case, you know, analytics is one of the areas that you need better AI from it. Thank you Tom.

The next template that I want to just highlight here is an example of a dashboard template and this is again related towards sales. But it's important to note that this same template could be used for GL financials, project accounting, inventory, purchasing. Really the vision behind dashboarding within Data Self is for business users, C suite management, decision makers to be able to understand high level how we're performing and then being able to quickly and easily identify any outliers so where we're doing well, where we're not doing so well and then click in and drill down into the details. And the nice thing here is when drilling down into the details, it's still going to keep the, the dashboarding format available for you. Okay. So you can then further analyze, identify any additional outliers, drill down into those. Ultimately Data Self is going to be able to support unlimited drill down capabilities as well as the ability to drill across on your data which we'll show an example of in just a few minutes. Okay, but just to give you a quick lay of the land here of this report, we can see this year, prior year, the variance is broken down as a bar chart. Our sales trended over time as a line. We can even see geographically where our sales are occurring and then we can actually see the underlying data, customer, product and service data, prior year, this year and the variances. Now the overall look and feel of this you can absolutely edit and format to your liking. This is just an example here for demo purposes. But let's say that we want to pick on New York. Here we can see that New York had 25% growth prior year to this year. Hey, that's a great achievement. We should all be super happy and celebrating this accomplishment. Let's see, you know, what are the items, what are the products or services that are really driving this increase? Okay. When I select New York, this dashboard's now only showing me my New York customers.

Okay.

And although we're growing 25%, what's really grabbing my attention is the fact that our third largest customer last year is down almost $900,000 this year. Why is that happening? I select this and here we can see it's these items here that are really driving that decline. And what I can do is I can actually say, show me the details. And at this point I can see the underlying data that makes up those totals above and I can see the invoice information, the customer items information, the transactional data here for prior year, in this year. Okay, so what these dashboards empower decision makers, business users, C suite management is being able to see high level how we're performing as an organization and then quickly and easily identify any outliers where they can then drill down into those details or into that information further to really try and understand why something may or may not be happening. Johnny, anything that you'd like to compliment here?

Yeah, so as mentioned, as Tom mentioned, I think the biggest message of a interactive dashboard is interactivity. You know, as a decision maker, usually when you look at your KPIs, if they look fine, you go about your day. But if something is good or something is bad, then you're like, what is this? The ability to start to uncover the trends behind it and go one step at a time. You know, like Tom started with, you know, with the state level and then he saw a customer that, you know, was, was odd and then he saw the items and then eventually he, he went down to the, to the most detailed level. So the ability for business people to do those changes without calling again the experts being able to make a decision now, not who knows when is amazingly empowering. Nowadays a lot of decision makers are demanding this kind of power to become more of a data hero. Back to you, Tom.

So that was just an overview of some of the core features and functions that are leveraged within data self. Now I just like to show you what some of the other templates that are available that you would have access to. So migrating over to the financial side of the house Here we have a profit and loss report data self has a variety of different iterations of profit and loss reports, but in this particular one we're including the budget. So this is where you can do, you know, real time budgets to actuals, see that variance. Of course you're still going to have the filtering that's consistent throughout, so you can do comparative analysis as well. Here we have a cash flow projection or cash flow forecasting. So really what this template is going to show it or highlight is money coming in against the money that's going out. And then based on those due dates from the, you know, AR invoices, AP bills, sales orders, purchase orders, we're going to be able to forecast out any point in time into the future where you will be from a cash on hand perspective. Okay, now this is a report where we could make some modifications and configure it for your unique business needs by including in, you know, loans, lines of credit, things of that nature. But at its core giving you better visibility into your cash flow. From an operations perspective, we have a variety of different operational reports. Here we're looking at our inventory planning or inventory projection. So really what it's doing here is looking at a variety of, you know, two months into the future and anything that you see in red is where you're going to be at a shortage. Anything in black is where you're going to be in excess. So being able to empower users to understand when I see red, I'm either going to have to create new production orders or create purchase orders to make sure that I have the stock available to meet my sales needs. Okay. So really as a excellent report to eliminate those stock outs based off of the, the various metrics that we're going to be able to track here.

Okay.

Additionally, for those that fall on more of the the servicing or construction side of the house, here we have some WIP reporting. So this is where we can see just a standard WIP report and we can have this configured to your liking. But again, just like you saw in some of those dashboards, we do have that drillability concept. So if I were to drill into this project, for example, now I'm drilling into those individual tasks and if I drill into these tasks to see what expenses or transactions have occurred, I can now see what those transactions were. So it's a interactive drillable WIP report. Additionally, we have the ability from a resource management side of the house to have you covered there for any projects that you may be performing.

Okay.

Lastly, what I'd like To highlight Here is our 360 degree view dashboard. So really what this encompasses is a variety of different dashboarding metrics. So this can be configured for whether it's C suite management across various different departments or including multiple different data sources that can be all aggregated into one single pane view. Or you can have it set up for maybe just the various department heads and then it's just key metrics pertaining to that individual department. In my template that we're showing here on the left hand side, this is more leading statistics or analysis. So more forecasting projections. So we have the cash flow projection, open ar, open sales order and so forth. The center pane, this is showing more lagging statistics. So you know, looking at a six month P&L, how it was today, six months into the past.

Okay.

And then this pane on the right hand side, this is where we're pulling in other or additional data sources. So within Data Self we do leverage an enterprise grade data warehouse where we can utilize not just or leverage not just your ERP data, but also data from other data sources. So it could be E commerce, point of sale, Google Analytics, hcm, payroll, CRM. Really we can plug in with any data source there. But at its core, this report here or dashboard is really meant to give business users, department head, C suite management, a understanding of how you're performing overall as a company and then being able to, you know, drill across, as we would say, into any specific area that you would want to dive into more detail.

Okay.

Johnny.

Yeah, just a quick compliment. The 360 degree view is you think of each row, you know, he was showing a sea level kind of 360 degree degree view. But if you are a salesperson, a VP of sales or inventory planning person or project accounting person, you know, usually you have, you want to have your own 360 degree view that you run either all day long or maybe once, once a day, once a week, once a month, with a quarter once a year. And being able to drive from this landing point into the details why this is good is why this is not good. So interactivity and consolidation of data, you know, multi company, multi currency, all these things is something that analytics can help, you know, data heroes be more empowered. Awesome. Tom, I really appreciate it for the demo. Let me click back here, go through a few more PowerPoint slides. All right, so how does the technology works? So behind the scenes we have this technology. The diagram is showing oopsie on the left side. We call what challenges people have before data Self. Limited visibility, conflicting data Reports of laboratories and whatnot. So we're going to talk about the challenges. The way we solve the problem is with a three step process. Step number one, which is one of the most important and Tom already talked a little bit about, is the data warehousing framework. Data warehousing is a technology that pretty much is the foundation to provide fast and automated reporting and also the foundation for a lot of AI machine learning initiatives. The idea is to bring the raw data from your transaction systems like your erp, CRM, payroll and whatnot into the data warehouse. So mirror the data in the data warehouse and then once you have the data mirrored, apply transformations, aggregations, summaries, whatnot that can help decision making. So if you're looking at metric at the year level, well be sure that the data is optimized to do year level, quarter level, month level and whatnot. We use ETL plus, which is our homegrown tool to do extraction, transformation and loading ETL extraction to transmission loading. Clients can actually deploy and maintain their own data warehousing with data self ETL without coding. You know, ETL is a no code, low code, full code. You can do a lot of things without knowing any coding. But if you have some complicated their problems that many companies do have, then you have the power of, you know, low code, full code to fully customize the back end as needed. So a lot of the heavy lifting in doing maintaining the single version of Truth, running things fast is because the data warehouse is doing the heavy lifting behind behind the scenes automatically. Step two is we support a wide range of reporting tools. We're listing here the three most popular Tableau, Power BI and Excel. If you want to use or if you're using one of them or multiple of these tools, we can help you with a lot of technology around them templates and also sometimes just expertise in how to leverage them in a better way to better decision making. We have found the decision makers they usually find in Taboo Power Bi, something much easier for them to find the reports and dashboards to slice and dice their data, the query reports. Then even tools like Excel. Everyone loves Excel, but many people don't know how to use Excel for new reports. So Tableau Power BI have proven friendlier to business people. You know, for some of the business people to be more empowered, the last step is the templates. We have a pretty comprehensive data warehouse out of the box for multiple systems like you know, again, ERP, CRMs, payroll and manat. Again, if you're working with Akimatica, Sage, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks, Salesforce, HubSpot. There's a lot of systems that we plug and play the data warehouse framework already bringing a lot of the tables required for reporting already linked to tools like Tableau, Purpose and Excel. At the end of the day, once you deploy data self which usually takes about a day ish if you go with the full blown solution. There are more than 8,000 reports and dashboards ready to go on day two. So AP, AR Financials, you know Tom was showing a little bit sales, inventory, purchasing, project accounting, CRM. There's a lot of things ready to go on day one. And like Tom was showing, you can either just run them and filter them and export them if you want to, or you can change them, you can heavily customize them or even create new structures from scratch dramatically. But by providing this three step process pretty much at the end of the day is what you get is 360 degree visibility. Easy, easy way to maintain the signal for the truth. A lot of the reporting that before reporting manipulation before was manual become automated and streamlined reports were in seconds. Our benchmark is running under 10 seconds. Press the refresh button. Anytime you want to see a report, open the report in 10 seconds you get it rendered bringing data together multi company, multi currency. I mean there's a lot of value that once you have all this framework for better decision making. This is ETL tool is not a business tool. It's not a tool for business users. It's usually more for the business analysts that people that usually work with Excel, Crystal Reporting Services, Power BI tableau that no tables as I mentioned is a no code, low code, full code. Very easy to add more data sources. Here is just showing a few ERP budget payroll. Why not click plus you can add more data sources. It's very easy, straightforward. You can see the tables that you have pre selected. You can apply transformations so very you know, you don't need to know any SQL it just creates a SQL for you. But if you know SQL, this is SQL, you can go there and apply transformations using T SQL as needed. One of the most powerful features for fast reporting is the delta refresh in the most popular delta refresh in the data warehouse is called the upsert. Upsert means update. Once you bring the first load of data into data self data warehouse your data self data warehouse. And that might take some time if you have a lot of data. But once you do the first load after that usually what's going to be refreshing from the source system is just the modified rows the update modified rows and start new ones, meaning after the first refresh, every subsequent refresh usually runs super fast and it doesn't tax the source system. You know you can run pretty much every time without taxing your erp, CRM and whatnot. As I mentioned, this complete solution out of the box and deployed usually within a day. The out the box is plug and play. Connect your data, refresh it. Now you can see your data in practical terms. Many times people need some more time to test it to get trained, but you know it goes live very quickly and we have a pricing model that fits the budget of small, medium and large organizations. Doesn't matter what your business size is, we usually have a pricing model that our pricing is using. A deal breaker. The deal breaker is is this technology a good fit for you? Will you benefit from it? If the answer is usually yes, typically price will not be an issue. Because of this price range. We have adapted for different organizations budgets because you're attending this webinar, we have a promotion going on in December. If you place an order through December 15th, we give a 15% off. If you place the order by the end of the year it's 10% off. So contact us or your board to discuss more details and see if you can benefit from Data Self take advantage of the promotion. Having said that, I'm going to open for questions and answers. If you have questions you can use the chat panel or the Q and A panel on Zoom. Just going to wait a minute to see if there's any questions. There's a question from Katherine asking why we have chosen Tableau and Power BI for the analytics layer. Catherine, thanks for the question. We bring high end tools, high end business intelligence analytics tools for mid sized organizations with the goal of not breaking the bank. There are actually a lot of different tools out there that are really amazing. If you look at the Garden Magic Quadrant, there's like three dozen different tools that are part of the Magic Quadrant that is usually very reputable. A lot of, lot of a lot of usage. But the way that we build the out of the box is only what we consider the most popular ones in Tableau and Power BI have been the most popular ones for the last seven years in a row. If you look at the Guardian Magic Quadrant, these two are the top two for seven years in a row. We've been supporting tableau for about 12 years in power BI for about 5 years. So the reason why we chose them was because they are amazingly powerful. They are easy to use for business users in their pricing model Usually doesn't break the bank of mid sized companies. Unfortunately in our case they were also the leaders of the gardener magic quadrant. But pretty much we chose them because of functionality, ease of using power. I don't see more questions, so let's just wrap it.

Well if you already there's one more. Actually there's two ones. One from Susie and one from Tricia.

Oh, thank you. I'm just looking on the chat. Thank you. The descendant reports include auto simply manufacturing and service manager data. So I think we're talking about sage 300. The standard reports do not include them, but we have clients that have the auto simply manufacturing and service manager as an add on to the search for Sage 300 and then through custom work that I think even the client learned how to do, they brought those data sets, those tables and attached to some of the existing reports and build new ones from scratch. So not out of the box. But it's. It is fairly straightforward to add more systems. You know when I showed the ETL on the left, you know how to add new data sources. I believe both of the systems they populate the Data instead of Sage 300. So you don't need to add a new system. You just have to refresh the Sage 300 connection. It will show all the tables from these add ons along with the Sage tables and then you just double click each table to bring to the ETL and then you can do the data modeling. So not out of the box but it's fairly straightforward to add other data sources like add ons to dsl. Thanks for questions Suzy. Nice to hear from you. So here in the Q and A there's another question from Tricia. How do you share information with others? There are multiple ways. We actually don't need to show that next time. But as a user there's a button that is that is shared that you click that button and then you can choose to either schedule. Let's say I want to distribute this report back to me and maybe a few more people every day, every week, every month. Pretty much a schedule can just click the button, you choose the subscription option. You choose who do you want to send this report to on a schedule. Put the emails of the people you define the format to email PDF attachment and then how often do you assign you save it. That's it. As a user you can have the power to do it. You don't need to call it. You can give regular users the ability to subscribe reports and automatically distribute the reports other options as you can actually get these reports to be embedded into other applications. So if you're using a web portal, I don't know, some, you know, let's say that you're using some web application for like erp Intact Akumatica, Netsuite. You can actually embed the reports inside of your web application. So when people are navigating the erp, they want to see the sub report, they just click a link, the report launches within that application. So multiple ways to share information with other users. Hope that answers the question. All right, I think that answers it. Okay, well, if you guys have more questions, I recommend doing a one on one. You know, schedule a call with us. We can actually see specifically what you're looking for. We can give you an assessment how we could solve those problems if and how we can solve those problems. We can give a pricing idea. And again, if you were to be placing the order quick enough before the year end, you get a promotion for attending the webinar. Thanks for your time. I hope you enjoy the rest of the day and happy holidays.