ERP & CRM: Make Better Business Decisions by DataSelf

Don hi everyone, my name is Don Farber with Data Self Analytics. I am joined by Johnny Girardi, CEO and founder of Data Self and like to welcome you to our presentation on making better business decisions for your ERP solution. This presentation will take roughly 30 minutes. We're going to divide it into three sections. The first will be a business level overview about how you can use analytics to improve the value of the decisions you make out of your ERP solution. We'll follow that with a brief product demo for provided by my colleague Johnny Girardi and we'll end up with about five minutes or so at the end for any questions that come in. So without further ado, let's get right to it. A little bit about Data Self Analytics. We've been around since 2005. We were founded by my colleague and Data Self CEO and founder Johnny Girardi. Our mission from day one has been to enable clients to make more timely and more informed business decisions. And the way we do that is by providing providing a technology that's a trinity of capabilities. First of all, we provide a next generation data optimization engine, industry leading BI tools such as Microsoft Power, BI and Tableau. And finally we complete that with the industry's largest report and dashboard template library. We'll get into more details about all of those as we go through today's presentation. But for now I'd like to start off by turning things over to Data Self CEO and founder Johnny Girardi to talk about some of the challenges you might have in reporting out of your ERP solution.

Thank you Don. This is Johnny Girardi. I've been working with mid sized organizations in helping them make more informed decisions for about 20 years and for 17 years as data cell founder and CEO. And primarily every single client or prospect that knocks on our door, they have the following challenges. Business users complaining that they are kind of flying blind. You know, many times they have questions about their business, they have to make a decision now and they are not going to be able to get the answer because they have to call someone else or they have to wait until a report runs. So a common complaint from them is flying blind. You know, not having easy access to their data anytime and anywhere. Also a major complaint is reports in general. Reports and dashboards in general are just too time consuming. It takes a lot of effort of business analysts, of people in the back end. That takes hours, days and sometimes weeks to get certain reports done, refreshed and distributed. It's just too time consuming. And third is just the speed of reporting. You know when you want to when the management wants to see some KPIs or reports now, they usually want to see now. And if they have to open a report, click a refresh button and wait and have to wait for too long, quite often they don't wait. They have to just make a decision and move on. In our standard, you know too long is more than 10 seconds. If you press a refresh button on the report, it takes more than 10 seconds. Guess what? Many business users will not wait. They'll wing it or they will not make the best decisions. And those are the main pain points people come to us in where we can help them take their reporting and management decision making to the next level. Don, back to you.

Thanks Johnny. I'd like to continue our conversation by talking about the two kinds of reports that an ERP solution needs to provide. The first of those are referred to as staff oriented reports. And I tend to look at those as providing the little picture into your ERP data. And that's why we have the microscope here as our analogy. Because the focus here is on the completion of tasks by your staff members, keeping your staff informed about what they need to do now, as well as allowing them to track what they have done in the past day, week or month and what needs to be done within the upcoming days, weeks or months. And good examples of these staff oriented reports are things like today's shipments, stock status report, AR Aging and Invoices processed today. These staff oriented reports are typically the kinds of reports that you get out of your ERP solution, whether that's netsuite, Sage, Acumatica, or any of the ERP solutions available today. Now the second kind of reports that you need to get out of your ERP are management oriented reports and they provide what I like to talk about as the big picture or the telescope view into your ERP data. These reports are designed for for management and they're designed to allow management to make better, more timely, more informed business decisions. They provide key performance indicators that not only show what's been going on in your business, but why it's been going on, trends and things of that nature. Good examples of these management oriented reports are things like High risk receivables, debt inventory projection, Sales rep growth analysis, negative cash flow projection, and year over year variance variants. These big picture reports are typically what are provided through analytics solutions. Now that begs the question, why can't you Simply take your ERPs existing standard reports, those task oriented and staff oriented reports, and why can't you simply use them for management oriented reporting purposes. And the answer is technology. There's a great difference in technology between standard ERP staff oriented reports and management oriented analytics. Starting with a scalable data warehouse. Because when you're talking analytics, the amount of data, the volume of data, the sources from which data needs to be collected are exponentially greater. And so you need a scalable data warehouse, typically using something like SQL Server to manage and optimize that data. That data needs to be retrieved not in minutes or hours, but in seconds. And when you do get to that data, you need to be able to drill down into it, all the way down to the transactional level of detail. Also, analytics requires quick, easy, Google like or natural language search. Technology needs to enable you to do what if reporting to postulate on certain business scenarios for the future. Analytics needs to do predictive reporting. Especially important if you deal with inventory. Because knowing that you have enough on hand to deal with orders today is good. But even better is knowing that you have enough to deal with orders coming in this week, next week and beyond. Finally, analytics, because of its criticality, timeliness and devotion to managers, need to provide KPI based alerts to let managers know when there are things that require their attention and full finally, analytics needs the ability to blend data together from multiple not only modules within erp, but it needs to blend data from your ERP solution to your CRM, to other solutions to spreadsheets and beyond. Now specifically Data Self analytics we focus on management level reporting while at the same time providing the essential drill down capability to staff level tasks. And you'll see that in the demo provided by my colleague Johnny so Data Self analytics, it really starts on the left hand side of this illustration with limited visibility, those being the business challenges that your management is currently facing. Things like revenue shortfalls, unpredictable cash flow and slow paying clients. Data Self analytics addresses this and we'll talk about the how in just a minute, but I'm going to draw your attention over to the extreme right hand side of this illustration to Talk about the 360 degree visibility that data Self analytics provides through its reports and dashboards. So before we get into the demo, what makes Data Self analytics different from other analytics solutions? Three things specifically. First of all is the power behind Data Self is driven through module that provides data optimization and Data Self is the only analytics solution on the market today that provides next generation data optimization with its patented ETL plus tool married to a robust SQL Server data warehouse. Secondly, Data Self analytics provides an unprecedented ease of use through its incorporation and its support for the leading two BI solutions on the market today, both Tableau and Microsoft Power bi. Both of these available for you to choose from, providing that high level of ease of use of the industry's best BI technologies. And finally, the analytics library Data Self analytics provides the largest library of reports and dashboards in the industry today. Over 8,000, 8,000 report and dashboard templates as we call them now. Of course, those 8,000 are distributed amongst all of the various ERP and CRM and related solutions that are on the market today. But this provides you with a starting point. You don't want to take an analytics solution and have to start designing every single report from scratch. With this robust library, you can use those out of the box and also use them to create custom reports and dashboards of your own. All right, so now let me turn things over to CEO and Data Cell founder Johnny Girardi for a live product demo.

Thank you Don. Let me share my screen. Can you see my mouse moving?

Sure can.

Thank you Don. This is Johnny Girardi again. What I'm going to show in this product presentation is focusing on what business users decision makers get out of Data Self. So focus is business users. Next month we're going to be showing the business analyst experience, but today is really for business users, commonly business users. Sorry, they have ad hoc questions about their business and they want to find answer to their questions right now quickly and easily by themselves. I'm going to show a few examples of how Data Self fulfills that job and then I'm also going to show how they can make even more sophisticated customizations in this product presentation. So the first one I'm going to show is the most empowering and easiest to use. It's called natural language query and it's just like Google, you ask a question in plain English. English is required, the only language currently supported, so you need to have at least middle school but having English in articulating your questions, the tool will give you instant accurate answers right off the bat. I need you an example. I'm going to see Sales by salesperson in 2022. I just wrote the question like I would do in Google and if you noticed the tool uses artificial intelligence intelligence machine learning to identify the data points that you wrote versus the data points available in the database. To make a query in the database as a business users, I don't care. I wrote in English. I press enter in the tool instantly and accurately answer the question. So showing salespeople showing sales in a descending order in that particular Time period. This report did not exist before. It was just created on the scratch. To answer this ad hoc question. If I type by month, meaning I want to break down this same perspective. Now more granularly press enter and now the tool broke down by month, giving in this case a line chart for every salesperson using different colors showing sales in the months of 2022. Now, many users might not like this chart. They want to see in a different representation, maybe bar chart. If you're an accountant, most likely you want to see numbers by the penny. Sure, you just choose different graphical representation like text table. In this example I'm looking the same information as a tableau report. And if I want to export to Excel in a couple more clicks I could get this data into Excel and continue my analysis. So natural language query is an amazing technology, very similar to Google. Many questions will be answered. You know, users will find the answers by themselves anytime and anywhere. But like in Google, it will not answer all the questions. So let me show other pieces of the technology that will also help questions where natural language query is not yet answering. I'm going to go now to the Slicer tab. The Slicer is among the top five most popular features out of the box in Data Self because it's also addressing ad hoc questions. And it's like an Excel pivot table on steroids, but much easier to use. In this example, right now I'm looking sales by customer in a certain period, you know, three periods. And that's what I'm showing right now. Well, what if I want to see sales by salesperson in periods 2 and 3? Well, changing the field is pretty straightforward. So just changing periods 2 and 3 press apply. So now I change the period, but I don't want to see customer, I want to see salesperson. I just click on the slicer and I choose salesperson. Now, this list that I'm showing you comes available out of the box for your ERP system. And a business analyst can easily come and customize this list. Remove, add, make changes to whatever the business people need. Once this list has been customized to a specific, you know, slicer that you want, a business user just needs to pick and choose. So I'm going to click salesperson. And now the report became a sales by salesperson in those two periods. All right, that's my big picture telescope view. Well, now I want to drill down and want to see more details. I want to see sales by salesperson by item in those two periods. Well, I just click this plus signal to go to the Next column. Right now I already have the item, so that was easy. Sales by salesperson by item in those two periods. And again I could choose a different one in case I wanted. I want to go microscope now. I want to see actually sales by salesperson, by item, by customer. Sure. I click plus again to go to the next column and I pick the next dimension. It could be anyone, could be the documents or maybe the customers. You just pick and choose and you see the answer right in front of your eyes. Maybe you want to see a different measure, same thing from the measures out of the box. We have a lot budget variances. Let's say I want to sequence the sold, press apply and that's it. What I just showed you primarily is the training required to get a business user fairly self sufficient in slice and dicing this data without calling for anyone else. It's amazing how many questions can be answered using the natural language query in the slicer. All right, now I'm going to show another way of big picture small picture telescope microscope approach. Now I'm switching to the GL set of data self. You can see P and L balance sheet, cash flow protection, whatnot. In this example I have a P and L showing a certain period in certain year periods. You know my numbers and commonly when people are looking at their P and L and balance sheet, sometimes they see a number that they are curious why this number is too high or too low and then they want to go into the details. With data self that possibility to go from the top to the intermediate to the most granular level is very straightforward. Let's say that I look at the salaries here in this number. I see, I don't want to learn more about it. I just click on it. I still see my P and L where I started my analysis, but the bottom. Now I see all the GL transaction details on that particular data point. You see that they matches because that's exactly what I'm looking for. If I look for the second period, just click on it. I change to the second period and the numbers are matching. Maybe I actually want to see the whole line. I click the whole line and now if you see the bottom, I have everything for month one and two and the total is matching the total. Maybe you want to see the whole cost of goods sold. You select the whole thing and now if you look at the bottom, let me just scroll down the bottom, you'll see that all the transactions that are here add up to the total cost of goods sold. And then I could quickly see from The P and L any data point, point and click. Joe down to find why my numbers are the way that they are. Very empowering. Just point and click. All right, I kind of showed you so far the tabular we call the simpler analysis to look at the numbers and follow. What I'm going to show you now is a little bit more sophisticated but for many business people it's amazingly insightful. This dashboard, the year over year dashboard is actually the number one most popular in our client base primarily because it shows you what's happening this year, let's say this period, this quarter, the year to date or maybe the, you know, a few periods in this year. And you can also compare them versus the same period last year, which is a very common way of analyzing business, seeing how you're doing versus the same period last year. Anyhow, the way you select the period is by choosing this dropdown Right Now I'm choosing 2022 and what periods you want to analyze. Let me choose year to date through period nine. You press apply now by doing so, what I'm getting here in this whole kind of little busy dashboard. Well, telescope first. This is the big numbers, the total sales this year, year to date. In this case, sales last year to date in the variance in dollar and percentage amount. So big number the telescope. Then I'm drilling down visually into more granular information. In this case I'm looking at the dark blue this year, light blue last year and I see the breakdown by period and see kind of trend analysis over time. You see that where I'm growing since last year to the next widget I actually looking the same information but now from a geography perspective where the size of the bubble is this your sales black means is growing since last year to date in this example and red is declining. So let's say taxes, you see all the numbers and we have a growth of 2%. If you look at New Jersey also all the numbers and a decline of 1%. So visually you can tell the good and the bad of the sales analysis from a geography standpoint. On the right side out of the box we have customers and items. And then I see sales deaths last year, sales this year in the variance. Now that I understand the big picture, the telescope of my sales from all of these data points and I'll show how to customize in a bit. But let's say that I'm happy with this dashboard. As a business user, as a salesperson, as a VP of sales, I usually want to analyze the outliers, something really good or really bad. And what's happening, like in this example, Marina Golf, it has a major sales decline since last year. What's happening with this customer? Maybe nobody knew anything about it. I can just click on this particular data point and the tool automatically. Now go from the very big picture and start to go into more details. Right now this is the total analysis for this customer only. Marina Golf trend analysis for Marina Golf where I'm shipping the products or the customer address if all the items have been sold to them in those two periods. Now when I look at the product analysis, I see that these three items have a major decline. They're pretty much driving the decline. What's happening? I can now check only those three items. And again now my dashboard is further filtered only for Marina Golf only for the three items, the totals, the trend analysis and the ship too. Now, with data self, the ability to slice and dice it, drill down, drill across is very powerful. But at some point, quite often people want to go to the microscope approach. So in this case, I'm going to put my mouse over those products and I'm going to click show me the details. And now I left the telescope and I went into the microscope and I can see every invoice number, invoice date, the items, the customer, the quantity, every detail of those transactions is here. And all of this can be customized. I mean, this is a summary of the details. If you want to see all the columns of your sales invoice, invoice line, it can be brought over. And once you do this, it takes again a couple of clicks to export the data to Excel or to PowerPoint in case you want to. But this ability to actually take a dashboard or report from the telescope view, slice and dice it, drill down, it's amazingly powerful for business users. Everything that I showed you so far is the business user experience. What I'm going to show you next is some ways to customize the report designer that many business users will not, will not do it because they are too busy, they don't want to learn. But we have many business users that find report design amazingly empowering and easy. I'm going to show how to make some easy customizations using the report Designer. That is usually more for business analysts. So let's say there's a business user. I actually don't care about customers. Let's say I sell to retail, I don't care. I care about sales by city instead. How can I change this widget to show sales by city? Well, I need the edit button that only business analysts or people who have the editing rights will have access to. Let's say I'm a business person, but I have edited rights. I'm going to click the edit button. I go to the report editor that for some people list too much, but for many it's simple enough. And I want to customize this widget. So let me go straight into the settings of this widget right now. As you can tell, there's a lot more things around and here I'm see all the sales parameters or dimensions for my sales analysis. Well, I want to get customer city and replace in the rows where the customer was. So just replace it. Drag and drop. And now the report became a customer city report. Instead I'm going to sort descending order and that's it. In a few clicks I changed that widget. Instead of being a customer widget, now is a customer city widget. So making some changes is that easy. If you know how to drag and drop, you can do it. Even building new reports from scratch using the report editor is something that many business users will do. Let me show a quick example. When I right click and create a new worksheet and I do a revenues analysis and I want to see sales by salesperson this month. So how can I do it? Well, drag and drop. I find the customer name, put in my rows. These are my customers. I want to see sales. There it is. Drag and drop in the report. So sales by customer. Let me start descending. So I see my top customers at the top of the list. All right, now I want to see by this month. So let me put invoice date and see what happens. Put in my columns. Beautiful. Show me all the years in business. Total sales by the year. I don't want to see other years. Let me just filter and just show 2022. So just I create a filter and say just 2022. All right, sales by customer in 2022. But I only want to see by month. How can I get to the month level? I can click the plus in the year, it will go to the quarter. I can click the plus in the quarter and it goes to the month. Nice. All right, so let me make a filter of my month. So I'm going to say show month as a filter and I only want to see let's say September. That's it. Drag and drop. I can see sales by customer in September. And now if I want to select more periods, more years, let's say what happened last year, same period. Right. I just picked two years and I see September side by side or what if I want to break down by some more details like I was doing with this live stream, but now I have access to everything I want to see product line, you bring product line, there it is, sales by customer, by product line. And maybe I want to also bring, you know, quantity sold. I drag and drop quantity sold in my report and I would put as a measure on the top. So quantity sold in sales maybe when I see goes by the percentage pretty much. If you know how to drag and drop, you can do it. And that's the power of giving business users the ability to find answers to their questions now, anywhere, anytime, without calling for assistance. That was my part. Don, back to you.

Thanks, Johnny. You know what really impresses me about the Data Self solution is the fact that although it brings you typically in at the management level view of what's going on within an organization with just a few clicks and with that infinite drill down, you can actually get down to the transactional level detail. So if that level of detail is required by a manager or executive, it's always there at their fingertips. Now with that, I think it's safe to assume that most people, or at least a lot of people will think that this functionality is great, but it's way beyond me price wise. In fact, I think people are surprised to find out that Data Self analytics is so affordable. We have three basic tiers of licensing and pricing, referred to as the Advanced, Professional and Enterprise Edition. Data Self analytics and everything that you just saw through Johnny's demo can be had for as little as just under $400 a month with the Advanced Edition. One of the aspects of our pricing structure is that each of those tiers can be broken down into individual components. And so we allow customers to buy only those features that they really require. And so full details of the pricing tiers and their components are available from the data self website, dataself.com and we encourage people to go there not only to check out all of the details about pricing, but also to try out Data Self analytics for themselves. Because a free, fully functional version of Data Self is available. If you need assistance in terms of configuring it, we'll be here to help you. But we go by the mantra, try it and we think you'll like it. And with that, I'm going to open up the lines for any questions that may have come in from our audience. I see two questions initially. One is, on average, how long does it take to get the Data Self solution up and running?

Then I'll take that Question. The out of the box deployment, once the commercial side has been resolved, settled, is usually under one hour. Primarily we have to take our ETL tool and give it access to your ERP or CRM system. That's usually an IT conversation away and installing if it requires something in our system, typically within one hour from the beginning, the system will be connected, will be authenticated and will start to extract the data into the Data Self cloud or on premises server. So the effort is short, usually within minutes, hours, maybe sometimes even days. If you have lots of data, the data will be ready for some consumption. The out of the box deployment comes with a pre configured setting, so you'll see some data right out of the box. But usually we, you know, we tell people that anytime you get a new report or new reporting platform, you need to validate the data. Be sure that the data, the business logic running the report is matching with your current settings. So in practical terms, usually takes data and maybe a couple of weeks or so to validate the data and go to production. So the actual deployment is one hour. Quality assurance, which every reporting platform requires, can take a few, you know, a few days or a couple of weeks and that's usually when the system goes live in production.

Perfect. And the second question we've received thus far has to do with the deployment environment. Is Data Self purely a cloud based solution? Can it be implemented on prem? What are the details there?

We have the we call the Lego block approach. Whatever the client needs, if they need completing the cloud, we can do everything in the cloud. Some clients want everything behind the firewall. We can bring all the Lego blocks behind the firewall. And we have many clients that make a hybrid. Some piece in the data warehouse. I'm sorry, some pieces on premises, some place in the cloud. So we have a technology that is modern and has been designed to adapt to the needs of each individual customer.

Perfect, thank you. I don't see any other questions from our audience and I see that we're just about out of time, so I'll move to our wrap up. And on behalf of Johnny Girardi, I'm Don Farber. Thank you very much for attending this webinar on Data Self analytics for your ERP solution. Do note that we provide monthly webinars and next month will be a deeper dive into the Data Self technology specifically for your business analysts. And again, you can go to the Data Self website to see the content and topics of upcoming webinars. So once again, thank you very much for your time and your interest in the data self analytics solution and we very much look forward to working with you. Thanks again.

Thank you all. Bye bye.