How Analytics changed at Sage Summit 2014 - Sep 03, 14

What if, what if reporting were easy? What if it could be done anytime, anywhere by anyone? That's what I'm going to talk about here today is how analytics changed at Sage Summit 2014. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm the founder and CEO of DataSelf. So I'm going to jump right into about a minute and a half presentation of the product. This is data self analytics. And here on the left we have what we call the data panel where we see the data from my system, from my ERP system or from my CRM system or both combined. In this example I'm looking at my sales information. I have sales coming from the ERP package as well as I have CRM information combined in the same user interface. I have here a multi company framework, several company databases consolidated and I want to see let's say sales for all of my companies over the months. I want to see sales and number of meetings coming from my CRM system. I also want to plot my sales on a map to see bigger sales in bigger map by state and also looking at how big my deals are. I want to put all this information in a single dashboard and I want to see how easy and how long does it take to do it. Let's do it, let's do it. So I want to see my sales, so I drag my sales to my rows. That's my total sales. I want to break down by month. So I'm going to drag my months to my columns and right there I have sales by month. Well I have a multi company so I want to see sales split by company. So every one of my companies have a different color and I see lines for each one of them by month. I also want to see number of meetings for my CRM system. So I'm going to drag my number of meetings to my report. So there I have sales as well as number of meetings now so I don't get confused. I'm going to make my meetings with bars. So meetings are bars, sales are curves, I can easily tell them apart. All right, this sounds like a good piece of information. Now I'm going to pick a new sheet and I want to see let's say by state. I want to break down my sales by the deal size and put the sales all everything on a map. So let's do that and let's make bigger bubbles for bigger sales. So the bigger the bubble, the bigger my sales and then the sales are sliced by the size of the deals. Now in my team I have some people that actually like to look numbers by the penny, you know, they don't like charts. So let's remove some of this graphical capabilities and let's put everything on a grid format. And finally, I want to build a dashboard putting all of those pieces together so I can publish my dashboard to my users anywhere they are. And everything is drag and drop. I don't need to know complexity, I don't need to know database structures. I just drag and drop and that's it. I built from scratch a fairly sophisticated dashboard. And as you can tell, it's not complicated. You don't need to go to a lot of training. We actually have many of our users, business users, like CEOs, presidents, salespeople, CFOs, controllers, people who are not necessarily IT savvy, building dashboards from scratch, anytime, anywhere, not calling for it. So that's what we do. It's really easy to use, it's really empowering. Let me give you a little bit of PowerPoint extra information. The main reason that we do this is because the technology is called user centric. What I mean by that? Well, if you know the other reporting tools available in the sewage market, they are what we call expert centric. There is someone in your organization, maybe a consultant that spend hours, days, sometimes weeks to become familiar with the framework. And most of the report requests, new reports and ad hoc analysis have to go through that person or that people. What happens is it's slow, it's time consuming. The people building reports are always busy and people needing reports are always waiting for some new reports and dashboards. So those solutions are what we call expert centric. Most requests have to go to the experts. Ours is user centric. On average, more than 70% of the custom reporting needs of the average user. They will be able to do it, they can tackle it, they can take care of themselves. It's like a liberation. Users will be able to more quickly and easily take care of their own reporting needs. And the IT and the experts will be able to focus more their time and their expertise in more sophisticated things. One of the ways that I like to make an analogy of what we do here, let me show a picture here. This is my mom. She just turned 80. And by the way, I'm from Brazil. I went to Brazil about a month ago. My mom, she never ever used a computer in her life. Computer was too complicated for her. At the end of the day, to use a computer, you have to be kind of an expert. You know how to log in and all these keys and the mouse and the Right click and left click. Fairly complicated for an average user. Now, last year I gave my mom an iPad. What happens now with an iPad? She Skypes with me, she checks the weather, she's even checking Facebook. She in her 80s, she never would use a computer, but a tablet she uses. And that's what we're trying to do. It's kind of user centric. Our technology is business intelligence that empowers pretty much anyone in the organization with a tool that they can do it if they want to. Truth is, some people will not take the time to learn because fortunately they're too busy. But whoever wants to learn it, whoever wants to do it by themselves, they can. Going back to my mom example, my dad, he just doesn't want to even learn the tablet. He lets mom drive the Skype and so forth. Could he do it? Absolutely he could, but he had other priorities like playing cards. Anyway, so our technology has been designed to be user centric. It's designed to empower users who are not necessarily IT savvy to take ownership and offload reporting from it. Besides being user centric, we have been developing and building the Solution for over 14 years, the whole data sales team. And over the years we have built more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So it's a very comprehensive solution. It's not only easy to use, but has a lot of reports and KPIs ready to go and we'll show some of them as we go through this presentation. Why is this solution so easy to use? Well, we're actually using an enterprise level analytics platform and let me talk about that very quickly. This is Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and analytics platforms. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies in the Fortune 2000 world, making a technology assessment of upper market vendors. And every year they assess how the BI and analytics vendors in the Fortune 2000 world, they are performing. Making a long story short, on this chart, the higher you are on this, the higher the vendor is on this axis, the better the vendor is doing, the better they are delivering on their vision, the more traction they're getting with their client base. Here we have Tableau as the top leader in the Fortune 2000 for analytics and dashboarding and ease of use. And Microsoft is the leader when it comes to BI infrastructure gathering information and compiling information. What about them? What about data self? Well, I'm the founder of Data Cells and when I founded the business back in 2005, my vision from the beginning was I know There are great technology out there in the Fortune 2000 that can be simplified and amplified for mid sized companies. And I've been through this journey for nine years. I have a great team working with me and what we have today, it's nothing else but the best of the breed for the Fortune 2000 world delivered for mid sized companies. So we have Tableau which is the leader in dashboarding and ease of use. We have SQL Server representing the Microsoft BI infrastructure. We have our tool that eliminates programming from these other technologies so it's easier to install and deploy, maintain. And we have added more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So what we bring is enterprise level technology that is user centric. It's very fast to deploy. We have been working with enterprise level technology for mid sized companies for over 14 years. So we know the Sage products and many other products in the mid market and we know how to bring them to reporting platforms. And this technology literally can cost hundreds of dollars per month if you go with the entry level system. So very affordable. That's what we do. Now some people ask us okay, but how can users access this information? Well, let's take a look at it. So what I showed you before is the, the desktop client, which by the way can be used on Windows machines as well as on Mac machines. So we support both platforms. And this tool is usually more suitable for the power users, the more ad hoc data hungry guys, most other users, they'll be consuming information as well as slicing and dicing and even creating new reports using the web user interface. The web user interface can be accessed by the most popular browsers out there, Internet browsers, as well as from mobile devices, let's say tablets and smartphones. There are even apps for those devices so you can more quickly do the tasks. Now when you log in to this portal, which can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, you'll get into your own set of dashboards and reports. So let's say if I'm the CEO, I'll see the CEO reports and dashboards. If I'm a salesperson, I would see the salespeople reports and dashboards. Now as I navigate through my dashboards and we have a few hundred here as a sample, if I open one of the dashboards and I'm going to open this dashboard here, and if I were a salesperson, when I open this dashboard, what the system can actually do is give me only the information that I have rights to. So let's say if I'm the California account manager, these would be the top customers in California, while the rep from Florida opens the same dashboard. Exactly the same. It only sees the top customers in Florida, while the big boss opens the same dashboard and sees the top customers across all territories. So not only the security controls what dashboards and reports I have access to, but also what information is rendered to each one of these dashboards. So most of the users will be able to access the dashboards using the web or mobile device interfaces. Now, just to give you a quick overview of out of the box reports and dashboards, we have a lot of dashboards and reports looking at top performers, top growth, top decline, top change. Like this is an intriguing example. In this case, a sales report showing customers who grew the most since last year in customers who declined the most since last year to date, or maybe the last quarter today, something like that. Some of those metrics can be really, really critical. Now also, some people ask us how easy it is to change dashboards on the fly using, let's say, a mobile device. Well, let me show an example here. Let me go to my geography analysis. This one here I'm going to show sales. Even though we cover sales, purchasing, payables, receivables, inventory, financials, we cover a lot of different areas. But I'm using sales examples because it's easier for most people to understand. So I open this dashboard and I see sales on a geography, on a map. Bigger bubbles, bigger sales, and the sales lies by the size deals. I also have here sales by account manager, bigger bars, bigger sales. And the color. The bars are represented by the color. So from not so profitable all the way to very profitable. And then I show here also some of my top products. Now if I'm a regular user and I want to change the dashboard, I could use, even use my fingers on, let's say on an iPad, and select just the west coast states. When I select them, what happens is the whole dashboard changes to reflect only sales for those three states. If I choose one of my salespeople here, the dashboard changes again. Now it's only showing for those three states what Sam is selling. These kind of changes are very easy and most users will learn how to do these changes without training or with little training. And they cannot break it. They can just modify, save for themselves, but not break the original ones. And maybe, you know, if I'm a user who wants to receive a dashboard or report on a scheduled basis automatically my email so I don't have to log in, I can come here and subscribe I click this little button here and I say that I want to receive by email. And the subject of my email will be this. I want to receive in different schedules. Let's say every Monday morning and I click subscribe and there you go. Now, every Monday morning I'll get in my inbox a copy of this dashboard and I can click right into my email to launch this and be able to slice and dice it. So that's how most people will have access to this framework. Now what if I'm a power user and I want to be able to slice and dice a dashboard on the fly, on an iPad, in front of a client or in a coffee shop? Well then if you're a power user, you have the edit button. When you click the edit button, you'll be able to go into the different sections of your report and dashboard. You can even start a new one from scratch. And then you can completely change them. Just like I was doing with my other client tool. I can come here and say, hey, I want to see numbers by the penny. So I choose my graphical representation into numbers showing my sales and gross profit right there. And then if I want to break this down, let's say by product or product line, I can drag product line to my report and there it is, by sales. By product line, I see sales and gross profit. Maybe I want to add customer information. So let me drag customer input between my salesperson and my product line. It's just drag and drop. This is a user centric technology that will allow most of your users with little training be able to do reports that today have to go through an expert. And with data software analytics you will skip that. And everything is kind of drag and drop. If I drag my time to my report then now I'm seeing the time frame at the top here and the measures broken down. Pretty straightforward, pretty intuitive. I want to open now for questions. Let me. And if you have questions, Please use the GoToWebinar panel. It may be hidden. Right now you click the little orange button which should be on the right side of your screen. Then you can click a question here and press the send button and we will address your questions in the next few minutes. So let me see if we have any questions here on the audience. And yes, we already have a few questions. And actually the first thing that some people are asking is actually more than two people is if I could repeat the first example, the ad hoc analysis, because probably they got a little late. And the most intriguing part of my presentation is the first couple of minutes so let me go very quickly and do that and build this dashboard from scratch. Again I'm going to do more quickly. So I'm going to start from scratch. I want to see sales drag sales to my report here. I'm going to break down by month, so I'm going to drag my months to my columns and I see sales by month. I'm going to break down and see sales by different company. You know, I have a multi company framework, so for every company I have a different color in my sales. Now I also have CRM in my system together with my sales. So now I have sales amount and number of meetings from CRM and let me put the number of meetings in bars so it's more easy to tell what is what. And then I also want to put in this dashboard sales by state, by deal size, everything on a map. So right there I have everything on a map. And let me make the bubbles bigger. So bigger bubbles, bigger sales. And finally I want to duplicate this particular information and see numbers by the penny because again, some people understand better if we look at numbers. And finally I want to combine all of this information into a dashboard. Everything is drag and drop, everything is user centric, designed so business people can do things that today they have to go to an expert. So right there actually decided. It took me about a minute to build this dashboard from scratch. So thank you for those who asked me to repeat this. Last time we had the same kind of request, but we have more questions here on the audience. One of the questions here is what versions of Sage 300 are supported? Well, let me answer a little bit more broadly. If you go to our website dataself.com and you go to this menu, you'll find your products that you work with. And if you click on it, you'll find on that products page the version that we support, which is pretty much versions from 10 years ago all the way to the latest. You also see webinar recordings, brochures, sample reports and everything else. So use our website resources for finding out the version we support. Tom, thank you for the question. We got a bunch of questions here. Let's see another question here from Alice. How long does it take to deploy this solution? Alice, thanks for your question. Depending on the complexity or simplicity of your system, the core solution, the core modules can be literally deployed in a few hours. Most of the time there are customizations and additional work that may take a few days and sometimes a few weeks depending on the complexity. But the core deployment of the out of the box, which Includes a lot of reports and dashboards, is usually done in hours, literally. It's pretty fast. Alice, thanks for your question. We have a bunch of questions here. Let me see if I can see the most intriguing ones. So Jeff is asking here, can this be linked to sage 300 cre? Jeff actually I don't know what cre is, but we definitely link to sage 300. So maybe we should have this question on a 101 to understand what you mean by cre. Question here from Jennifer can this pull data from other software Systems consecutively with Sage 300? How does this work? Looks like we have a lot of people from Sage 300 here today. Jennifer, very good question. Let me use our website to explain our software architecture which will probably answer your question. So this is how our technology works. Our system again can be deployed on premises or can be used in the cloud deployment both ways. What our solution does is connect to your data sources. Sage CRM Yes, Sage 100, Sage 500, Sage X3, Sage CRM SalesLogix we also work with Microsoft Dynamics products and others, but we have plug and play connectors to a lot of these mid market ERP and CRM systems. But we can read data from any data source as long as relational, as long as you have tables. We can pull these data sources into our ultralight data warehouse. That makes the data easier and faster. And then the next component is actually a web interface that again can be deployed behind your firewall or in the cloud. And at the end of the day your users will access information using desktop, web and mobile devices. Jennifer, I hope you have answered your question. Let's see more questions here. Question for Becca what if I make a mistake and you save, can you go back? So overall the technology has the back button just like on a web browser. So yes, if you save and you have the back button you can go back. Now sometimes if you save and you close it, I'm not sure if you have still the go back button. So sometimes when people are concerned about that, we also show them how you can have procedures in place that even if you break something, accidentally destroy something, how you can prevent that from, let's say breaking the original. But overall we have the back and the forward buttons that work in a similar manner as in web browsers. Decca, thanks for your question. So question from Chris. How does a user add in a spreadsheet and add that to the mix of data? How they incorporate their own data into the analysis? Chris, good question and probably we should have this answering in a more detail on A one on one basis. But overall there are two main ways to bring other data sources into the framework. Like I was showing here. You can bring Excel, you can bring SQL databases, access databases, Oracle databases, you name it. Excel is a fairly popular option and many people ask us what our recommendation is. There are two main ways to import Excel into data self analytics. One is using the same procedure as we do take Excel funnel through the data warehouse to the client tool and that's fairly straightforward. You do not need to be an IT person to do that. However, if you have in your organization a few users that are really data hungry and they are the data discovery people that are always experimenting with different things and pulling data from all over the place, then we usually recommend those people to get some special version of the client tool which is powered by Tableau. So those people will be able to do that data import using directly the client tool here. And once the data has been validated, tested, then that procedure of importing this data source goes through it and then it will funnel through let's say the data warehouse. That's one of the approaches. So many options you can import directly or through the data warehouse and make it available to you. Chris, you are one of our clients. I'll be glad to take this conversation offline to give you more insight since I believe you may making some decisions that this may impact your moving forward. I'll take one more question and then we'll have to wrap. There's a bunch of questions here. So let me take this question here. How do we compare with Sage Intelligence? That's a question from Sally. Sally, this entry would be fairly long to make a comparison but overall there are few things that tell us apart from Sage Intelligence and actually all the other players in the mid market. First of all I would say that we are an enterprise level technology. We're pretty much the only enterprise level technology using Fortune 2000 technology. Not only Fortune 2000 but the best of the breeds Fortune 2000 technology, that's one thing. And when we put together it becomes really a user centric technology. Pretty much all of the other vendors, all of the other BI and analytics in the Sage market, they're fairly expert centric. Someone will have to go through extensive training and this person or this group of people be the ones doing reports and serving other people. So it's it still goes through the experts whilst we focus on more the user centric folks. Our time has been wrapped up. I still have a lot of questions to answer but we will be answering all of them. By email. I hope you found this informative. If you have more questions, if you want to be more educated about our technology and if we can be a good fit for your business, please contact me. You have my email, my cell phone, my Twitter account. I'll be glad to give you more explanations, make an assessment, and hopefully we'll be just learning more from each other and maybe doing some business if that is a good fit. I hope you have a great Wednesday and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you. Have a good.