Microsoft BI for SMBs webinar

Good morning everyone. Happy Friday. This is John A. Girardi, CEO and Founder of Data Self. Thanks for joining us. Today we're going to have an exciting and informative 30 minute session. Before I jump into it, a quick overview of why I founded this business back in 2005. So I'm an electric engineer. As my background and in my early career I was a programmer for many years. So eventually I fell in love with the business area. I did my MBA and I became a business person. For me, reporting and data analysis was never really an issue. I'm a programmer, I'm comfortable with computers with complicated tools, databases and I could do it. But many of my business friends, they couldn't. They would have to call another person, a consultant or myself to help them. And it would take five forever to get the reports. Even myself, I would need to build something from scratch, slice and dice. It would take me quite a while. So I joined the business intelligence industry back 14 years ago. And then in 2005 I decided to start my own business. And the main idea when I started the business and still today is I want to work in the mid market. You know mid sized companies, they need better reporting, they need easier reporting for management and it's usually the great solutions available out there in the upper market. They're too expensive for mid sized companies and too often too complicated and time consuming to set it up. So I thought and I saw that I could actually go to the upper market, find the right best of the B technology and bring to the mid market, make them simpler, make them better. So my vision was I want to simplify and amplify top notch BI technology for midsize companies. That was the beginning of the vision and today we're excited to show you the latest and greatest. So let's jump into the product presentation. So first of all, all lines are muted and if you have questions throughout the presentation, Please use the GoToMeeting chat inbox. And then we're going to be addressing at the end of the presentation. So I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about why analytics, why us and then a quick product presentation and then we're going to go for questions and answers. So most of the time when people looking for Microsoft BI for small and medium sized businesses, if they come to us, the most popular requirements are they want to have better sales analysis, supply chain and financials. So let's take a closer look at each one of these components. On the sales analysis, the most popular requirement is just have a better understanding of what they're selling, how much they're selling, who is buying, who's selling, what territories. If you're selling products, you know what products you're selling, is it growing or declining over the years, Is it profitable or not? So being able to easily slice and dice data anytime, anywhere is critical. And analytics definitely provides big value for those requirements. Some people have a more elaborate ordering and invoicing system where it takes a while to invoice clients and their inefficiencies in the process. So being able to pinpoint where the inefficiencies are so you can quickly tackle them is critical. And analytics can help you with that. Sales commissions. Some companies, they spend hours, sometimes days and even weeks crunching their data to come up with the sales numbers at the end of each period. Analytics can usually automate the process quite often 100%. So it becomes anytime throughout the period you can check where the commissions are versus the targets, things of that nature. So good help in that front as well. Some companies engage into large, long term contracts and they better be sure that they're coming up with the right pricing strategy. So to be a win win for you and for the clients, maybe you're dealing with Walmart and Target and analytics can help you analyze price strategy components. Forecasting. If you're trying to have a better understanding for sales how much you're going to be selling, you may be looking at your past sales. Maybe you want to be looking at data coming from salespeople spreadsheets, or maybe your clients are sending forecast. So the ability to combine data to do forecasting is critical and analytics can help with that. Finally, data integration. Maybe your sales data is in your ERP system, maybe it's coming from a point of sale systems, maybe it's coming from your client information. The ability to combine data, you know, any data with your ERP system is critical sometimes and we can also help you with that. On the supply chain. One of the most popular requirements for analytics is the simple inventory management. You know you want to see, let's say if you have products, you want to know where they are, how long they've been sitting on shelves, what the inventory turnover is, should you be moving items to different warehouses? Those requirements are typical that analytics can help. If you have inbound and outbound routing and logistics that may need analysis. Maybe you have shipping companies that are bringing products overseas and you want to know if you're going to get them in time and be aware in a timely fashion. So analytics can help you with that as well. If you collaborate with your supply chain, maybe your vendors send information, shipping companies, clients, analytics can combine this data into a single place and you can see the whole perspective and easily make better decisions. Your purchasing processes, if they are elaborate and you have inefficiencies throughout the purchasing processes, analytics can also help you analyze those things so it becomes more efficient. The same way in the sales. If you want to forecast, are you going to be able to deliver your products, your services in a timely fashion? Look at all the components that go into forecasting. Your deliverables can be challenging and analytics can bring it together easily, allow you to slice and dice them anytime, anywhere and big value for those people having forecasting needs. Data integration, we already talked about it applies the same way. Sometimes your data, you need to combine data from Excel sheets and access databases. SQL clients sending your data, salespeople sending data, you can combine them into analytics to make better decisions or at least more informed decisions. On the financial side, typically when people come to us, they already have in place an ERP system and they want better financials. And we ask them why you're not happy with the current financial solution. Usually should be good for your ERP package. And sometimes we tell them go back to your var and work with them. Because probably you should be good with what you have, but sometimes it can't. The financial solutions from accounting packages, they can go only so far. So when people are stretching the limit, pushing the limit and financials become a labor intensive process, it takes hours, days or weeks to close the financials. Talk with us, we may have a great solution for you. So if you have that problem, talk with us. If you're handling multi company frameworks and you need to consolidate them, quite often we have the right framework to address that. So if you are in this case, please come talk with us. We want to understand your needs and see if we are a good fit. In plain and simple, most of the financials from accounting packages, they are fairly static as a PDF, as an Excel, you cannot slice and dice it on the fly anytime, anywhere. Maybe on a mobile device, we provide that kind of functionality. So if you need slice and dicing anytime, anywhere, talk with us. We'll see if we are a good fit. So those are the main topics we cover. Payroll, services, you name it. But these are the most popular when people come looking for Microsoft BI in the mid market. So let me talk a little bit about us. So this is Gartner, Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies making assessment of the Technology from the upper market, the Fortune 2000 vendors, and this is the latest release they do once a year. So this is very fresh information. Make a long story short here, the more to the right you are on this quadrant, the better you are for Fortune 2000 companies. So not so critical for SMBs like here. However, the higher you are in the Y axis, the better because you have executing better your vision as a provider and you have better products overall. So here we have these two vendors. Microsoft, which right now is considered the leader in the BI infrastructure and Tableau, which is considered the leader in the data visualization technology and ease of use for business people dashboarding things. So what about these two guys? What about us? Well, it goes back to my vision of the company. When I found it. I wanted to go to the upper market and find best of breed technologies from those vendors. I want to simplify them, I want to amplify them. We've been working with Microsoft BI since the beginning of the company and over two years ago we adopted Tableau as our client tool because they complement each other really well. Tableau, Microsoft is a really great complement and today I'm very happy that Gartner released the latest analysis showing that these top two, Tableau and Microsoft are the top two leaders in their own categories. And what we have in our solution is exactly that. We have Tableau as a client tool, we have Microsoft BI as the infrastructure, but we add our own component that simplifies them, eliminating programming from the deployment, maintenance and we add more than 2,000 reports and dashboards to augment or to amplify the solution. So that's what we do. We simplify and we amplify it. Let me re spin it in a little different way here. So again, top notch technology from industry leaders from the upper market, the data self etl. ETL stands for extraction, transformation Loading is a technology that eliminates programming from the equation. So we simplify it. And then over the years we have built more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs that are kind of plug and play. So we amplify the solution. Can you build it yourself? Absolutely. You can build a solution from scratch, but at the end of the day what we provide is first of all ease of use, best of breed technology, pretty much the easiest also to use out there. We make it even simpler to use. So for business people and for it, it's really easy to use. Now it takes only usually a few hours or a few days to deploy. And if you build this from scratch, it's Going to take you months or years so fast to deploy and maintain is a big value. We provide expertise. The core team of Data Self has been working with mid sized companies in high n bi for 14 years. So we know ERP packages and CRM from mid sized companies. We know how to connect them with these high N BI tools and we know how to work with mid sized companies for reporting purposes. So we have expertise in doing all of these things. And finally, low cost, our cost is going to be a fraction if you try to get the solution from competitors. Because it's ready, it's plug and play and we know how to do it. So those are the four main values we provide. Ease of use, speed, expertise and low cost. And because we use the great components, we say we sell our Ferrari. Our solution like a Ferrari in the mid market where many other vendors like the Bimmers, the Mercedes, the Porsches, great solutions, great pricing, but we are the faster, the more sophisticated yet the easier to use overall. And it's like a Ferrari. So let's take our baby first test drive, we're going to do a presentation, breaking three buckets, secured access, sample KPIs out of the 2,000 in some ad hoc examples. So have a seat in the passenger seat, buckle up, put your helmet and let's go for a spin. All right, so most people, most users will access Data Self analytics through a web portal like this one. They'll be using a desktop, web or mobile device such as, let's say a tablet or a smartphone. When they log in to this portal, they would only be able to see their own dashboards. It's a highly secure framework. So if I'm a salesperson I would see only the sales team dashboard. If I'm a person with the finance team, I would only be able to see the finance team dashboard. Now when I open one of these dashboards, I'm going to open this one. Then another layer of security can kick in and then I would only be able to see if I'm the rep from California, I will only be able to see sales in California, my top customers in California, while the rep in Florida opens the same view and sees top customers in Florida, while the big boss opens the same view and see top customers across all accounts. So same dashboard gives different information based on your user credentials. So that's how security works. Now we have more than 2,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. This is one example. It's a top performer example in this case top customers by sales this year to date. When we build the dashboards, we try to make them simple yet insightful. The idea is we want to give business people quick insight into important things so they can take care of them, not spending time analyzing data. They want to have insights quickly, hopefully. So that's how we do it. In this case, we're looking at my top customers and then I see bars, bigger bars for bigger sales. Looking at this bar down here, and then the color bars are represented by this. The gross profit of each customer is represented by this color theme here. So more red. It's not so profitable. Greener is more profitable. I can easily tell now that this customer is a top customer, but it's fairly unprofitable. Is there something wrong about that? Should we work more closely with this client and increase profitability? Maybe so, maybe not. But knowing this kind of trend may be important for your business and you can pay attention to those things and be proactive. We can also see these black dots which also show profitability on these other top x axis. So once you have this insight, you understand how this dashboard works. Next time that you look at it, it's going to take you a few seconds to realize if you need to do something about these clients, you know who they are and you know how profitable should you do something about it. So the idea is we shortcut the time to analyze data so you can go by your life and do your stuff. Another way of looking at data, which sometimes is even more important, is looking at the time tip of the growth curve of your major key performance indicators. This is a good example. If you have recurring customers, this is a way of looking at the tip of the sales growth curve. And that means top increasing sales, in this case since last year to date, and top decreasing sales since last year to date. Well, in this particular perspective, these customers are growing the most. Bigger bar is bigger growth since last year to date. Most likely happy customers, salespeople are working closely with them. It's a no brainer. How about this? Why are they declining so much? Maybe it's a problem you better know before it's too late. So looking at the tip of the growth curve is usually critical for many KPIs and you should pay attention to them. And we provide this kind of functionality. How about exception reporting? Have you heard about it? Well, exception reporting looks at things that are no longer happening. In this example, I'm showing customers who are no longer buying. Why, if they're recurring, why they're no longer buying. Maybe you want to look at Items that you're no longer selling. So looking at exception, reporting is critical and we have many reports covering those perspectives. Maybe you are a C level executive and you want to have on your iPhone something like this. You wake up in the morning, you check your major KPIs. If it's red, it's not so good. Maybe you need to do something about it. Maybe you need to call someone. If it's green, no brainer. If it's yellow, well, maybe so. Or not. You look at this. Let's say in this case my sales a little bit down. Maybe it's a problem. However, my profit is good. Oh, I just remembered that actually we're selling to more profitable businesses lately. It's a focus. I told them. So it's okay if the sale is not so great as long as profitability is up. So I don't need to worry about that. So the idea again is give you insight into meaningful things so you can go by your life and make decisions quickly instead of spending time trying to come up with these insights. All right, let's make the final insight here. And I'm going to make an ad hoc analysis. Suppose I'm the VP of sales and I open this dashboard that shows me sales by geography. I see sales, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. I see slice of my bubble showing size of the deal and then I want to see if it's growing or declining over the years. I can quickly change the year and see what's going on. Okay, very cool. Now what if I only want to see sales for West Coast? I could use my fingers, select those three states and when I do that, the other components of my dashboard changes. So it shows now salespeople selling those three states and what they're selling. Making changes, dynamic changes is very easy. And most business people will learn to do this with little or no training at all. Now, if I'm a power user and I want to extensively change the report on the fly, I will have the edit button only for power users. But if I'm a power user, I can do it even if I'm a business person with little training. Let me show you that. So I'm clicking the edit button and now I go into the edit mode. This engine here was designed by Stanford University professors who studied how business people look at business data and have insights from it. It's a journey, it's a process. It takes interaction. And that's why when a business person asks a question to the it, can you build a report xyz and the guy brings Back the report and the guy, well, the decision maker. Well, can you please change this? Add a summary, a filter, and there he goes, comes back, well, can you put a chart? Can I change the color? It's a process. It takes interaction with the data until the decision maker has the right insight. So these Stanford University professors came up with a software engine that helps decision makers walk through this journey by themselves with little or no assistance from it. So let me show how it works. So here I have a tab for each of the quadrants of my dashboard. Assume I would like to take this dashboard here and see sales by the penny for my salespeople. Well, I can click the show me button and select different graphical representations. In this case, I want to see numbers by the penny. So I want to choose the grid approach. There it is. Easy. Sales by customer by the penny. Easy. Cool. What if I'm going to break this down by something else? By product line? Easy. I go to the data panel, I find the product list, product line is here. I drag and drop into my report and there it is by salesperson, by product line, sales and gross profit. What if I want to break down by something else? By customer territory? You name it. You just go and find the reporting parameter you want and you drag and drop with your fingers on the iPad before the salesperson, between or after, you just drag and drop wherever you want and there you go. It's like magic. It's easy. Salesperson, customer, product line. What if you want to see by year, by quarter, by month, fiscal period, you name it. It's pretty much a matter of dragging, dropping components and then filtering, summarizing, and you got it. It's very, very straightforward. Maybe you want to export Excel, send in a PDF, everything is kind of point and click. You click, you choose underlying data. In this case, I want to see all records and I click to download information and then you get it in Excel. And now if you like Excel, you can get information in Excel to do some manipulation. Very straightforward. So that's pretty much how our Ferrari works. I hope you have enjoyed the ride. Let's wrap up the presentation and go for questions and answers. So if you have questions, Please use the GoToMeeting panel chatting box to ask questions and we're going to address them right now. So let's see if we have questions. Okay, so let me see, we have some questions here. So the first question is why you didn't use Microsoft BI client tool in your solution. That's a question from John. John, thank you very much for your Question. It's a very good question. So let me go back here to the architecture to answer this question. So why we didn't use Microsoft BI tools in our solution? So when I founded the business back in 2005 back then I decided that Microsoft BI infrastructure, SQL Server was the right platform for our back end system. Back then I chose proclarity as the client tool because back then Microsoft client tools were not really refined for our market. So in proclarity back then I thought they potentially be acquired by Microsoft because they were such a good fit. Sure enough, two years later Microsoft acquired ProClarity and I was so happy. Wow. Now Microsoft has the best of breed infrastructure from my perspective and the best of breed client tool. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to kill proclarity and change with a different approach using Excel and some other components. And then we decided well let's dance Microsoft song because we've been happy so far. And then eventually we found that in our market the Excel approach and the other components Microsoft was building was not very user friendly for the mid market clients. It was a little bit too much technical requirements to maintain it. So about three years ago we decided, hey, you know, it's a great solution. Many of our clients love the Microsoft client tools. They're inexpensive, they already have it, it's awesome. But too many of our other clients, they were having difficulties and I went back to my vision. Hey, we need to have the best of the breed technology from each component and let's see if we can find in the upper market something that works better as a client tool. And back then Tableau was about here. So they were not back then considered the best of the breed from Gartner standpoint. But in my standpoint they were a good fit for our market. They were simpler to use, they had great data visualization and they were really designed for business people. So we bet on them to be the right choice for our offering. Being easier to use, easier to deploy, easier to maintain from a business user standpoint as well from a technical user standpoint. And I'm so happy we made that choice because since then tableau just got better. And now they are considered by far the easiest to use. The most successful client tool that works with Microsoft bi. So don't take me wrong, Microsoft BI provides awesome tools many of our clients continue to use and we happily support them. But overall as the default approach, we believe the combination of Tableau and Microsoft BI in the back end is the best approach for the mid sized companies. And actually let me show you in our website, if you go to our website. By the way, in our website, if you go to the analytics by product, you can see all the solutions we have available out of the box for different ERPs and CRM systems. So we can click here. Let's say for Microsoft, let's say if you have Dynamics and then you have here software architecture brochures, sample KPIs, there's a bunch of good stuff including recording webinars now on the software architecture. That's what I want to show you here. This is how our solution works behind the scenes. So we pull data from your data source into an ultra light data warehouse, which is a SQL Server based data warehouse. But unlike the traditional approach of using programming in SQL and requiring expensive programmers, we use a simplified approach to use our own ETL technology. Much easier, much faster. So part of the ultralight feature, meaning it's easier data warehousing, is because we use the ETL so it's easy. There's no, there's little programming involved. And we also have templates that connect this framework to the most popular ERP and CRM systems in the mid market. So out of the box it plugs and play and then we connect to Tableau component which is an OEM we have. And then at the end of the day, business people have access to their data anytime, anywhere using mobile desktop devices. So sorry for the long answer and unfortunately we're running out of time. I wish I could have more time to address other questions. We'll address them on a one on one basis. So let me wrap it. Here is my contact information, my cell phone, my email, my Twitter. I highly recommend you to follow us on our Twitter accounts and also LinkedIn. We always have great news and we're going to have some fun promotions coming up with real Ferraris. I really appreciate your time and interest in our business. Have a wonderful Friday. Have a good day. I look forward to speaking with you in the near future. Thank you. Bye bye.