Sage 100: Make Better Business Decisions by DataSelf

All right. Hi everyone, my name is Don Farber from Data Self Analytics. I am joined by Johnny Girardi, the CEO and founder of Data Self analytics. And I'd like to welcome you to this webinar on Sage 100 Making Better Business decisions. This webinar will run for approximately 30 minutes. We'll start off with some business level discussions about the need for and technology of analytics. We will then transition into a live demo of the Data Self analytics solution. And if all goes well, we'll even have a few minutes at the end for Q and A. So if you do have any questions as we go through this, please do save them for the end of our presentation. Any questions that we can't answer online due to time constraints, we will follow up with each of you via email. And so with that, let us talk about analytics and about dataself. As I mentioned, Data Self has been around for just under 20 years. Our CEO and founder Johnny Girardi is on the phone with me today. He'll be conducting our product demo. Our mission has always been the same and that is to enable clients to make more informed business decisions through leading edge, BI and related technologies. The technology specifically is kind of a trinity. That is, it's a combination of next generation data optimization with industry leading business intelligence and the largest template library in the analytics industry. We'll be talking about each of those points in more detail as we go through today's presentation. And so I'm going to have Johnny jump in for this particular slide to talk to us about business intelligence for Sage 100. Some of the challenges and other considerations that you have to think about. Johnny.

Thank you, Don. I'm going to keep this simple. We've been working with Sage 100, you know, doing better reporting out of Sage 100 since 2005 was the first system that we integrated with. So it's been 17 years. And the interesting thing is we got a lot of momentum when we started with Sage 100. And then at some point Sage 100 was kind of, you know, eclipsing maybe getting out of the picture. All of the new cloud systems, they got a lot of momentum. So we were having less new businesses with Sage 100. But for the last three years, Sage 100 market has become the fastest growing market in our client base. For the last three years, the number one market by growth is Sage 100. And primarily is because I think Sage 100 companies using Sage 100, they either want to extend the life of their investment. Sage 100 in having better reporting and analytics out of it is a critical component. So a lot of investment for just better decision of Sh100. And also some companies are thinking about moving out of it into a different ERP system in getting the reporting settled down first and transition into the new system seamlessly is also something that BI has been helping. So lots of momentum around the S300 market. If you think that you want to extend your investment in 100, I think you should check out analytics and data self if you're thinking in transition out of that. Also check out with us to see if we can help you in the transition on the reporting side. Back to you, Don.

All right, so in terms of some of the typical challenges that are faced by yourself, your organization, Sage 100 clients in general, especially more sophisticated reporting within Sage 100 can be a little bit challenging and can take a while to actually create those reports or even when you run the reports to actually have to wait, sometimes hours or longer for that resulting data to come to you. So speed of data retrieval is an issue. And also more and more we're seeing organizations from an analytics perspective needing to bring together information not only from Multiple modules across Sage 100, but also from across multiple products. So not just erp data from Sage 100, but wanting to blend data between your ERP solution, maybe your CRM solution, maybe other third party applications, or perhaps even you're still using some Excel spreadsheets to do reporting. And the ability to marry that Excel data with information inside Sage 100 can often be a bit challenging. So what I'd like to do now is talk about reporting in general, starting with this concept that in fact organizations today rely upon two kinds of reports to keep on top of what's going on within their business. Now the first of those are referred to as staff oriented reports. And these really focus on enabling staffers to complete their tasks at hand. Really giving your staff information about what they need to do now in order to fulfill their jobs requirements. And in fact it goes a little bit beyond that because it's not only providing information on what needs to be done now, but it also provides information on what has been done for the last day, week or month, as well as what needs to be done tomorrow, next week or next month. And some good examples of these staff oriented reports are things like today's shipments, stock status report and AR aging report or invoices processed today. Now I tend to refer to these staff oriented reports as giving you the little picture, the details about what's going on, what needs to get done within your organization These reports are absolutely essential for your everyday business activities. And it's truly. Excuse me, these reports, these staff oriented reports are what you get out of sage 100 standard reports. But then there's the flip side of the coin. Management oriented reports. In this case, these reports really focus on decision making. They're giving your executives and your management personnel key performance indicators that show them why business is occurring as it is and thus enable those folks to make more informed high level decisions. Now examples of these management oriented reports are things like high risk receivables, debt inventory projection, sales rep growth analysis, negative cash flow and year over year variance. These reports are what give your organization access to the big picture of what's going on within your organization and what decisions need to be made in order to provide the greatest probability of success and growth for your business. Now these management oriented reports are exactly what analytics were designed for. Now that begs the question, if we've got these two different kinds of reports, staff oriented reports and management oriented reports. Well, why can't you just use sage 100 standard staff oriented reports and just apply them to the needs of your management personnel? Well, the answer to that question is technology. Because the technology needed for management oriented reports is in fact very different from that provided by Sage 100 or standard ERP reports. Starting with a scalable data warehouse the amount of information that needs to be gathered and analyzed in order to provide executives and and management with those decision making capabilities that needs to look at a lot of data requiring that data warehouse. Secondly, as I mentioned previously, managers executive need information right now and so waiting overnight for a report or analysis to take place just isn't acceptable. Management and executives also need the ability to drill down into any component of data within a report. With that is the ability for executives and management to search for the information they want using a nice friendly Google like search technology. This is often referred to as natural language searching. Also key for executives and management is what if reporting and predictive reporting. Looking forward, what if we increase our inventory on hand for this item? What if we were to rearrange our sales territories in this way? We what would happen? And looking at inventory to make sure that you'll have enough on hand to fulfill orders not just today or tomorrow, but next week and next month. Also the ability to keep management and executives informed decision making is so reliant upon timing. It's making the right decision at the right time. So receiving alerts about KPIs that are being approached or exceeded. And finally blending data from between Sage 100 and other applications. All right, so from an analytics perspective, we here at Data Self we do focus on management oriented reporting. And what I want to do with the current slide is focus your attention initially to the extreme left hand column titled Limited Visibility as these are the typical business challenges or pains that management face. And if we look at the extreme right hand column under 360 degree visibility, these are the benefits that an analytics solution like Data Self provides by enabling management and executives to make those big picture business decisions regarding revenue, cash flow, stock shortages, cost overruns and the like. Now, we've talked about the value of analytics to an organization as far as providing management and executives with the reports that they need. And we've talked about some of the specific business pains that can be addressed through an analytics solution like cash flow, inventory availability and the like. But what we're going to discuss next is what makes Data Self analytics specifically different from other analytics solutions on the market today. And in fact there are three key differences. The first of those is data optimization. We've talked about how management reporting needs to pull data together from multiple modules and sources. A lot of data needs to be crunched in order to provide that insight to making the appropriate business decisions. Data Self analytics is the only analytics solution out there that gives you a next generation data optimization tool with its patented ETL plus solution combined with a robust SQL Server data warehouse. Second Top Rated BI Engines Now I don't know if you've spent a whole lot of time researching BI technologies, but if you have, you'll have run across two that are constantly and consistently rated as the top two BI engines on the market. And again, datasoft is the only solution that gives you the choice of using either of those two solutions, really guaranteeing that you're going to be able to rely on technologies to provide you with the insight and results that you need. And we know that these technologies have been around for years. They're consistently top rated and we know they'll be around for years to come. Third and lastly, as far as a differentiator, Data Self analytics includes the largest library of analytical reports and dashboards in the industry today. That number of templates, as we call them is now over 8,000 templates for Sage 100 for other ERP solutions for CRM solutions. Because as valuable as an analytics solution is, you don't want to bring in an analytics solution and then have to face the task of creating 10, 20, 50 or more reports to satisfy your management out of the box. Data Self comes with the greatest collection of analytics Reports and dashboards. All right, so that's going to be it for me. I'll come back a little bit later on to talk about pricing. But for now, Johnny, I'd like to turn the controls over to you to show the Data Self solution.

All right then. Thank you. Can you hear me and can you see the mouse moving?

We certainly can. Thank you.

Perfect. All right, so what I'm going to show next is some popular features in the Data Self user experience, looking from a management standpoint. So today's webinar is showing how business people, not the business analyst, how the business people, the users, can actually use Data Self to quickly and easily find answers to their questions anytime, anywhere in ad hoc questions. So I'm going to show ad hoc analysis in. The first thing I'm going to show is the most intuitive, which is pretty much if you know English and English is the language you need to know, so you need middle school at least. But if you know English, then you can ask, actually ask questions to the solution in plain English and you get the answer. Similar to Google, let's say right now I'm looking at my sales information in the natural language query functionality of Data Self, pulling data from Sage 100 and I just typed in sales by salesperson in 2022. So just a plain question in English, if you noticed, as I was typing in, the tool uses natural language, artificial intelligence, to translate the human language into what the computer understands. I don't care. I just type in English like in Google and press Enter and the tool will instantly and accurately answer that question. So right here by salesperson, it puts sales in a descending order for the year 2022. This report didn't exist before. It just entered my natural language query. If I type by month again, I just type in by month, press enter. And now the tool again took the prior query. So sales by salesperson. Now we give a line chart with different colors. I'm still looking at sales. And now we broke down by month in 2022. That easy. Now when you're doing natural language, you know, sometimes you might not like the representation. Like, you know, right now we're showing a line chart and maybe you want to see a different graphical representation, bars, whatnot, or maybe, you know, just like in Excel and many people, they just like to see the numbers by the penny. Sure. Any point you select, let's say the different representation in this case text table, and there it is. And in another couple of clicks I could export this to Excel. If I want to get the data out to other analysis. The beauty is this is similar to Google. Many questions that decision makers will have ad hoc questions they just need to ask in English and they'll get the answer by themselves anytime and anywhere. Very empowering. Now like Google, it will not answer all the questions. So let me show the next level of ad hoc analysis that is very popular using our framework. I'm going to go now for the slicer. The slicer is like an Excel pivot table on steroids. Being web based, being always refreshed and it takes a few minutes to learn how to use. Right now I'm looking sales by customer in the selected period that I have the filter here. And if I want to change, let's say I want to see sales by Salesperson in months 2 and 3. I quickly change the period to month 2 and 3. Press apply. So now the report is showing sales for that those two periods. I don't want to see customer, I want to see salesperson. This list here can be easily customized by business analysts. And once the list is customized, adding, removing the rows. As a business user, I just need to know how to pick and choose. Like salesperson. I pick salesperson. And now the report shows sales by salesperson in those two months. All right, I'm looking the big picture, you know, my telescope. I want to drill down and see more details. I want to see sales by salesperson, by item. Well, I can expand from the first column to the second by clicking on this plus signal. Now I go to the second column that already has the item. So there it is, salesperson by item. I want to see more details. I want to see to whom I sold, you know, by salesperson, by item, by customer. I click expand again, go to the next column and then I pick the next data point, in this case customer. And that's it. You can easily drill down from any of these data points up and down and you can see different measures. Right now we're showing sales. If you want to see two measures like sales and quantity sold, you pick and choose, press apply and that's it. Super easy for a business person to see this three minute demo. And that's the training. Now many business people will be able to slice and dice their data using the slicer anytime and anywhere. Many of the questions of the slicer cannot be done with natural language query, but they are powerful and they're easy to work with business people to have different perspectives. All right, that was the second example. The third example is more sophisticated. The third example is a very good example of management Reporting where you start looking at the big picture, big numbers, very high level, the telescope. In this case I'm looking year over year variances. This dashboard is the most popular out of the box dashboard out of 8,000, the most popular in our client base. And primarily you pick a year, any year right now, current year, and you pick the periods. Let's say I want to see period today through period nine. So all the periods through period nine press apply. Now this dashboard shows me year to date information. This is the total this year, dark blue. This is the total last year to date in this example in light blue, in the variance in dollar percentage. So big numbers. Now I have a visual drill down into more details. So in this case I have the same information, dark blue for this year, light blue for last year, but broken down by period and I see the trend analysis. If I have seasonality, I have another visual drill down. Now is the same information but broken down by state where the size of the bubble is how much is the sales this year? Black means growth, red means decline. So let's say Texas has 2% growth since last year. And I see all the numbers if I go to New Jersey it's 1% decline. And I see all the numbers at high level. On the right I have customer and item showing sales last year, this year in the variance. And usually if you are a salesperson, VP of sales and analyzing this dashboard, usually you focus on the outliers, you know what's happening, that is news. Like in this example, maybe I see this customer, one of my big customers has a major decline since last year. What happened with this customer, you might ask Right now if I simply click on this customer, I will drill down only in this customer information. So this is showing the totals for this customer last year. This year, the trend analysis, what I'm shipping to. In all the products have been sold, a single click of the data point, drill down only the data that I care. And maybe when you look at this data, you actually want to see the details. You know, right now I'm looking my bunch of products with a major decline. I want to see actually the details. I want to go now to the microscope, right? I want to see the detail level information. I can select any data point in my dashboard. In this case, my top three items by sales decline for this particular customer. And I want to see the microscope, show me the details. And you click it now it's going to show at the bottom every single invoice, invoice date, invoice number, invoice items, Information quantity. So everything for that period selected and with an extra couple of clicks I can export information to Excel in case I want to or share with other people. So the ability to see the high level information and being easily able to focus on the outliers give management the power to find what's happening with their business and where they should focus their attention. Everything that I showed you so far is for managers. It's easy for them to do this ad hoc analysis. What I'm going to show you next is more sophisticated, is definitely for business, for business analysts, but also many managers can make these modifications the next ones because it's not too hard. I'm going to show how to use the report editor, the web report editor now. So only a few people sometimes have access to the edit button. But let's say that I want to, I don't want to see customers, you know, I sell retail. I want to see sales by city on this, on this section of my dashboard. How can I change this to city? I click the edit button. Again, only some users will have the edit functionality, but those who do will be able to make modifications to their reports fairly easily. So right now I'm going to go to my customer section and go into it specifically. So drill down only to that section. And right now I want to show actually customer City instead of my customer information. So just drag and drop on top of it. And now this report is showing sales by city last year, this year in the variance and that's it. I just changed my dashboard that was showing customer information to customer City. Very straightforward to make some modifications like that. The last example that I'm going to show on the report editor is how to build a report from scratch using the web editor. I'm going to right click and say a new worksheet. So this will be a new report. This is not for many people. Many people might find this a little bit, you know, too much. But right here you have all the data coming from your sage system. And if you want to see, let's say sales by customer for this month, you can take the customer drag and drop. So pretty much it's drag and drop. That's my customer. I want to see sales, I find sales, I drag and drop. So this is total sales by customer. I want to find my invoice date, put in my columns. There it is in the whole company history. Sales by customer. I want to make this a filter to only show this year. So I'm going to filter only to this year. There it is. Sales by Customer. This year I'm going to drill down from the year. I'll go to quarters, click down to months. And I want to show a filter for month and only show the month of, let's say October. And there it is, sales by customer in the month of October. And maybe I'm going to compare with last year. The report editor is amazingly powerful and if you know how to drag and drop point and click, you can pretty much take care of 80% of the reporting needs with little, little training. So very powerful. All right, that's the last part of this ad hoc analysis. I want to show one more thing and we're going to give back to Don. As Don mentioned, we cover lots of different modules. Ap, Arkansas gl, for those of you who are on GL side, financial side, this is an example of a T and L that can be consolidated across different companies. And again, this would be the big picture, looking at all the numbers. And let's say you look at a number here like my salary is in. Oops, Let me just reload it. Maybe you see the number here and this number is weird. Why is this amount. You click on this data point and right off the bat it shows at the bottom all the GL transactions behind the particular data point. If you select the whole section, then it's going to show for both periods, the total at the bottom. And then with a click of the mouse, you can export Excel and do more analysis again using the telescope and the microscope to find out the outliers to make more informed decisions. Don, back to you.

Thanks very much, Johnny. I appreciate that. And you know, I have to say that watching you create a report from scratch like that or even customize an existing report, I think back to some of the days when I was responsible for writing reports. My projects lasted anywhere from a certain number of days to a certain number of weeks. And to see you create a report, change a report in truly under a minute is a remarkable thing to witness. So thank you for, for our demo of Data Self. So in the couple minutes that we have left, just want to talk a little bit about pricing because too often when people hear about BI or analytics, the immediate assumption is, oh gosh, I'm never going to be able to afford that. And so very simply, I wanted to just give you an idea for where the Data Self analytics solution is priced. We have a few different additions. We always customize pricing according each customer's needs because if you're not going to need or use a certain aspect of functionality, there's certainly no purpose in having you pay for it. So as you can see, you can come into Data Self analytics as for as little as just under $400 a month. You can also go to the Data Self website to get full details on pricing, some of the options that you have, and what's included in each edition. Do also note that you can go to the Data Self website and actually download the real live Data Self analytics solution and try it out for yourself for free for 30 days. And I think you'll find that it really is as quick and as easy as Jonny has shown it to be. So at this point we have just a couple minutes left, but does anyone in the audience have any questions that we can answer? You can either take your phones off mute or type them into the chat session in the zoom. We'll be glad to answer them. You know Joni, while we're waiting to see if anyone does have any questions, I have one of my own that I'd like to ask you. And that is on average, how long does it take a client to get up and running with Data Self? I'm not talking, you know, every possible report being fully configured, but from, from absolute no Data Self whatsoever to having it installed and configured and having some of these analytics readily available, what are we talking in terms of, you know, days, weeks, months, etc.

Yep, good question. So typically the out of the box deployment, you know, once we got the business side covered and we got the my team in the, in the client's team to do the job, and sometimes it's just the clients doing the job themselves, literally under 1, 1, 1 hour, the system gets up and running with what's called the out of the box. So the out of the box deployment per se is under one hour deployment. Now in real life, usually when you get. Not usually every time you get a new report or a new reporting solution, someone has to go through what we call the data quality process to be sure that the data on this new report or reporting solution is matching with your source system. You know, quite often the source system has customizations that you need to be sure the new report is matching that. So in real life, the quality assurance process takes hours, days, and sometimes even weeks. I always tell people in under one hour we can give you management raw access to your data easily and quickly. Like I showed in practical terms, usually takes about one to two weeks to get the data validated, but it's dramatically easier, better and faster than all the other analytics solution that I know out there.

Fantastic. And I know we're up against our time limit, Johnny, but I would like to ask one more question because I know in the ERP world people often do move from one ERP solution to another. And so you had mentioned earlier on that Data Self could help in that process. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

Yep. Usually when people transition from one ERP to another, part of the transition is to be sure that on day one, day 30 in the, you know, the next quarter, you have critical reports that are operating today in your business. And when you go to a new ERP system, many times many of those more complex reports will not be ready out of the box. You know, someone will have to create them and then you can create them in the new ERP in hope that will be possible to do just using the ERP functionality. Or you can actually get Data Self before the transition. You can move your critical reports to Data Self and then all the critical reports are in Data Self. And when you transition to the new erp, we pretty much remap the back end to pull your data from the new erp, not the old erp. In reporting, pretty much there's no change. It's the same report, the same user, the same data, and is one less transition to be made with the new erp. Also for some businesses, they want to be able to analyze their historical data seamlessly when they go to the ERP system. With the Data Self data warehouse, we can keep your historical legacy data frozen in the SQL data warehouse and glued at the bottom of your live system, the new ERP system. And when people are analyzing your GL transactions, your sales and inventory over the years, because we are combining the data behind the scenes, it's like you never changed. All your data is still there in dataset for analyze.

And Johnny, I'm going to impose upon you one more time because we had a question come in. Also, can reports be created and users receive them via email updates, for example, daily reports automatically emailed out to the appropriate staffers or management?

Yes, and it's amazingly easy for a business person to set up the we call the subscription, you select a report and you tell who should you receive, who should receive this report. So just put the usernames, you tell the format to email them a PDF or you know, an image or something. Then you tell how often you know, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and you press complete and that's it. You don't need to be a consultant, you don't need to be a technician. Business users will have the right to schedule this report distribution if you give them the right to. It's very straightforward.

Excellent. Thank you Johnny, for the answer. And thank you to our audience for posting those questions. So on behalf of Johnny Girardi and myself, Don Farber, thank you all very much for attending this webinar on Data Self analytics, making Better business decisions for Sage 100. We'll be following up with you via email. Also be providing a link to a recording of this webinar so that you can share it with your colleagues. And so, once again, thank you very much for your time and interest in Data self. We very much look forward to working with you. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you all. Thank you. Don. Bye bye bye bye.