Sage 100 with Automated Services: BI for Informed Decisions

My name is Johnny Girardi, I'm Data Sales founder and CEO and I'm super excited here to talk about Sage 100 with automated services from Ascent and talk about business intelligence for more informed decisions. I've been working in helping companies using Sage 100 for better reporting for 17 years. That's when I started DDSL back in 2005. And hopefully what I'm going to be showing you today will be of value and show how you can use this system to have better visibility from your operations. So first of all, Sage 100, it's great for several types of reporting and I'll be talking about a little bit about the things that sage 100 is really good with. But if you're here today is because there are part of your reports that you're not very happy with. What are the kind of challenges that people come to us with Sage 100 reporting challenges? These are the three most important ones that people knock on our door. The first one is being time consuming, meaning when you want to see a new report, you know, sometimes takes hours, sometimes days and even weeks to get the report built, ready and refreshed for you. And sometimes when you get the report, it's too late, it's outdated, you don't care anymore. So time consuming. It's a common problem that we hear people coming to us and see if they can be, can be solved and sometimes just running the report, hey, I'm going to see the report now. You click, you click refresh the data and sometimes you got to walk away, drink a coffee, take a nap, wait for tomorrow until the refresh finish running. So time consuming is a problem. Second, and sometimes even more importantly, is complex. Many times a decision maker, a business person needs to see some data, new data, and then they have to call someone else. Meaning business users cannot easily go there and find answers to their questions. The data is there in Sage, but it's just hard and they need to get someone else to get the data out for them at the end of the day. Because of these two problems, people complain of limited visibility quite often. I hear, you know, people saying, I'm flying blind. You know, too many times I have to make decisions without knowing what's going on. And that's no longer something that many companies can afford. Now, why some reports work well in Sage and why many reports have these problems. Let's talk about the two types of reports that are available in any system. The first one we call process oriented reporting. We call also the microscope. Process oriented reporting is what your staff needs to know to execute your business processes. For instance, you know, looking at today's jobs, if you have inventory, checking your stock status, collecting receivables, primarily you're looking at the small data set. That's what we call microscope. You know, we look at small data sets, maybe one or a few tables and SAGE does a great job providing these reports and running them efficiently for, for your staff. So microscope reporting reporting or process oriented reporting is something that Sid100 does really, really well. Now on the other side, this is what we call the decision oriented reporting. And now we're talking about kind of the telescope. That's usually what you need to make more informed decisions. It's pretty much the why behind your results. You know, if you have lots of debts, you know why in which clients are driving the high risk receivables debt. Or maybe you want to check your utilization rates across different teams, different times, different sites, you need to go through a lot of data and that can be taxing, cash flow projection, inventory projection, year over year variances. When you work with lots of data or lots of tables and you need to have what they call the telescope view. And when you see something that is weird, you want to drill down to see the details and maybe go to the microscope. Those are the things that Sage 100 does not do well. And that's what analytics is really critical. With analytics technology, you can look at the big picture easily, quickly, you can slice and dice it and as you see the outliers, the problems or hidden opportunities, you can quickly drill down, drill across and go all the way down to the microscope view to see why certain things happening. Hopefully today as we show data self, you'll see how this works. So that's why, you know, Sage 100 is limited. It's not only Sage 100 we work with. Pretty much all sit on the competing products and none of them provide the telescope. They all focus on the microscope reporting. So how does analytics and specifically data self provide the telescope and microscope in a better way than what comes with sage? So how do we solve these three problems? This is the data self we call diagram. On the far left we have the challenges. You know, the data silos limit visibility challenges, getting access to the data. And then we solve those three challenges with a three step process. The first step we call the power step because many reporting challenges in many reports are complicated. There's a lot of data, there's a lot of massage of the data to come up with key performance indicators and whatnot and things that sometimes people do Manually in Excel, running macros and whatnot. We use the Power step, which primarily is a SQL Server database, some people call reporting database or a data warehouse where we can teach the computer to do what humans do, usually in Excel or Crystal. So we take a much better database engine to do that heavy duty calculation. Once we teach the computer to do the power, then it becomes automated on schedule. Every day, every hour, every week, the data will be crunched and will be ready to be analyzed. This step is a little bit more technical, but once you program the computer to do it, you're pretty much automating reporting repetitive tasks. Now once you have this in place, the Power step then comes the ease of use. The ease of use leverages technologies such as Tableau Power BI in Excel which are amazing tools to enable decision makers, not necessarily computer savvy people. They don't need to be to be able to find and access their reports and keep Astronomy indicators anytime, anywhere, instantly. They don't have to wait. They just open and they run and they see instantly the results. And most importantly provide them with easy ways to do ad hoc analysis. Changing reports, asking new questions. It is amazing how much easier it is to use this framework once you have the power Fitting Tableau Power BI in Excel. And I'll show a little bit of that when we go to the product presentation. Finally out of the box. Our solution comes with lots of reports preconfigured AP, AR GL, inventory sales, sales order Automated services. There's a lot of things ready to go and we have several different editions of data cells. If you go with the most comprehensive, we have more than 8,000 in a library. You don't have to look at all of them. Absolutely not. It's like a library. If you want to see a report, usually you can find it, pick that one, get the insight and move on. So with this three step process, primarily we provide management with 360 degree visibility into operations Sage data, if you know, bring other data sources, you know, if you have payroll outside of it, Excel sheets or not, we can give management easy access to it. All right, let's take a look at the product then. Let me reload here. So right now what I'm going to be showing you is initially how business users can access data self and have ad hoc questions answered. So I'm going to start with the ad hoc analysis and the most important functionality when I start with is the easiest to use. It's called natural language query, which is pretty similar to Google or when you're searching the Internet. You ask a question in plain English, you have to know English, you know, that's a requirement. You know, we kind of joke that if you have English middle school, you are equipped to build your own reports. So primarily you come over here and you type a question. And let me. Type here, salesperson in 2022. So I just typed the question in plain English asking sales by Salesperson 2022. If you notice as I was typing this, you know these words, the tool kind of identified them as data points in the database that it can answer. As a business user, I don't care. I wrote in English. I press enter and the tool will instantly and accurately answer this question with a report built from scratch. Yep, right there. You get by salesperson. I'm looking at sales in a descending order this year. So Russian, English, press Enter, get the answer. If you want to say by month, you just type in by month. The tool again identified what the data point is. I just press enter. And now we convert it to a line chart where every salesperson has a line with a different color showing sales by month in 2022. This report didn't exist a second ago. Now it was created to answer my question. Many people maybe don't like the line chart they want to see in a different graphical representation. Or maybe just like in Excel, show me the numbers by the penny. Sure. You can choose tax table. And now that report becomes like an Excel for every salesperson. I have sales by month, and with a few clicks, if I want to, I can export this data to Excel and continue my analysis outside in case you want to do that in Excel. So natural language is very similar to Google, just inarticulate. In English, press enter, and lots of times the answer will be right there, anytime, anywhere, instantly. Now, just like Google, you will not answer all the questions many times the question is sophisticated or complicated, and the tool will not be able to enter, you know, like I just showed. So how can the tool answer other questions? I'm going to show now another part of the solution that allows users to also slice and dice their data anytime, anywhere, without calling for someone else. I'm still showing how business users use Data Cell. The slicer is like an Excel pivot table in Steroid, Easier, faster, and more automated, pretty much. Here you select. Right now I'm looking at customers. It shows sales in a given period, and I can change the period. So let's say suppose I want to see periods 2 and 3 of 2022. I press apply. Now I change the period of my report. But let's say I want to see something else when I see sales by salesperson, by customer, by, I don't know, warehouse. Well now I just have to go to this dropdown list and choose what I want to see. So I want to see salesperson. I choose this one. The drop down options here are available out of the box and a more technical person can customize the list, add more fields, remove them, put optional fields, add jobs and whatnot. So the list is customizable. But as a business user, once the list has been customized, I just pick what I want when I say salesperson. So I chose salesperson. Now the report shows sales by salesperson in that particular time period. All right, now I'm going to break down my telescope view into a little bit of drill down when I see by sales, person by customer. So I can click now the plus signal to expand into the next column which are now showing item and I just choose customer. That's it, choose customer. Now the report shows by salesperson by customer. If I now go and drill down even further, I can press go to the next column and choose the next parameter. Let's say items and there it is. I can see by salesperson, by customer, sales by item. Now looking at sales, what if you want to see also another measure. These are the measures available out of the box. If you want to see quantity sold, pick and choose, press apply and that's it. And pretty much this is the training. Once you show a user, a business user, how to use this drop down list, pick and choose and expand to the next column and change the filters here, they'll be able to have many of their questions answered. And this can go much deeper than what the natural language query functionality I was showing before. You can do a lot here that the natural language query cannot. So this is the second functionality that is also very empowering for business users when they come to new questions from scratch. Now let me show a little bit of other areas like financials and I'm still showing how business users can make more informed decisions. This is a P and L. Just reloading it. There's a P and L showing in a certain period my profit losses. And let's say that I'm looking at my salaries and I look at number and I say this number looks weird. I want to see the details. If I simply click on any of the data points like in this one, I just click on pops at the bottom, all the GL transactions associated to this number for this particular period and showing the total and all the Details all of the data right here. Maybe I want to see the whole line. I want to see, you know, months one and two. Now I select the line and then for months one and two I have all the details. Maybe when I see the whole cost of goods sold or any data point, it will automatically, as you click a data point, it will bring you the details at the bottom. Again, make it easy for decision makers to get from a telescope view. When they see something that is not kind of an outlier, they can quickly drill down and see the details. All right, I want to show one more example of ad hoc analysis and then I'm going to go more into the automated services reports available out of the box. This dashboard is pretty popular in our client base primarily because many sales driven organizations, they want to analyze their revenues or sales this year in certain periods. You know, current period, last period, this quarter, maybe last quarter. And quite often to compare with the same period last year, this year to date versus last year to date, this quarter to date versus last quarter to date and things of that nature. So what you do here is you select on the right the year and the period that you want to select or you want to work with. Let me choose period nine, press apply. And then here on the top left we have the big telescope total numbers, you know, total sales this year, total sales last year and the variance in dollar and percentage. Then I can see the breakdown by period where the dark blue is this year and the light blue is last year. I can see by ship to or you know, the customer address. And then I can see the customers in items. And this could be projects as well last year, this year in the variance. Now once you see this big picture, many times people want to slice and dice the data using it outliers, you know, from a telescope. I'm going to start to do some analysis. Let's say this customer here has a major decline in sales since last year. If I click on it to see the why I just click on it and now the whole dashboard changed to only show the data associated to this particular customer totals, trend analysis shipped to and items or projects sold. And maybe now I want to see out of this decline. I only want to take my top three decline by item. So I select only those three items in the decimal example and again it filter everything to only show for this customer for these three items. The rest of the KPIs it may be now I'm ready to see the microscope. I want to see the details and you choose show details. So from the Telescope. I'm going now down to the telescope to see all the transaction details. So again, very easy for decision makers to slice and dice the data and focus on the outliers and the why behind the business results. Now let me show a little bit of the automated services specific dashboards that the Ascend team has been building in collaboration with my team. This is one example of a dashboard from automated services showing the top 10 sites by gross profit percentage, the top 10 sites by revenue. It shows this information also on a pie chart, you know, so the biggest customer or the biggest customer by revenue is flow solution. You can see clearly that it takes kind of almost 3,4 of the total revenue for the business. And on the right we have some more additional granular information. There's a lot, there are a lot of reports and dashboards available out of the box. Plug and play to Sage to make you, your management make more informed decisions. But what if you want to customize a dashboard like this? What I'm going to show you next is how business analysts can actually build things from scratch. So this is not for the business users. Many business users will not go what I'm going to show you next. But I'm going to show how easy it is. And actually many business users will do it because it's fairly straightforward to make extensive modifications with the report designer. So I'm going to click the edit button to change this dashboard. I'm going to click edit and now I'm going to the edit mode. So there's a lot more controls. That's why for many business users they don't care, it's too much, they don't want to bother. But let's say for this particular widget of my dashboard, I want to change this job type into site for instance. So let me go straight into, only into this widget and I have all the controls that show how this widget's been created. And I want to replace job type with the site on the left. I have all the fields available from automated services. Type is right here. I could take the site and put after, just after. And now I broke down by service type, by type code by site. But actually I want to replace this with site. I just drag and drop on top of it. And now the report becomes by job service type code in site name. That's it. That could be a simple modification where I changed one of the dashboards widgets from something to something else. As I told you, many business users that are not afraid of these things, they will be able to make These changes if you give them the rights to by the way, because we lost almost 10 minutes at the beginning of the session. If you can stay another 10 minutes, I would appreciate it. I'm going to go over my schedule. Sorry about the late beginning. For those of you who have to leave later, we'll send you a link to the recording then you can watch the rest of the webinar. Anyhow, let me move on and show how to build from scratch a new report. So right now I'm going to say give me a new worksheet so something completely new from scratch blank sheet. And I have all the automated services tables pre configured out of the box. This list can be customized but right now is what available out of the box. Let's say I want to build a new report from scratch showing by customer. I want to see the job descriptions in a few measures. So I take my customer ID drag and drop into my report. So these are all the customers that I have. I take the job description or any other field in this case job description, drag and drop to my report. So by customer, by job description. And I want to see some measures. Let's say the booked extended price, drag and drop. So this is the book extended price and let's say I want to see labor hours. Now I have let me make this a little bigger. Add the labor hours in the book. I want to see material cost and I want to put gross profit percentage. So just drag and drop longer, wider and let me just put the extended price far down in my gross profit after it. So just changing the order of things. So labor cost, material cost, extended price and gross profit. And this would be the whole company history. Well, too much data. I just want to see, you know, I just want to see this in a certain period. So right now I put my completion date at the top and I want to show as a filter and I have a lot of data in my sample database. I only want to see for 2021. There it is for 2021 for all completed jobs. I can see customer ID job description in the measures. As I told you, if you are okay dragging and dropping, point and clicking, you as the business analyst or you as a business person will be able to make many changes in data self without calling to someone else. And that's the power of giving your smart decision makers the ability to find answers to their questions right now, anytime, anywhere. And if they make more informed decisions, guess what? The business should move forward more quickly, get happier clients, make more money, save more, you know, have more Cost cutting. So that's pretty much examples of how to simply easily you can publish, save it, use security to control who can see what. But it's very powerful to create new reports and to distribute them to other people. By the way, suppose that you come up with a report in Data Self like this one and now you want to automatically email this report refreshed every week, every day or every month. How can you do it? Simply you go to watch and you say subscription. So I want to subscribe this report to people you describe who's going to be receiving. I'm going to add back. I put Peter, who's not here, Clark include myself and I can say only send this particular report or the whole workbook. You can have several reports together and then you can choose the whole workbook. In this case only this report I want to send as a PDF and send automatically every week, let's say every week. Friday 4:30 and that's it. Once you click subscribe automatically, this email will be refreshed and emailed to all the people you add at the Top every Friday 4:30pm so refreshing the reports, the date of the reports and distributing to people, it's something that many users will be able to configure by themselves. All right, let me go back to the PowerPoint to wrap it. That's pretty much the demo pricing the data self website, dataself.com, we have more information about the pricing options when you get Data Self with automated services, the entry level pricing is $499 per month. That's the entry level pricing includes 20 users for a single company. We have more capable tools that can have multiple companies and a lot more things. The good news is more than half of our clients, they use the entry level and is sufficient for their for their reporting needs. So this is entry level but for half of our clients it's enough to take the reporting to the next level. Deployment usually takes days. Once you close the deal with Ascent, get the people involved and usually in a few days you have access to your data. And if you do order Data Self by the end of this year, we have a promotion because you're attending this webinar of giving you one free month, meaning you're paying a whole year, but you're going to get covered for 13 months. And that was it. My presentation questions. If you have any questions, if you can type the name in the chat box and we will monitor and address them. Let me see if I see. Doesn't look like there's any questions anyhow. So if you do have questions, you can absolutely contact, you know, Mike, Jose, Chris Fix and whatnot, or your consultant. And usually if you have questions about data self, we can schedule a one on one meeting to discuss your needs. Kind of spec it out the license required initial services as needed in training. And in case you move forward, we'll be super excited to help organization take we call your data Force to the next level. I really appreciate for your time initiative self. I hope you guys have a great day. Thank you.