Sage Summit 2016: BI and Analytics Preview with DataSelf and Tableau

Johnny Girardi shows how DataSelf pairs SQL Server data warehouses with Tableau to build BI tools for mid-market companies. The workflow moves from data prep to dashboards to distribution, with drag-and-drop reports, maps, and filters. DataSelf's templates cut deployment time.
Questions this video answers
Johnny Girardi, founder and CEO of DataSelf.
July 19, 2016.
Tableau for analytics and Microsoft SQL Server for the data warehouse (plus DataSelf ETL).
More than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box.
Chapters
Sage Summit is just around the corner, another exciting event. Often when people come to summit, many people are looking for BI and analytics options and quite often the conversation just stays at a very high level. So this webinar pretty much is an idea to provide more in depth content. So when you or your peers go to Sage Summit looking for bi, you'll know better, you'll know more. Thank you for joining us. So this is Sage Summit Analytics Preview with Dataself in Tableau. My name is Johnny Girardi and I'm the founder and CEO of dataself. We have some very interesting content to cover today. I'll talk about some reporting concepts, how data self adds value. I will do a demo, we'll talk about some pros and cons of different concepts. We'll have a QA at the end of the session and also I'll run three quick surveys throughout this presentation. So first of all, reporting process. Typically when someone asks for a new report, what phases people have to go through? Well, the first phase is what is called data preparation. So the person building the report must know the database structure of the data source really well. It must know also tools that can pull the data from the data source. Typically this phase, the data presentation is very technical. It requires someone very IT oriented that will be able to pull the data from the data sources. The next phase is what is called the data presentation. Well now once you have the data, you need to put in a certain format, maybe some grid in a chart, maybe going to be focusing on looking data this year to date versus last year to date. So this is the actual report. Some people use Crystal, Excel reporting services, you name it. The data presentation also typically is a fairly technical job. The person doing it must have a lot of experience dealing with the reporting tool, whatever it is. So data presentation typically is also fairly technical. The lesser part of the process is, well, people that require the report typically are. Someone else is not the person building the report. So comes the data distribution. Sending reports to different people, maybe by email, maybe saving on a portal. Quite often this process is done by the person who actually build the report. And quite often is very time consuming. It might take a lot of copy and paste, emailing. It can be error prone, it can have delays. Anyhow, these are the three main processes or steps people go through to build and distribute reports. Well, how can you do this process in an automated way? How can you make it more efficiently using different technologies out there? There are many approaches. The one I'm going to cover here is one of the Most comprehensive ones that cover more needs. So here on the left you have your data sources we call the data silos. It can be your ERP system, your CRM, Google Analytics, social media, maybe a payroll system, whatever it is. Typically every organization has several data silos. And typically people have to build reports from individual data silos and eventually consolidate them to have single view of the company. How can this done better? Well, typically one of the best ways to break the data silos is to bring all the data from the data silos that you need for reporting into a data warehouse. And that's how you can take care of data preparation. So you bring the data into the data warehouse, you can make the data look easier and faster for reporting. This is a very, very technical job, but it's a one time thing. Once you set up a data warehouse with your data, consolidating your data silos and making them easy and fast for reporting, that's it. Automatically the data warehouse will be refreshing this data and will be much easier to report out of it. Well, for data presentation and distribution, typically companies using enterprise grade analytics, they will use what is called an analytics platform that has several features. The first one is must be really easy to use. That's the most important thing. It should allow the users to access their reports anytime, anywhere using desktop, web and mobile devices. It should also allow users to drill down, slice and dice, download their data and even build new reports from scratch without calling for consultants. So the analytics must be user driven, let decision makers to be more self sufficient with their reporting needs. The second thing is it must provide information in different ways. Some people like to consume the reports going to a portal. Some people might like to receive the reports on an email. So you need to provide ways that people can consume the data anytime that they want, in the way that they want. So think about that as well. And finally, it should also help do the thing automatically. You know, send reports automatically to people, let them automatically put information the format that they want. One day one so this is typically how Fortune 2000 companies take care of their reporting needs or companies who are using better, easier, faster BI solutions. Some companies use programming to build data warehouses. Some companies buy the data warehouse from scratch. And there are many options for analytics. So this generic concept, before I move forward, let me open here the first a poll and ask you where are the polls here? What are your main reporting challenges? So if you don't mind checking the boxes for which ones are your main reporting challenges? We're still having votes coming in, so five more Seconds. Please post your vote and click the submit button. Okay, I'm going to close the poll. Thank you very much. Let me share the results. So difficult to use is the biggest reporting challenge. And slow data silos and report distribution is about the same. Okay, thank you very much for sharing. All right, so let's move forward. So how Data Self adds value to this puzzle? When I founded Data Self, the main vision has been from the beginning that there are great reporting technologies for Fortune 2000 companies. Very easy to use, very fast, but typically they're too expensive for mid sized companies. You know, companies who use like Sage products. So the vision of Data Self is to find in the Fortune 2000 world the best of the breed technology. Make it simple, make it easy, make it affordable. That's it. That's our vision. Best of the breed make work for mid sized companies. If you look at our solution today, we use Tableau and SQL Server and we'll talk about them very shortly. Which are best of the big technologies for Fortune 2000 World. But then we add our own secret sauce. We add our ETL which is extraction, transformation and loading. That makes the deployment and maintenance of data warehouses much simpler than the alternative. In over the 16 years working with this technology for mid market, we have learned how our clients have used reporting and we have added many of those views into our out of the box solution. So today we have more than 5,000 reports, dashboard APIs out of the box. But what about SQL Server and Tableau? Well this is Gartner. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment for Fortune 2000. In every February they release how well those vendors are doing in what they call the Gartner Magic quadrant for BI and analytics platforms. Make a long story short, the two vendors that we bring to the mid market, which are Tableau and Microsoft, they have been leaders in the Gartner Magic quadrant for many many years in a row. So they're not perfect, they are not a magic wand. But boy, they're one of the best available for Fortune 2000 and we're so glad to make them easy in affordable form mid sized companies. Now how does this architecture work using Data Self approach? Well, for the data warehouse we use SQL Server, which is one of the most solid, well supported data warehouse platforms out there. But instead of using programming, which is what most people do, we use our own ETL which allow us to install and deploy and maintain the data warehouse in a much more efficient approach. Usually takes hours instead of weeks and months. Using programming so much Easier, much faster. Then for the analytics platform, we use Tableau, which Garner has rewarded as the gold standard for analytics for four years in a row. Again, a very easy to use, a very fast technology. Well, on top of this, we put templates that put all of these pieces together. So it's not only easier, faster, but there are more than 5,000 reports pulling data from Sage ERP systems such as 100, 300, 500, AX3, Sage Pro. We also have Sage CRM, SalesLogix, Salesforce and some other competing products. So that's our architecture. Looking from the data warehousing approach. Now some people ask us, why did we choose Tableau? It's a good question. There are so many great analytics platforms out there. Why Tableau? Well, from our knowledge, Tableau has been pretty much the only analytics platform that has designed their product using psychologists and graphic designers. From the beginning, they perceived that data discovery or data analysis is a discovery process. It's a journey. The decision maker has an idea, he has a sense of something is wrong or something is good, what is it? They have to be able to dig into the data, slice and dice it, drill down until they find exactly what is causing this different behavior. So it's a human process. And the psychologists and graphic designers involved in the design of Tableau were pivotal to help make the product so easy to use and so fast. Let me show a perspective about that. What should I do? Well, we humans are very visual animals. If we weren't, maybe we we would have not survived as a species. But if we are in this situation, we don't have to think what to do. We just jump out of this situation. Right. Well, Tableau does that with data. It doesn't bite, but it gives you visual perspectives into information. Let's talk about rows and columns. Absolutely. Tableau and dataself. We support extensively rows and columns analysis. So you can see numbers by the penny in different ways. Absolutely. That supported. However, what else tableau and theta self do? Well, if I ask you how many nines are in this table? If you're like most of us, you can go row by row and eventually going to count how many. What Tableau does is this is a subtle, simple change that highlights the nines with the bold in red. Now in a few seconds I can tell there's about 10 nines and then I can make decisions. The idea is to shorten the time to get the insight so you have more time to decide and most importantly to act on your decisions. How about this? So I'm looking at product type Product territories and gross profit and sales. If I ask you which territory has the biggest sales, which products are not so profitable? Again, if you're like most of us, it's going to take a while to come up with the answer. What the blood does is something like this. Longer bars, bigger sales colors represent profitability and red is not profitable. So now in a few seconds you can tell central it has the biggest sales trends and a few products are being not so profitable. Again, shrink the time to get to the inside so you can decide and make, you know, act on those decisions. Now it's not about being just beautiful, it's about being sightful. Insightful is the main point. This is a business, you need to get information. Not being beautiful, yes, it's better. But most importantly being insightful. What about it? Well, 3D pie charts, they are so beautiful. Yes, I love them, but boy, they can be deceiving. When you put a pie chart at an angle, you lose the perspective of which slices are bigger. So tableau makes it harder for people to see 3D pie charts because they are deceiving. Instead, it shows beautifully 2D pie charts and visualizations to help you come up with insights more quickly without being deceiving. So again, important is beautiful as insightful and insightful. With the focus on insightful now next I'm going to jump into the product presentation and what I'm going to be doing is an exercise from a company from one of our clients here in California. This company is a distributor of products and every month the CEO was going to board meetings with a stack of reports. And when they acquire dataself, they want to do a few things. One was allow decision makers to be more self sufficient, getting these reports in a timely fashion. They want to reduce the time to get the reports done and they want to allow decision makers to slice and dice their data anytime, anywhere. So the exercise I'm going to go through is actually showing some of the reports that the CEO was taking to the board meetings. One of them was, well, showing this month's sales details. Then they were looking at marketing sales trends. So I'm going to show how to build a report. Also seeing sales by region. You know, they're shipping products in the whole country, they want to see sales by state. And I'm also going to show some of the reports out of the box we provided them to help with the decision making process. But before I show the product, I'm going to launch one more poll very quickly. So let's take the second poll and the Question is, what are your critical reporting areas to address next? I know you may be busy looking for all your reporting needs, but in the next six months, which of these areas do you need to improve next? So please vote and be sure to click the submit button. 10 more seconds. Please be sure to click the submit button. Five more seconds getting some answers. All right, I'm going to close the poll and share the results. So big for sales, second CRM and then financials and others. All right, thank you very much. Let's move on. So let's go for the product presentation and I'm going to start the product presentation showing this desktop client tool. The desktop client tool is the publishing tool. But most of the things I'm going to show you with the desktop tool, which by the way, can work with Windows and Macs, you can also do using web browsers and mobile devices. So when you connect to the system the first and you're going to be building a new report from scratch, the first decision you make is what connector you're going to be working with. And you can have several connectors. You can have financials connector. You can have payables, receivables, payroll. You can have connectors that are blended together payroll and looking at your financials, for instance. Anyhow, you select a connector and then you build your reports. In my example, the CEO of this distribution company here in California needs to see a report showing sales details this month. So he needs to pull from the revenues connector some information like customer invoices, product and whatnot, and also look at sales information. How did he do it? I'm going to show it to you. Well, he needs to see sales by customer this month. So let's go to the customer list and just drag and drop customer name into my report. So there it is. Here are all my customers. Well, he wants to see sales, so I'm going to take sales, just drag and drop into the report. So this is total sales for all customers total in the whole company history. Well, he wants to see sales this month. So let's add invoice date. So now we have total sales by year in the whole company history. Well, again, he needs to see this month. So let's drill down from the year to the quarter level. I'm going to expand from quarter to the month level. There it is. We have sales by customer by month. I could be drilling down from into fiscal periods, into months, into weeks, into any kind of time bucket. Once we build the time buckets in the data warehouse, it becomes very easy for Any person to just drill from the very top level all to the bottom. You know, you can go to the hour level to the minute and seconds level if you want to. The idea is once in the data warehouse, we customize the solution for your specific needs. Business people will be able to slice and dice and drill down just by doing things like this. Okay, well, the CEO needs to see sales this month, not the whole company history. How can we filter it? Well, it's pretty much drag and drop as well. I'm going to take invoice, date, drag into my filters shelf, drag and drop into my filter shelf and then I can select different time buckets or select relative date, which I'm going to select right now. Relative date, select months this month and click. Ok, there it is. Now this report will always show this month, whatever the month is. I don't have to change the date anymore. And sometimes in the board meetings, a board member would ask, what about last month, the last three months, last year, you name it. In the past, if the CEO didn't have the report printed out, he would have to make notes and I'll get back to you. Now he just come to the report and say last month. There it is. Maybe the last three months or four months, or maybe the last two months. Just point and click and you get the answer right away, very quickly, very easily. It's very intuitive. Now the CEO needs to show sales by customer, by product, invoice, date, invoice number, you name it. Well, how can we change this? We drag and drop product. Let's put product information. Product is here. I drag and drop between my customer in my sales. There it is. By customer, by product, my sales this month. Maybe when I see invoice number, what you do, you drag and drop invoice number. Here it is. Drag and drop between customer in product. Maybe invoice dates. Drag and drop right here. Many of our clients, users, they have learned how to build reports from scratch by watching a presentation like this. You have to learn how to drag and drop. Is that simple? Of course, there's so many possibilities that to be really a ninja user of this, you have to learn a lot of techniques. But the basics is pretty much drag and drop filter and you get the report. It's really impressive and it's really fast. Okay, that's the first report the CEO needed to bring. The next report is showing marketing sales trends. So now I'm going to click this button to get a new sheet and then I'm going to build a new report that's going to show sales and marketing trends. Well this company, they want to analyze sales from their ERP system along with the website visitors from Google Analytics. It's a different data silo. They want to see the information together. In the past they will spend several days to put this report together every month for the CEO. Well with the data warehouse we brought the data together and we linked by the dates fields and then website visitors became just another field in my revenues connector. It was taken care by the IT team in US but once was brought together into the data warehouse it automatically refreshes. Now business people like the CEO just have to drag and drop. So let's see sales. I'm going to do double click sales. I want to see sales by invoice date and then I want to see sales on a monthly basis. So right now I see sales for the whole company history on a monthly basis. Now I want to put website visitors side by side. Well I just drag and drop website visitors. I drag and drop here. So these are my website visitors. Let's make bars. So they are different from my sales and I even want to put them together on what is called a dual axis. So now my website visitors are the orange bars, my sales is the blue line. And now we can make decisions very quickly. It's that easy. Yes. It took some days to put together website Google Analytics with DRP information, the data warehouse but boy once it's done it's completed automatically refresh every day. And now people can build reports like this from scratch anytime, anywhere without calling for it. User empowerment, letting decision makers become more self sufficient. That's all about BI analytics. Okay, the last report was well they ship products for the whole country, US and Canada and they want to see how big the deals were by state. So now we're going to choose could be customer address, could be shipped to any field that has an address we can put on a map. I'm going to choose customer state, invoice size and sales. And then I tell the tool, show me on a map and that's it. Let's make this map a little bigger. Let's bring it over here, make the bubbles a little bigger too. So what I'm seeing here is in a few clicks is bigger bubbles, bigger sales and each bubble is sliced by these colors which represent how large the aggregation of large meaning and small invoices are. Again, very simple. Any user with a little bit of training will be able to build these reports from scratch like the CEO of this company. Now the CEO of this company goes to these board meetings. Now with his iPad and he wants to put these three reports on a dashboard. So now I'm creating a dashboard. And then how you create a dashboard by dragging, dropping. I'm going to take the map, drag into my dashboard area. I'm going to take the trend analysis and drag. I can put in the left quadrant, top, right, bottom, just drag, drag and drop. And then I'm going to put revenues report and drag it into a different quadrant. Whatever I drag and drop, I get that information right there. So very quickly, the CEO built this dashboard from scratch, something that before his IT team, marketing and accounting people, whatever, they were spending several days to put these reports together. Now the co did it and it's all automatic. And now it's on his iPad. Now, quite often in these board meetings, a board member would ask, hey, Mr. CEO, I'm going to California, Texas. How are we doing over there? Well, in the past, the CEO had to make notes and I'll get back to you with the answer. Now with his iPad, he can use his fingers and he choose, oh, you want to go to. You're going to California, Texas. Once I select those two states and I let the mouse go where the finger go, the dashboard will change to show the trends in those two states, whatever I picked, and also the revenue details. And now the CO just emails this dashboard from his iPad on spot. And what's the next question? Again, the idea is to shrink the time that it takes to get to the inside so we have more time to discuss, come up with a decision, and most importantly, to act on your decisions. That's all about analytics. So this is usually how people build reports and dashboards. These are the mechanics. As I mentioned, I use the desktop tool. But you can do this using the web and mobile devices. You could do this on a tablet, for instance. Absolutely, you could. Now, most people will consume reports using a web portal and they can use web browsers or mobile devices. And when they log into the portal, security will control what they have access to. So if I'm a salesperson, I would only see the sales team reports and dashboards. If I'm the finance team, I only see financial reports and dashboards. If I'm the C level team, I could have specific dashboards only for the CEO, for the coo, whatever you want. So you can control what reports and dashboards people can see? Not only that, but when you open a reporter dashboard, you can control what data they can see. So for instance, I log to this portal and I click financials. I Want to see some financial reports and dashboards? Let's assume I want to click this one, which shows my main KPIs by location. Well, if I'm the CFO, I have access to everything. Irvine office, Atlanta office, New York, Houston, whatever. If I'm the Atlanta office, when they open the same dashboard, suppose I'm the general manager for the Atlanta office. When I open the same dashboard, it would only show me Atlanta information. So automatically the tool provides you the data based on your user credentials. Now, as the CFO or the CEO, perhaps I'm opening this office of this dashboard. And let's assume I want to drill down into more information. Well, as I showed you before, you can drill. If you have power users, you can drill down in any direction. You can do anything, you can slice and dice, you can create new reports. But many users are not power users. They want to have a controlled experience that someone else designed for them. I'm going to show an example. Suppose I'm the cfo. I'm not a power user and I look in this dashboard. But I want to drill down into the Atlanta office details. Well, I can click the Atlanta office bar and then I can have different options of how to drill down. These options were designed by the person who built the report. You can tell exactly when you click drill down to where the person goes. Or you can tell you can go in different directions. In this case, when I click balance details, I go to a completely different report. Maybe we go in data from a different data silo, maybe from the financials. I go into payroll information, into an external data source. It doesn't matter. It's all in the data warehouse. Now you just click and you drill down to something else. And now I have another report. And if I choose, let's say chair sales here is going to change the details. So now we change only information for chairs, maybe for desk. Very intuitive, very dynamic. Again, the point is to make the information fluid so decision makers can make more informed decisions anytime, anywhere. Now, let me drop financials. Let me show a very insightful report that this company put together, which is very good for sales analysis. Who is hot? So if you have salespeople that are calling prospects, suppose that you sell to hundreds or maybe you have thousands of retailers and you want to tell the rep who they should call next. Reps, they usually call people in a certain mindset. Obviously the hotter leads, they know who to call. But sometimes they run out of options. Who should I call next? I don't know. Well, this company come together with an idea of when the rep doesn't know who to call. Follow this dashboard. So this dashboard is pretty much showing number of contacts by customer. Bigger bar, more contacts, either calls, emails or website hits. So they have all of this information and then it's just sorted in a descending order by number of contacts. Now the wrap in this case is, well, now is 9:30 Pacific. It's a great time to call Texas and this state and this date and why not? So once he picks which states to call based on the time zone. Yep, I already called Michael. Hey, wow, Jesus. I haven't called Frederick. Well, let's call Frederick to see how they're doing. But now that I know who to call next, what should I know about Frederick before I call Frederick? Well then there's a second tab here that I come here and I'm going to call Frederick and now I choose the client. I'm going to call in a few minutes and then this dashboard will tell what kind of information the account manager should be aware before calling any customer. So he look at some sales by month if it's going up or down. So in this case, 2015 is higher than 2014. Awesome. And then I look at, you know, last month sales in this case looking April sales of last year and this year and oh, look at this for dairy products, sales went down significantly. I wonder why. Now I'm going to be calling Frederick and ask how he's doing, blah, blah, blah, taking his orders. And once the conversation is over, then I can tell, hey, Frederick, you know, I'm just checking that last year in April you bought a lot of dairy and this year not what happened. Well, what you're helping is helping the rep have a contextual, informative conversation with the client. The client will appreciate that your reps, your salespeople, know about their business, is trying to improve them. So the point is to help the rep be more efficient. And you can build these dashboards and reports to any person, to a salesperson, to a finance person, to a purchasing person to help them do their job more efficiently. Now in this, my last example here, while when he finishes the conversation, Mason calls him. So while he's talking with Mason, how you're doing what you want, blah, blah, blah, he goes to the Mason record and he sees the same information. And look at this. It's low profitability with Mason and I have to be informative to Mason, but also I have to get my boss happy. So I click on the red and it goes to another report showing for Mason profitability information for my product. So now I'm also helping the rep not only be more informative and educated for the client, but also being able. He's meeting his internal goals, which in this case is reach a certain profitability level. I don't want to say this example is good for you. The point is giving a tool that you can empower each of your decision makers, each of your salespeople, your purchasing people to go through a flow of reports and dashboard that will help them make better decisions. Finally, you need to provide ways that people can consume the data in different ways. So I showed the desktop way. I showed the web approach. People can access information using web in mobile devices like iPads or Android phones, but they can also subscribe. They can come here and say, hey, I want to receive this report and dashboard. Every Friday, 6:00pm now, the user chooses how they want to receive the report. These reports will get to their inbox, in this case every Friday, 6pm refreshed, they can look at this information and if they click on it, it will jump right to the tool. They will be able to slice and dice even further. So again, providing ways, different ways so people can consume the data in their own way, not the way that you want, but in their own way. It's a very important component as well. Alrighty. I hope you found the presentation informative. The demo now, how about pros and cons? There's always two sides of a coin from a data warehouse standpoint. What are the pros and cons? Well, what are the cons? First of all, it requires skilled people to have data warehousing. You should have people that know about data warehousing. They are skilled and they're expensive. Quite often a lot of the data will not be real time. Most data warehouse data will have data refreshed on a scheduled basis, maybe overnight, maybe every 15 minutes. But it usually is not real time. It can be, yes, but usually it's not. Also, typically it will require investment. Typically there's time and people involved to get data warehouse properly deployed. So those are the cons. What about the benefits? Well, the first one is the single version of the truth. All your data will be consolidated in a single data repository. The IT people who are putting together will vet the data to be sure it's proper. And all the metrics will come from the single place. So whatever you define as your sales as your gross profit is only a single version of the truth. And all the reports will derive information from that source. So you'll have the same information across all reports. So Single version of Truth is a very important benefit. And you don't need to have a report from each one of your data silos. A report from the ERP system, another report from the CRM, a report from the payroll system is all reports coming from a single data source. You're breaking the silos and consolidating them. The other one is performance. Most of the reports will run in seconds, regardless of the data size that you have and will make report much, much easier. So those are very important pros of data warehousing. How about Tableau? What are the pros and cons? First of all, it's a standalone product. Many people like to have the reporting built into their source system like Crystal in the Sage products. Well, Tableau will be running outside of the product even though you can embed views into it. But it's a standalone product. Some popular visualizations are not built in. So if you want to see 3D pie charts, it's going to be hard. You have to do a lot of work Tableau doesn't like. They call deceiving data sources. So some popular visualizations, if you want to have them, it will give you some work. And also it's a fairly pricey, not too expensive, but you know it requires more money. It's a lot more than Excel and then Crystal. The other thing is it is not a magic wand. It will not solve all of your reporting needs. There is no such a tool. If you want something that does a really great job, you will going to do certain things really well. So typically Tableau will be a new component that will complement your reporting tools, but will not replace all of them. It will not. What are the pros? The most important by far, ease of use. It's really easy to use, is drag and drop. And you'll be able to empower your business people with a tool that they can do it a lot of the things by themselves. It's fast. Most reports will run in seconds regardless of the size of your database. And it focus on beautiful insights. Again, Insights is the most important component. But making them beautiful and it's a standalone product, that's actually a benefit. Once you start realizing that you can give reports to different users. You want to give to people who don't have access to your Sage product or to your ERP system or to your payroll system. You want to give to all decision makers. So being a standalone product is actually overall a good benefit. The good news also is you can embed the Tableau views into other applications so they're part of the user experience, but it's a standalone product and that we see as overall as a benefit. Now you can buy the products and build the solution yourself or you can buy a solution like dataself. What are the pros and cons of build your own versus off the shelf? Let's start with the cons for building your own. Well, you need to find and retain skilled talent to maintain the solution. So that's usually a challenge. Finding the right people to do it and keeping them for the long run. Usually it's costly. People are costly. If you have to hire a new person, well, most likely your investment is going to be six figures as you look over years. So it can be very costly. It's slow, typically might take months, sometimes years for your team to put together a comprehensive reporting solution using the build approach and long term maintenance. If these people they're no longer available, maintaining it can be very hard because other people that you hire, you have to rewrite a lot of things from scratch. What are the pros? Well, it's designed from the beginning specifically for needs for your needs. So very focused on your needs and you have control. You choose the tools you can replace anytime that you want. You have full control, even though sometimes it's tricky, but you do have control. What about buying a solution like dataself? What are the cons? Well, you're going to pay more. You're going to pay more now. Instead of paying more later. You're going to pay more now. It's a higher license cost. Yes. Going to cost you more money. You lose some control. Well, if we provide you with the tools, you have to use these tools. Yes, you can use more tools, but you are kind of tied in a way with some of the tools provided by the vendor. So you lose some control. What are the pros? Well, there's a lot of value out of the box. In our case, more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs covering sales, financials, payables, receivables and so forth. It can be completely customized for you. It's super fast and it can be deployed usually in hours or days. In the long term, we'll keep maintaining the solution for you. Let me go quickly because we're running out of time here. Also best practices and lower cost of ownership. So what's next? Well, Visit us at Sage Booth 1303. We're going to have a theater session on Tuesday at 2pm Bring your data or send us your data beforehand and we can give you a test drive. We'll give you a trial version of Data Self so you can test Data Self with your own data. Contact me if you're interested, even beforehand. Or bring your data on USB drive on a purple hard drive and orders placed by September 31st. Going to get two free power users. Folks, the last poll, please. If you allow me to run it, Let me run the last poll very quickly. Just let me know how this was this webinar for you. Please click the Submit button. 10 more seconds. Please be sure to click the Submit button. Five more seconds. I'm going to close it. I'm going to share it. All right, thank you very much for sharing, folks. Unfortunately we're running out of time, so if you have questions or comments, please send me an email. I look forward to meeting you in Chicago. This session is being recorded and we're going to make it available so you can share with the other people. And for people who go to Summit looking for bi, I highly recommend sharing this recording with them so when they come to talk with us and other BI vendors, they'll know better. They'll have more intelligent questions so they can make a better decision of which offer is the best offer for them. Folks, I really appreciate your time. Happy Tuesday and look forward to meeting you in SAGE Summit in Chicago. Thank you.










