Sage Summit DataSelf and Tableau BI, analytics and data warehousing

Thank you very much everyone for your patience. What I'm going to be talking about here today is a couple of things. The first one and the most important is about BI generically. What I'm showing right now on my screen are very popular BI options that sometimes we run into in the mid market. So probably you're familiar with some of them. And my goal is to talk about, from an education standpoint about the options in how to make your BI journey successful. And then we'll dive into the more the Data Self with Microsoft and tableau approach. So let me get moving here. So this presentation today is called Sage Summit Data Self in Tableau, BI analytics and data warehousing. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm Data cell founder and CEO. Big picture agenda. The first about 10 minutes I'll talk about the success of BI Journey, regardless of what BI tool you pick. So just a little bit about the big picture, then I'll dive into Data Self, why we started Data Self, how we do it, and then we'll open a Q and A at the end of the session. Let's start with the ingredients for a successful BI journey. Myself and my team, we've been doing Enterprise BI for 17 years in this market and we have seen a lot of BI projects. Of course, our own, we have hundreds under our belt, but many other clients doing BI projects with different products. Over these years, we learned three main ingredients that are critical to make your BI journey successful. The first ingredient is the obvious one, you need a BI platform. There are many options, but absolutely the BI platform is critical for the success of your journey. And most people focus on this. Absolutely, it's one critical component. Second is depending on your BI needs, maybe it's fine, you don't need a BI expert. Maybe with your own team, with some little beautiful assistance, you get it done, you get it successful. Some that have more complex BI needs. You'll need BI expertise to help you select what the right BI platform is, how to deploy it and how to maintain it. So more complex BI needs usually will require more and sometimes a lot of BI expertise to make this journey successful. The last ingredient, which is sometimes not so obvious, it looks obvious, but sometimes it's not, is having decision makers engaged in this process. And I've seen so many projects where the BI project started in the, let's say in the IT team or the accounting team, and they don't get decision makers properly engaged with the process. And then decision makers are looking at this as another expense problem, not from the right benefit. Perspective and then the budget is limited, the actual needs are not really tackled and the BI project is bumpy and it's frustrating. Expensive takes forever. So I always tell people the ultimate benefit for BI is for decision makers. They have to define what the goals are. They have to understand the pros and cons of the different options. They have to understand and define the budget so whoever's implementing the project will have the right goals, the right budget, the right time frame and make it happen. So it's critical and bi, it has, yes, a lot of technical considerations, but the benefits are usually very tangible and is very business oriented. So be sure to have them engaged. So these are the three main ingredients. Now what usually happens out there is what I call the regular BI journey. If you don't know better, if you don't have guidance, this is what's going to happen. For most companies. Let's say you have an ERP system and you're doing your reporting using the built in functionality and at one point you realize you need something better, something easier, something faster. Well, typically try to address that. If you cannot figure it out, usually you call, let's say the ERP reseller and you ask, hey, we need something better, faster, easier, whatnot. And what they will do is usually they have a better reporting platform for your ERP system. BI platform, they'll plug it in, they'll teach you, they'll help you, and off you go, you're better. You know, you're getting a lot more value from this enhanced email ERP with whatever analytics platform you get. Awesome. Now typically what happens is in your business you also have other systems, let's say a CRM system or maybe a payroll system and maybe you want to use Google Analytics and a lot of Excel files, you have a lot of data silos and eventually what happens? What I've seen is let's say the sales team has a CRM and they need better BI of the CRM. What they do, they try to figure it out, eventually they call, maybe someone and someone will give them a BI tool for the CRM. Awesome. Now these people have better BI and maybe out of the payroll system. Eventually you get a better BI for those people. In a regular BI journey, usually what you end up with is every data silo that you have will have its own BI solution, its own team doing better. But quite often the data doesn't go across the different BI solutions. So you have an expensive BI platform with many different products. Sometimes the same user have to have a login in different systems. With different user licenses and different training, it becomes hard to maintain because you know too many software. Sometimes you need to bring CRM information into the ERP and vice versa. And then these people don't understand the system and vice versa and it becomes low and complicated. Quite often you have performance issues. Overall we say if a report or a dashboard takes longer than 10 seconds to run, what's going to happen is people are not going to run it. Most of the time people don't have much patience. In 10 seconds is a threshold where most people will not going to be looking at that particular report or dashboard. So performance issues is very common in this kind of scenario. And finally, sometimes management grows frustrated with all of these different systems and is slow and they start looking for different options and sometimes they scratch everything. They get a new system that replaces the erp, the CRM, the payroll is a large project, large investment and then you have to start from scratch. Not only the BI but the other components. So this is what I've been seeing again, for many people it works. Their BI needs are not sophisticated. They just need something better for the erp, something better for the CRM and that's it. But for many people, as they outgrow this, things get slow, clunky and whatnot. Alrighty, let me do a very quick survey to ask you a few questions. Let me start the survey. So if you could please choose all the options that apply to your reporting needs. Is it difficult to use slow or lack of access anytime, anywhere data silos? And be sure to press the submit button. So be sure to press the submit button. 10 more seconds. 5 more seconds. All right, thank you very much for your feedback. Just a quick sharing of what the the pole is so difficult to use and lack of access anytime, anywhere. Thank you very much for your feedback. So moving forward, you know, for companies who have a more sophisticated or what I call more complex and expensive BI needs, what you'll need is to have a more structured BI journey. So need to plan, need to organize, need to discuss. In a more structured BI journey, always will include a data warehouse. In a data warehouse it's awesome to do data consolidation. Sometimes you're trying to get data across your, let's say GL information and sales and inventory all together. And it's hard, it's difficult. So a data warehouse can bring the data together. Maybe you have a multi company system, several Sage products, or maybe you have dynamics and NetSuite and whatnot and you need to bring these different companies together. Data consolidation data warehouse will do it also data warehouse is great for a single version of the truth. This is an awesome concept. Let's say once we define in the data warehouse a certain KPI, let's see how you look at your profitability, your expenses, your cost of sales. That's a single location where we define how to calculate each of these KPIs in all reports. And all dashboards using the KPI will use the same calculation, the same business rule. I have seen many companies where meetings people come with the reports showing let's say revenues or gross profit and whatnot. How however, the reports were built with different rules behind the scenes and nobody knows. And people are discussing comparing apples to pineapples and they don't even know about it. With the data warehouse those KPIs are defining a single place in the data warehouse in all reports will derive the information from that point. So we're guaranteeing that all the reports will be consistent, will have a single version of your KPIs. A very important concept. Next is the speed. You know, if you want to run reports in seconds, guess what? A data warehouse will be a critical component to be sure your reports will run really fast. And finally, you know, data warehousing will make overall reporting much easier, will allow many business people with little training to be more self sufficient when it comes to reporting and data analysis. Now the second component of this structured BI journey is an analytics platform that must be really easy to use. At the end of the day. People access seeing reports, they are usually business people and they usually don't have time to learn complex reporting tools. So they need something that they can actually take a report and change filters, slice and dice it, drill down, download and even build new reports from scratch without calling for expert assistance. So ease of use is the most important component of an analytics solution. Second is again speed. Again if it takes more than 10 seconds, usually many reports are not going to be read, but not going to wait and it's a waste. So must be really fast to deliver reports. And finally, you know, nowadays people are in different places, they're in the desktop, they are, you know, working at the company or they are visiting clients using the mobile devices. So providing a framework that will deliver information anytime, anywhere, using different methods of delivery is also very critical. Now when you look at the more structured BI journey where you have data warehousing, you have a very sophisticated analytics platform. You're pulling data from your erp, from your CRM, your Google Analytics payroll, social media, bunch of Excel files. If this is your problem, guess what you will need people that can make this happen, people that know your data sources, that know data warehousing that, that know analytics, that know how to put this all together and deliver value for decision makers. If you need a structured BI journey, BI expertise is critical. Now what is the right BI journey for you? Well, overall I tell if you have inexpensive BI issues, you know, if you don't spending a lot of time, you know, with reporting, if your users just need one more report, they're fine, then yeah, the regular BI journey, it works. A lot of companies are just asking a BI for the ERP or a BI for the CRM and they're very happy. There are a lot of options to cover those inexpensive BI issues. And those BI platforms are usually inexpensive. They are very inexpensive. Or if you have what I call more expensive BI issues, your team, you have a lot of people every week, every month, spending a lot of hours refreshing reports, sending reports to different people, or if management is always complaining that they're not having the data the way that they want in an easy format, then you have expensive BI issues and you have to go with the structured BI journey. So that's pretty much a high level overview of how to make your BI journeys, regardless of what BI tool you're picking. Now when I started Data self back in 2005, I saw this scenario. People have some simple needs and there's a lot of people fulfilling those needs. People have some complex needs, expensive needs and for those guys, typically the alternative back in 2005 was going to the Fortune 2000 BI world and start from scratch, the structured BI journey. And usually they would pay a lot of money, they would take a long time. And I thought, guess what, with my team we can start Data Self and focus specifically on these expensive BI structures, expensive BI issues, and come up with a solution that becomes inexpensive or I would say affordable, that becomes easy and out of the box. We can help these mid sized companies take advantage of a structured BI solution without breaking the bank, without taking forever. That's the focus of why Data Cell started to do the business 12 years ago. In a nutshell, what we did in these 12 years is we do BI day in, day out and we are experts, we know the data sources, we know a lot of ERPs in the mid market, all Sage, Microsoft and others. We know CRM systems, the most popular in the mid market. We know payroll systems, we know Google Analytics, we know all of these data sources, we know data warehousing, we know analytics, we know how it's put it together. We know how to deliver value. We are experts, we really know our stuff. When it comes to BI expertise, we've always looking for what is a great and solid BI platform. So our clients will take advantage of it. As I'm going to be showing later, our BI platform has been evolving for 12 years. It has great components, it's fast, is very easy to use and is one of the best available out there for Fortune 2000. We make it affordable for mid sized companies. Third that we found out is usually when people start a structured BI journey, they usually start from scratch. Everything is new. It's a new data warehouse, is a new analytics platform and they start building one report, another report and eventually they'll have usually hundreds of reports. Well, we found out that a lot of the reporting needs across different organizations are very similar. And as we saw clients using the same requests in the same reports, in building the same reports, we started to build an out of the box solution that will cover a lot of those needs out of the box so you don't have to start from scratch. With a data self solution, you have many of those things covered. That's what we do in a nutshell, BI expertise, a solid BI platform and there's a lot of things out of the box so you don't have to start from scratch. When we look at the architecture, we use SQL Server for data warehousing, which is a great platform, one of the best out there. We use our own extraction and transformation and loading tool. So make SQL Server data warehousing much easier, much faster, almost no programming involved. We use Tableau, which has been considered the gold standard for analytics for the past five years in a row by Gartner. So it's one of the best analytics platforms out there and that's what we use for the client tool. And we have nothing but 5,000 reports. Dashboard, KPIs out of the box. So again you don't have to start from scratch. There's a lot of reports. We cover AP, AR financials, inventory purchasing, sales, sales order, we have CRM, opportunity analysis, tech support, contact management. We have Google Analytics data, we have US GDP data. We have a lot of things out of the box to help you do better analysis. And some people tell me, Johnny, that's too much. It's true. Who needs 5,000 reports? At first, no one is just too much. But let me tell you two perspectives why we have 5,000 reports. I'm going to give you two examples. One of them, a prospect told me he called me after a while. The conversation he told me, johnny, I don't need 5,000, I need 20 and I guarantee that you don't have my 20. And I kind of laughed and yes, I've heard this before. So I say, yeah, just by the way you ask the question, I know your needs are very specific and probably I don't have it, but throw me one, let's see what happens. Anyhow, he asked me a specific report. It was a moving average by product and we do have moving average by product, by salesperson, by customer, whatnot. And when I checked the list, he want moving average in four months. And we only had for three, six and 12 months. So we didn't have for four. And he told me, johnny, I told you. And I said yes, I told you that probably I wouldn't have, but in less than a minute I changed the three month moving average to four. I just right click edit it and change to four and right there I said, well, now I have 5100, a new report is done and that was it. So I'm not saying we have all reports. No, we don't. But quite often if you have reporting needs, we might have the report ready or may have close enough with a few tweaks. You can change it, you can make it happen and off you go to make your decisions. Less time to get to the insight, more time to make decisions. The second perspective is inspiration. Quite often people come to us, hey Johnny, I have one Dashboards. Cool, awesome, that's great. What dashboard do you want? I want sales dashboard. All right, can be more specific. Well, let me think. Quite often people have some ideas of what they need, but when you ask specifically, they don't know exactly what. They have seen something and they want something. So out of this 5,000, there's a lot of and dashboards that many organizations like yours have asked us, we have added into the out of the box. And sometimes you just have to show your decision makers. Check this out, see if any of them make sense for you. And quite often they say, wow, yes, this is awesome. Or can you change this and this and that and so much more quickly. You can help your decision makers come up with great ideas to help them to become more well informed and make better decisions. That's why we have 5,000. It's out of kind of crowdsourcing from our clients to help our clients to be more effective with their reporting needs. This is the latest Gartner Magic quadrant for BI and analytics platform. Every February, Gartner makes an assessment of how well Fortune 2000, BI vendors are doing in the BI world and Tableau Microsoft, which is pretty much what we do, we bring Microsoft bi and Tableau bi to the mid market. And for the past several years in a row, these two vendors have been the leaders. They're not perfect, they're not a magic wand, but they're one of the best out there and we're so proud to make them easier, better, faster for mid sized companies. All right, poll number two. So if you don't mind, I'm going to launch it. Just let me know what are your main reporting areas, select all the options that you need and please don't forget to click the submit button. Ten more seconds. Don't forget to click submit button. Five more seconds. All right, thank you. Just sharing quickly. There it is. So financials, CRM and sales. Thank you. All right, so let's go into the product demo and what I'm going to do now is actually go through a scenario when where one of our clients, the CEO, created a new dashboard from scratch for his monthly board meetings. He, the CEO and his CIO called me a couple of years ago and the CEO told me, no, Johnny, we are a distribution company here in California. We're growing very quickly and my management is very data driven and we are struggling. Too often we have a new scenario that we don't have reports to answer our questions and we have to either wait until my team it one not comes up with the report or we have to wing it. We can no longer afford that. We have to have better, easier, faster ways to access our data. And the CIO told me, Johnny, our problem is not resources. We have many people in the organization, including my team, working with all these systems. We have the data, we have expertise, but it's just freaking cumbersome and time consuming. We need to automate a lot of these reporting procedures so management can be more self sufficient. The question was from both, can you help? Yes, we can help. We usually know with our data warehousing analytics platform we can automate a lot in sometimes 100 of the data manipulation that people do in Excel and massage, updating whatnot. The data warehouse usually takes care of a lot of that data manipulation automatically. And then on the reporting side with Tableau, we really excel at giving users easy, fast access to their data anytime, anywhere. So what I'm going to show you next is how the CEO built this dashboard that has to show for his board meetings, detailed sales this month, sales by customer, sales by product, invoice number, invoice date, kind of nature looking Numbers by the pending. Then he needs to see sales versus website visitors side by side on a chart. Information coming from Google Analytics and from the ERP together. And finally sales throughout US and Canada. They're shipping to all of these places how big the sales are and how much are big sales, medium size and small kind of sales. So I'm going to be switching now into the data self desktop application. All the things that I do here, they work in the same manner using web and mobile devices. So even if I'll be using, let's say a tablet like an iPad, I could be doing what I'm going to be doing here on my desktop. So when the CEO, after going through a little bit of training, he came to this tool and he wants to build a dashboard. So the first decision is what data source he's going to use for building this dashboard. And here I'm showing out of the box some of these things. We have ap, ar, we have a bunch of CRM, Google Analytics data, GL information, inventory, manufacturing, purchasing, budgeting, sales, GDP by quarter date and whatnot. What the CEO was trying to do was out of revenues. So now he picked the revenues data source and he needs to start to build the first part of the dashboard which is detailed sales, sales by customer, this month by product, whatnot. So once he chose the data source, he pretty much has to drag and drop. So customers here he got customer name, drag and drop in the report and let me just delete, maybe refresh it again since I had to change this, maybe I lost the connection. There you go. Hopefully now it's good now. Yes, good. Oh, and by the way, before I drag and drop, let me just show in my sample database for sales, I have nothing but 16 million records. So right now, as I do, as I build this dashboard from scratch, I'm hitting 60 million records of sales transactions and you'll see that it's lightning fast. So let's do it. So back to my sales by customer, by product, I hear customer drag and drop. So these are all the customers that the client has. When I see sales, sales is right here. Drag and drop sales to the report. So this is total sales by company in the whole company history. Who's my top customers, by the way? I just started descending. Oh, there it is. These are my top customers in the whole company history. Cool. Okay, well I want to see sales by customer this month. I take invoice date, I drag and drop into my report and right there I'm seeing sales by year. My sample database there is seven years. If you have 20 years of worth of data, you see 20 years of worth of data again, I'm hitting 60 million records and I just in a couple of seconds I got the answer. Well, I want to see sales this month. Well, I can expand year and go to the quarter. I can expand quarter and go to the month level. I can expand to days, to hours. If I'm keeping track of hours, minutes and seconds. I could go to fiscal periods, two weeks. Whatever time buckets that you want to analyze, we build them into the out of the box solution, into the data warehousing. And as a business user, I just have to expand from the top level all the way to the bottom very easily, very quickly. So all data for all months. Well, I only want to see this month. I don't want to see everything. So I can drag and drop invoice date into my filters shelf. When I drag and drop it asks me how I want to filter by date. I have a few options. Or I can choose relative date. Next I'm going to choose months this month. Click ok and guess what? Now this report will always show sales this month, whatever the month is. And if I want to change, let's say to previous month. There it is. That's sales in the previous month. Why is this changing here? Hold on a second, I just got some kind of pop up in my computer. I got my antivirus. Hold on a second. Let me just stop for a second. Stop my antivirus. That is spotting something now here. Sorry about that. Okay, there you go. Sorry about that. So I change here from this month to previous month and there it is. I see may, maybe I want to see the last three months. There it is, last three months, maybe the last two months. Maybe you want to see quarters, years, weeks, days. You just pick and choose and you get the answer very easy, very fast now. Okay, but I want to see sales by customer, by product. It's all drag and drop. Where is product? Right here. Product description. Drag and drop between customer and sales. And there it is by customer, by product. I see sales. What if I want to see invoice information? Let's say invoice number. There it is, drag and drop and you get the answer. Many of our clients learn how to use this by learning by watching presentation. If you know how to drag and drop, you can build these reports. You can drag any field into this report. Okay, that was my first report. The second report I want to see sales and Google Analytics in the same report showing trends. And for this particular company we added Google Analytics as part of the sales connector. It's just right here is another metric. It's being linked in the data warehouse by looking at invoice date equals to website visit date. Once we join them in the data warehouse, once the data is refreshed automatically, that's it. It's done. Every day you just open and you see the latest information. What the CEO did, he double click sales. So this is the whole total sales in the whole company history. He double click invoice date. So now he's seeing sales by year. He actually went and picked sales by month. So he want to see how the sales is going throughout the whole company history by month. He took website visits from Google Analytics. He just dragged and dropped the report. So these are website visits. And he said, show me as a bar so it's clearly different than my sales in the line. And finally put this on a dual axis. And there it is. He can see website visits as bars, sales as line. And he could tell that usually in about a month after major website campaigns, his sales was spiking up. This is not his data, but it's kind of the same things that his team went through and they start to keep track of sales and website campaigns and how they're affecting each other. It's really cool. The last part of my dashboard is a geography analysis. So he wants to see sales by state, could be shipped to, could be customer address and whatnot. So anything that has an address you can put on a map. You want to see invoice size and sales. And he said put this on a map and that's it. A map. We got, let's make this a little bigger bubbles and let's just centralize this a little better here. Now it took only a few clicks to get this whole map showing bigger bubbles, bigger sales, and the bubbles are sliced by how large the deals are. He even took and added the invoice date to the pages. And now by scrolling these slides, he can see how things are changing as the years pass by. It's a very cool functionality. And he even say, look, playback, play. And now as the year changes, automatically he see how things are changing across the states. Very cool, very insightful, very helpful for them to keep track of things over time. All right, so he built those three reports and three components of the dashboard. Now he actually want to put all of this into a single screen and it's all drag and drop. He put the map, he took the trend analysis, put at the bottom, he took the detail report, drag and drop to the Left, top corner and that's it. The point is a decision maker with a little bit of training, a CEO actually built from scratch a dashboard. Something that before was taking many hours of many people to come up with these views. Using Excel and downloading data and massaging the data. Now it's completely automated. Every day is refreshed with the latest data. And the CEO built from scratch, they are very happy about it. And now in the board meeting, sometimes a board member, you know, they have board, you know, people have notebooks and tablets, they have all this information in their hands. So the CEO no longer has to just be handing over printed paper. But sometimes some board members, they don't use those things that they want a piece of paper and they ask a question, how are we doing in a certain territory Right there, the CEO can use an iPad, he takes his iPad with his finger, he takes oh, west coast, here it is. And then the dashboard changes. He can take a screenshot or export this report on spot from his iPad into a PDF or some kind of report email to the board member and what's the next question? So they are much more self sufficient management now. They get the information when they want, they can change it, they can slice and dice it, they can drill down, they can create new reports without calling for assistance. And that's the value of our solution, which I'm going to go back to my PowerPoint. What do you get out of data? Self analytics, ease of use. Tableau is one of the easiest to use reporting analytics platform out there. We use it, we're very excited. It's lightning fast. We guarantee that most reports will run in seconds regardless of how much data you have. It doesn't matter if you have 100 million records, it doesn't matter. We're going to make you run fast. We have a very fast data warehouse, you know, the fastest analytics platform. It will be really fast. And third is time to value. Can you build a solution like ours from scratch? Absolutely. This is no rocket science. You just need the right people with the right expertise that know your data sources, that know data warehousing, know an analytics platform really well, know how to put them together and start building the reports from scratch. You can do it. It might take you years, but you'll get there. We will tell you how much you get out of our solution, how many reports, how many dashboards, how much customization, how long it's going to take, how much money going to take. We're going to cut down the uncertainty of the process so you know how Quickly how much and how fast you get your value. Time to value is a big benefit of data Self. To wrap up my last poll very quickly. So if you could answer by pressing checking all the options and don't forget to click the submit button. Ten more seconds. Five more seconds. Thank you very much. So, oopsie. We have about two minutes for questions and answers. So if you have any question Please use the GoToWebinar Question Panel and write your question. Let me see if I see anyone that already has posted a question. Let me see here. So Mary is asking here, what ERP systems do you support? Mary, thanks for your question. Actually, let me go to my website, dataself.com and if you go to Solutions and Analytics by ERP and CRM. So if you pick that option and you come to this page, you'll see all the ERP and CRMs we support. And we pretty much support all versions from 1999 all to the latest. So we support a lot of different European CRM systems and we also support a lot of different versions. Thank you very much. Another question here from Hazel. Can more than one database be linked to provide more consolidated reporting? Hazel? Absolutely. Great question. Yes, because we have a data warehouse. You can link as many databases as you need. Like in my example I showed Google Analytics data combined with the ERP data. But you have different ERP systems. If you want to combine, let's say ADP payroll information with your GL in the erp. If you have Excel files, the data warehouse purpose is to bring data together. It's for data consolidation. So yes, we absolutely bring data together for consolidated reports. One more question, question from Zach. If I have a list of the out of the box reports. Zach, good question. If you go back to Solutions here and you choose 5000 KPI's, so click 5000 KPI's. You go to this other page here that has a list of these reports. You can click Download full list. You'll get an Excel file that will show every single report out of the box we have. So you go here and let's say you want to see for, I don't know, for sales, then you go to this page and you go to Dashboards and you see all the descriptions. If you come to this page and you click Dashboard Samples, then you go into some examples screenshots. There's about a couple dozen of screenshots of dashboards that we have available out of the box. So feel free to do that. Folks, we're running out of time. What I want to tell you the most important thing is if you're going through your BI journey and you don't know and you want to get some Pick my brain. Regardless if Data self is not a good fit for you, please call me. I love to educate people. I love to learn what you're going through. If you want to share some of your success or failures. My first and most important goal is education for you and for myself. I'm always learning. I'll give my best opinion, I'll tell what I know, what is my opinion. And I'm going to be pointing sometimes to other companies that might be a better fit for you. So this is my cell phone, this is my email. Feel free to contact me again. I'm here to educate and if we're going to be doing business together, I can guarantee we're going to have a lot of fun and we're going to have a lot of value because we know our stuff. We know how to make BI projects successful. If we're a good fit, we'll make it happen. If we're not, we'll point in another direction. Folks, thank you for joining us. I hope you have enjoyed the webinar. We're going to have a recording. We'll email it to you probably later today or tomorrow. Feel free to contact me. Happy Thursday. Thank you.