Self Service BI - DataSelf / Tableau

Hi, I'm Johnny Girardi. Let's talk about self service for reports and dashboards. What are typically the user challenges when accessing their reports and dashboards? First of all, pretty common. I hear this a lot. Users need reports refreshed, the latest information at their fingertips, and too often they don't have it. And then what they have to do is if they have come up with a decision based on reports that are not available, they either have to wait, contact their IT team and ask for some new reports or customized reports. Sometimes the wait can take hours, days, or even weeks, or they have to wing it, make a decision without the proper information. Either way, waiting or winging it nowadays is no longer the best choice. So that's a pretty big challenge. Next, sometimes they do have the reports, the reports will have the information, but when they press the refresh button, it just takes too long to refresh, sometimes several minutes, sometimes even hours. I've heard many stories where people have to run the reports overnight because otherwise it just takes too long and it can bring down the source system like the ERP system. So running too slowly is also another challenge that I hear a lot. People complain about their reports and dashboards. Finally, business is changing rapidly every day, and people need to take their existing reports and slice and dice them, drill down, even create new reports from scratch without having to call the consultants, the experts. Because if they have to call someone else, if they cannot find the answer by themselves, anytime, anywhere, most likely it's going to take a long time to get the answer and then it goes back to waiting or winging it. So these are the most popular challenges that I've hear people, users complaining when it comes to their own reports and dashboards. So what do users want? Well, they want to be able to access the reports when and where they need it. Sometimes they're on their desktop, or maybe on a web browser, or maybe on a mobile device, anytime, anywhere, they might have questions that they need to find the answer. So giving them the information, maybe by email, in their own schedule, is what they want. And you need to have a platform that provides that kind of flexibility in delivering information in different ways and different formats. The reports must run in seconds, no matter how much data you have. If a report takes more than 10 seconds to run, on average, in our experience, most users will now wait. So you must come up with a reporting platform that will deliver reports in seconds, no matter how much data you have. Finally, people need to customize the reports and dashboards. So this platform must be really easy to use so users can learn to do things that otherwise would require consultants. In our experience with the platform that we have put together, on average more than 70% of the custom reporting needs of users, they can do it or someone in their team can actually make changes that typically with other platforms would require, you know, experts. So being easy to customize, allowing users to do it, it's really critical. So let's take a look at the Self Service with Data Self analytics. I'm going to show three examples of self service reports and dashboards with data self. The first one is an out of the box dashboard for salespeople. Here we have metrics that each salesperson is responsible for so they can see how they're doing every day. Front and center is information what they need to do today. This example open opportunities from CRM. This shows their commission information so the actual commission and the actual sales accumulating throughout the the months on a daily basis. And then at the bottom here I see the area for the hot and getting cold performers. The idea is to see who's hot, what's hot, where is hot, who's getting cold or what's getting cold, things of that nature. If I want to see who's hot, I just click the who's hot button and here it is. We have out of the box two ways to look at who's hot. One is top customers by sales this period in a descending order as well as top sales growth since the prior period. Maybe these customers are not big yet, but they're growing very rapidly and that's why we call them hot. How we define this period? Well you can choose out of the box here. Year, quarter months, moving, moving periods. So in this case I'm looking on a year to date basis and these are the top customers by sales growth since last year to date. Pretty straightforward perspective. Maybe I want to see who's getting cold so I choose who's getting cold. Same perspective I have top customer by sales decline since last year to date. So if I put the mouse over on each of these customers it shows in the centered area which products or services are driving the biggest decline since last year to date. In the right side I have an exception report showing no sales. So these were the customers that were buying last year to date but not at all this year to date on a descending order. So this is one example of self service dashboard where you can use this drop down list to pick and choose different things to see different perspectives of sales initiatives. The second example of self service is for more c Level executives. In this case I'm looking at an out of the box report that shows a 360 degree view of the business. So here I have information coming from several data silos like here, the 60 day cash flow projection. I can see my receivables, my payables, my payroll and my cash on hand today. And when I add all of this inbound and outbound money, I can see what the projection of my cash flow is for the next, in this case, 60 days. And as long as the most negative amount doesn't cross my line of credit, I don't have a problem. So, quick and easy way to see how my cash flow is doing. Well, it's important for these dashboards to be actionable. Like in this example we have built in a what if scenario in this cash flow. So what if I'm looking this dashboard and I know that this payment is not going to come because the client is disputing something, I can come here, click and say exclude a payment and see if that will affect my cash flow and if I need to do something about it. So being able to use these dashboards, do what if scenarios will make dashboards not only informative but actionable. And then you can make more informed decisions in a better time in a more timely fashion. So anyhow, this dashboard shows here on the left side, lead metrics, metrics looking into future transactions like again, cash flow, orders to ship, opportunities to close from CRM, ar, aging. And here on the right we have lag metrics metrics about the past performance of the business like revenues, Google Analytics, financial information. And overall we use the red color to be a red alert. Like in this case, as I can see, my inventory assets are too high. Why is that? If I'm, let's say the CEO, I'm wondering is this being taken care of? Do I need to contact someone to discuss about it? Well, typically once you see something not doing well, you might want to learn more about it before you take action. So in this example I'm going to click the red bar and then this will drill down into a more detailed segment of this dashboard showing inventory information. In this case I have inventory by business unit. I have my top 10 products by cost on hand today. These are the top 10 products and the bars represent how much I have on hand today. And if it's above 40 grand, in this example it shows as red because it's above my threshold. Now look, most of my excess inventory is actually on the west warehouse. Well, I may want to contact the warehouse Manager. In real life if you need to contact someone, sometimes you don't know who the person is or what their phone and emails are. So right there you might spend some time just figuring that out. We can have these dashboards where the person just clicks on a label, in this case the west warehouse and you have a link to email the manager or call the manager. If you do this from a cell phone like I'm just doing showing here, I can just take the same dashboard that I was showing on the desktop. I zoom in, I click on the label west. It gives me the option to call the manager. I click call confirm. Any places to call Right there from the smartphone. My last self service example is to show when a user needs to see something different than it's available in an existing reporter dashboard. Let's say that I want to add to this particular dashboard right here a chart showing my sales and profitability by month over time. Well if you really truly have a self service, bi platform users should be able to do something like that. I'm going to show an example right now. I'm going to click the edit button. Only users that have the right user rights have the edit button. So I'm going to click edit because in this case I do have user rights and I want to create a new sheet from scratch. So I'm going to create a new sheet and this gives me access to my data panel. Here I see the data sources I have available by security. I want to see sales because when I see sales in gross profit I can see my customers, my products and whatnot. In this example I want to see sales. So in my measures I double click sales and I see over time. So I'm going to double click invoice date. So by default I'm seeing sales by year. Well I want to see by month. I'm going to choose month here and right there I see sales by month in the whole company history. I also want to see gross profit percentage. It's right here I just have to drag and drop into my report. So here I see gross profit percentage in sales. I want to do a dual axis. So just pick dual axis chart and right there I see orange bars for sales and the blue line for gross profit. Let's make this a little thinner and remove the labels to make it cleaner. So that's my new chart. Now I go back to my inventory report and I actually want to add this new sheet, sheet 37 actually right here right in the middle of my dashboard. So I just take sheet 37, drag and drop right here. I when I remove the label, remove the title to make a little cleaner looks nicer and that's pretty clean and I click save. The change has been saved and now I simply go and close and that's it. So again, the ability to allow users to make changes like this quickly and easily and this could have been done on a mobile device is critical to have a truly self service reporting platform. If you want to learn more about self service reports and dashboards or about data self analytics, you can find here my contact information as well as our website. Thanks for watching.