Self service BI for Sage X3
Johnny Girardi (CEO & founder, Data Self) presents a recorded webinar demo showing DataSelf Analytics as a self-service BI solution tailored for Sage X3 clients. He demonstrates building reports and dashboards via drag-and-drop (quarter sales, marketing vs. sales trends, regional sales on a map, top customer growth/decline, revenue projections) that combine multiple data sources (Sage X3 modules, Google Analytics, GL, CRM). He uses a data-discovery example to diagnose low profitability for a customer group (SH), shows drilling to invoice-level detail, and highlights product claims: >5,000 out-of-the-box reports/dashboards/KPIs, powered by Tableau, fast deployments (hours/days), and an asserted average ~80% reduction in reporting labor costs. The video points viewers to dataself.com for a 2-minute demo, full report list, architecture docs, webinars, and contact info.
Chapters
Self Service bi. Self Service bi who needs it? What is it about? Well, primarily business people. The people who understand the business, who understand threats and opportunities are the people who really need information anytime, anywhere. They can be in a meeting, they can be in a coffee shop, they can be with a client. And quite often in their discussions, new questions come up. And these people who are usually not necessarily tech savvy, they need to have tools that they can see their own information using desktop, web and mobile devices. They should have plenty of reports and dashboards to get to those answers very quickly. But not only that, if they have new questions, you know, questions that there's no reports or dashboards ready, they should be able to build and slice and dice, drill down all by themselves without calling for an expert. And that's about Self service. BI is providing decision makers with tools that they can get any information all by themselves. Thanks for joining us. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm the CEO and founder of Data Self and today we'll be talking about Self Service bi for Sage X3. There are offerings of Self Service BI coming to mid market and for Sage X3, fortunately now our vision is the easier, the most powerful it is, the more value you provide to end users. How do we do it? How do we provide Self Service bi? Well, let me show you here. This is Gartner Magic quadrant for BI and analytics platforms. As you may know, Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessments for Fortune 2000 companies. In every year they release this study of upper market BI vendors and how they're doing for Fortune 2000 companies. This is the latest release. Making long story short, Tableau has been considered the leading self service data discovery reporting tool for Fortune 2000 companies and they have been the leader for three years in a row. Very successful. Microsoft has been a leader in BI infrastructure also for several years now. What about these vendors? What about Data Self? Well, Data Self analytics is a packaged solution that right now includes nothing but the very best technology coming from Fortune 2000 companies. So it's pretty much the leading specialty based from Gardner Assessment. But what we add as our own secret sauce, we add technology that simplifies the process, is easier to deploy, easier to maintain in the long run. So we make it easy and not only that, we add more than 5,000. You got that right, 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So as a starting point, you have a ton of reports. You don't have to start building from scratch. All of them so what we bring is nothing but the gold standard of analytics platform from Fortune 2000. For Sage X3 clients, we make it fast to deploy, usually hours or days. We have been working with enterprise grade technology for 15 years so we know how it works and we know how to integrate for X3 and mid sized businesses. Overall. You could build the solution from scratch, Absolutely you can. But most likely it's going to take you several months, if not years to build what we have out of the box. That would take hours or days to deploy. So the cost from us is much lower than if you try to reinvent the wheel. And that's what we do. We make it easy, we make it fast, we make it affordable. Let's go into the product presentation and I'm going to play a scenario here in my presentation where I'm the CEO of this distribution company here in the west coast. In every quarter we have meetings where as the CEO I have to present to the board the results of the company. What's going on. Now this business is very data driven. You know, we have gut feelings but we love to look at data before we make decisions. That's my management team, how we operate and also my board is the same way. Now when they go to my board, quite often they have new questions about my operations and quite often, you know, I come with a bunch of reports but sometimes I don't have the answers and I have to write down the questions to come back to answer, you know, in a few weeks in order to prepare myself for the board meeting. My team, you know, my IT team, my people, they work usually several days putting the data together for my meeting. While we acquired data self analytics recently and the goal is to reduce dramatically the time that it takes to come up with these reports. But most importantly to give my management team, including myself, a tool that we can take ownership and we can slice and dice and build new reports without calling for IT and for experts. And that's what I'm going to be showing here today. So to get ready for this board meeting, I'm going to cover all of these reports. You know, I'm going to show you this quarter sales details. I'm going to show some marketing and sales trends to see how website hits are affecting our sales. I want to see sales on a map to see how well we're doing in the different states in the usa. Then we're always looking at clients with sales decline. I want to see who they are and how this is going. I want to see some financial revenues in projection so these reports here, every quarter I come up with these reports for my meetings and this time I want to see how the new data self analytics approach will work. Then there's also a new question that the board asked me which is we've been growing our sales significantly year over year but profitability is pretty low. Why is that? And I don't know. And I want to see if I can use a self service bi tool and data discovery tool to to find some trends in profitability to start discussing those topics. So let's take a look at it. Let's do it. So first of all let's start looking at each one of these reports. The first one is this quarter sales details. And I'm going to be using this publishing tool. Most of the things I'm going to be showing here I can also do using web browsers as well as mobile devices. So overall I come to my connectors, my user interface and right now I'm looking at my revenues connector. For X3 we have revenues connector, sales order purchasing, payables, receivables, inventory, financial connectors. So in this case I'm looking, I want to see quarterly revenues so I'm going to use the revenues connector. And for this report I want to see detailed information by customer. I want to see customer sales this quarter by product I want to see invoice number. And the idea is if the board asked me questions around this quarter sales I should have an answer. So let's build that report. I want to see sales. I just drag and drop sales into my report by customer. So I'm going to take customer name, drag and drop and there you go. I have by customer total sales in the whole company history. Well I want to see this quarter sales. Well let's drag invoice date to my report. And now I see sales by year. I can expand from year to the quarter level by just clicking the plus signal. If I click the plus signal I go to the month level. Very easy to drill down from year to quarter to month, maybe fiscal period, weeks, any kind of time bucket you pretty much, you just expand the time frame. Now I want to see this quarter sale. So I need to have a slice of this report. So I'm going to filter, I'm going to drag my invoice data to my filter area and I'm going to choose let's say relative date and then I can choose a kind of bucket, you know, let's say quarters date this quarter and click ok and right there I have this quarter sales. And if the board asks me what about last quarter this year, Whatever. I can very easily take this report and just change to previous quarter or maybe the last three quarters or maybe I can change to two years, whatever. It's going to be very easy next time to change this report on the fly and answer the different questions that they throw at me. All right, that was easy. Well, you know, typically they ask me for product sales, invoice number, you name it. It's just drag and drop. So let's say if I want to see invoice number, there it is, drag and drop and you get by customer by invoice number. Pretty simple product just drag and drop. The beauty of this is right now let's say I can be building this report to get ready for my board meeting and maybe I stop at this or maybe they want to see quantity again. Quantity. I just drag and drop quantity to my report. So very straightforward. So I can have this report ready for my meeting. But then if they ask me who sold to this customer, what warehouse should be the product or whatever they throw at me, I can just drag and drop and get a completely new report on the fly without having to, oh, I got to write it down this question and wait until my it come up with a new report. That's self service bi. You come with two reports but if people have different questions, you can easily slice and dice it. You can drill down, you can export data or come up with new things without calling for experts. All right, that was an easy report just this quarter. Sales. Well, the next part is I want to see marketing sales trends side by side. So I want to see how my website hits are relating to my sales. So now I'm going to use a more chart approach report. So what I want to see is sales and I want to see sales over time. Actually let me put on a monthly basis. So these are my sales on a monthly basis for my whole company history. Well, I want to compare with my website hits which comes from Google Analytics. It's just related to my sales. Well fortunately my IT team and data self already connected the two pieces of information together. They come from completely different sources. Sales from X3, website hits from Google Analytics. It doesn't matter, it's just information that they put together. And now as the business person I don't understand the technical side of it but understand the business need. Hey, I have more website visitors here. I drag and drop into my report and these are our website visitors. Let me make bars for them. And at the bottom I have my sales. So These are my sales and for my view I'm going to put them together. And now I have orange bars for website visitors and sales in a blue line. And now I can see how the two are related so we can improve our marketing operations. Man, this is super easy. It took me a couple of minutes and this is completely automatic. Once I build these reports and I save them every time, I just open the report and the information is flash, freshly refreshed. So in the past when my IT team and my marketing team has to show me this information, they will spend several days actually getting data from, you know, Google Analytics, getting with X3 combining Excel, copy and paste. It was very labor intensive and error prone. Now it's all automatic, all easy and I can actually build reports from scratch. Beautiful. Let's go to the next report. This is moving very quickly. Regional sales by deal size. Well now we're going to see sales by geography and how small, large and medium sized business or deals are spread out across the country. So this is going to be a new report. I want to see sales. It could be by any kind of geography component, customer bill to ship to, you name it, I'm going to use here the bill to I'm going to take the customer state. I have invoice size and I want to see sales. All of this information I want to put on a map. And here we have the map and we have bigger bubbles, bigger sales. While the slices represent how large the deals are, the aggregation of them. And usually in these quarterly meetings we focus on the USA continental area. So I can click here and input United States continental and then I can zoom into that, into that area. If I was looking at let's say zip code level, city level, county level into let's say California, I could just type in California and the tool would zoom in right into California to look at more granular information. Very easy, very intuitive. That self service bi with little training, a business person with little IT knowledge at all, they would be able to do these things that usually would take a lot more work from experts if you're using other tools. Awesome. Now these three reports, typically I come with my iPad and I want to see them on a dashboard. So let me build a dashboard with these three pieces of information. I want to see, let's say the map. I want to put my trend analysis at the bottom and I want to put my detailed report on the right. As you can tell it's just drag and drop. Very easy, very intuitive. You do not need to be an expert to do this. This is really self service BI at best. As I showed in my PowerPoint, this kind of framework, which is powered by tableau, is the leading the gold standard Analytics Self Service BI for Fortune 2000 and we make it available for Sage X3 clients. Now just going back to my exercise here as a CEO. When I go to my board meetings quite often one of the board meetings is visiting a few of these states and he asked me, oh, how is these states doing? And when I go there I want to visit some clients, I want to have some information about it. And typically in the past we have to write down the states that the person is going to visit to and then come up with reports to them. Now next time they ask me this question, I can come here and say, okay, let's take this date, this date and you just pick and choose this date. When I do that, what happens is the whole dashboard changes. Right now I could just take and email this report to the board person and right of the flight, right there in about a minute I get the answer and we move on. It's awesome. I love it. All right, so we checked original sales by deal size. Now we're also always looking at top growth decline, let's say which clients have declined the most in sales. Now when I bought Data Self Analytics I knew that this report was already covered by the out of the box solution. So now I'm going to the web portal where I have my dashboards and I'm going to search for top customers. Right here I have some of the dashboards. I'm going to click the top customer by sales change which shows top growth and top decline since last year to date. And these customers are the ones declined the most since last year to date. This is, you know, sales change. So this report I do not have to build is available out of the box and I'm ready. So let's go to the next report. Next report is revenues and projection. Well, this is a very sophisticated report because we need to combine information from GL with sales, with CRM and so many things in the past. It would take about a week of my IT team working with different departments to come up with this report. The good news is now this whole information has been consolidated in Data Self Analytics. It's all data related. And this dashboard is now refreshed automatically every day. And let me show what it means. So here I have my revenues by quarter by different cost centers. Some more details, particularly about this quarter revenues and gross profit in percentages. Now this segment is even more powerful from an analytics standpoint. I have current month booking which comes from igl. I have outstanding open sales orders coming from the sales order module in X3. I have expected new revenues coming from CRM. And when you combine all this information, we have a fairly accurate projection of what this month's sales will be. So it's all three. There are three different data sources all together ready to go. And now I just have to open this dashboard any day and I get this information amazingly easy, amazingly powerful. And this I can access even my smartphones. And here's some more information about the projection this month. So very easy, very powerful. Self service financial dashboards also available. Alrighty. So I just covered in about 15 minutes 5 different reports I built from scratch and I showed how self service bi can be powerful to enable business people to get information anytime, anywhere and change things. Now let's do some data discovery. Data discovery is, I don't know, I need to find out some trends in my data and our profitability has been low. Why is that? Well, let me see if I can figure out some trends in my data just by poking around. So I'm going to create a new report here and I know sales, so let me start with sales information. And typically we look at customer groups and territories. So just breaking down this whole report by customer group, by territory and just in a few clicks I get this report and I look at this data. Yep, I completely relate. This is what I usually deal with. Now what about profitability? Let me take percentage gross profit and add to my color shelf. And now I have low profitability is kind of in a white ish and very green is profitable. And as I can tell regardless of the territory, my SH customer group is low profitability. So actually territory doesn't matter for profitability. Interesting. Let me remove and I can clearly see that all these three customer groups I have profitability above 50% while sh is 9%. It's incredibly slow. Wow, why is that? Let's check it out. First of all, let me click here and say keep only. I only want to analyze SH which I have 9% profitability which is way, way low. Well, is this changing over time? Is there a trend about this profitability? Good question. Let's add date here and let's show by. Let's drill down to the month level. Let me show this at the month level. So now for every year I see my sales and profitability in colors. And the interesting thing that I can see here is last year in November profitability was negative. I mean my business should have a 50% average profitability but was negative. What's going on? If I look in the prior year, around the same time it was also negative. Wow. If I go the prior year it was also pretty low. So there is definitely something going on at the end of the year that is bringing profitability significantly down for my sh. Customer group. Well, I'm the CEO. Well let me throw this curve vault at someone else. Let's say I'm going to go to last year, November. I'm going to click that particular data set and I'm going to choose give me all the details. So when I go here now I'm looking at all invoice line items. There are about 36,000 that has all the invoice number, customer information, products, salespeople, anything related to that. Those transactions are here. I can export this information in email to someone, let's say my project manager or account manager for this customer group and ask this person please look at why we're having this issue. Let's discuss because when I go to my board meeting I have already a much better understanding of what's going on and hopefully start addressing that issue. This is self service. This is data discovery. A tool where a business person with a few clicks can find trends, can find opportunities and threats that otherwise could be overlooked. Alrighty, so that was awesome. As you can tell it took me 15:20 minutes to cover so many different topics and that's because of the self service BI frameworks, data analytics. Let's move on. Main benefits from a very high level perspective. The most important one is empowering decision makers. So anytime, anywhere they can have their information to make more informed decisions and most importantly that they can slice and dice it, they can drill down, they can download and even create new reports from scratch anytime, anywhere using web, mobile and desktop devices. The way we do it is by providing the gold standard technology for self service, BI and data discovery which is powered by tableau. So it's very important to give something that is much that is super easy to use. If it takes an extra two clicks for them to do it, it's too complicated. That's our experience. Business people, they are busy, they're not it. If you show them a tool that takes more clicks, they just get overwhelmed. They'll be calling it and they're not going to get their information anytime, anywhere. So working the best in the market is really important. Not only that but out of the box. We have more than 5,000 canned reports dashboard. A lot of our clients, they just need that about Half of the clients this out of the box is all that they need. The other half, they do extensive customization on the front end or even the back end. But in a nutshell, empowering decision makers is the most important value that our technology provides. Now from a cost standpoint, many companies have, you know, they spend several hours, dozens, sometimes even hundreds of hours per month crunching data for reporting purposes is a very labor intensive process. It's a very error prone with data self analytics because we have a very comprehensive framework. Pretty much all the manual process becomes automated for data crunching as well as for report distribution. And we have seen on average more than 80% reduction in the cost in the labor cost associated for reporting because of that. And that's what we do. Well, let me show you now a little bit of our website where you can get information if you want to learn more about us. So first of all, our website, datasup.com is the most popular place to get started. And if you come to our homepage, you'll find here the most popular piece of information. So if you scroll it down here you'll find this two minute demo. So if you need to show our solution for other people, people that have little time to watch presentations, this two minute demo is very punchy, very straight to the point. So feel free to show it to people. If you come down here, you're going to find very popular links. Let's say if you want to see the whole list of the 5,000 reports that's in KPIs, you click on this link here and you'll see a short description of each of the modules we have. And if you click this download full list, you get an Excel file that has every single report listed, more than 5,000. So feel free to explore that particular button here. Also if you want to see the architecture of the technology, how it works, what the software components are. So you can come over here and then you know you can actually explore. We have upcoming webinars, webinar recordings. By the way, this webinar is going to be available on our Record webinar section in the next day. And also we have some other feature topics like how the Gardner report was our attendance exhibition at Summit. So feel free to use our homepage to find the most important components of our technology. Well folks, we are running out of time. Most importantly, if you want to talk with us to learn more about us and about other BI vendors in our perspective, how we compare, you can find here my cell phone, you can find my email and also my Twitter account. I hope you found this session informative. Have a happy Thursday and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.
