Self service BI that liberates everyone in a mid sized organization

Self Service bi. What is Self Service bi? Well, in a single sentence, with the users, they can take care of their own reporting needs anytime, anywhere. What is the typical scenario? Well, what I just read usually doesn't happen. You know, typically the people who need reporting are the business users. They know the problems, they know the opportunities, and they need more information to make more informed decisions. However, they have to call an expert to build a new report, to change a report. Usually they have to call someone in the IT department, maybe in the accounting department, maybe even an external consultant. And that will take time. And sometimes people don't have time. They have to make decisions and if they don't have the right information, well, they'll not make probably the best decision. So self reporting is about giving users anytime, anywhere, using desktop or web or mobile devices, the ability to retrieve reports that they have or change existing reports or slice reports, create new ones from scratch without calling for an expert. And what that translates into is liberation. Business users now have information when they need it, anytime, anywhere. While the experts, let's say accounting or IT or consultants, they can focus their time in things they're more skilled. For many of those people who build and work with reports, they have other things to do, but they have to be building reports for the user who are always asking for something different. So Self Service bi, at the end of the day provides liberation for everyone, business users and the report experts. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm the founder and CEO of Dataself. Now, today's presentation we're going to split about. In half the time I'm going to be showing the product, in half the time I'm going to be talking about concepts behind Self Service bi. I think if it's one of the first times you watch, our presentation will be very informative. Our next webinar, which will be on the 23rd, will be a full hour product presentation. So if you want to learn more about the product presentation, a full hour about the main features, be sure to attend our upcoming webinar on the 23rd. Well, let's jump right into the product and take a quick look at how Self Service BI works. What I'm going to show here in the next couple of minutes is how easy it is for a regular user, not an expert, a business user, to build a fairly sophisticated dashboard from scratch and being able to do that anytime, anywhere. So in this simple example, what I'm going to be building is a sales dashboard. And in the tool here I can see on the left what we call the sales connector where I have my main pieces of information for reporting. I have dimensions, customer products as well as measures. Well, this dashboard that I want to put eventually on an iPad, I want to show a few different pieces of information. I want to see my sales on a monthly basis. My sample company has a multi company framework, several different company databases that we have consolidated. So I want to see sales by individual company. I also have in this example the information from my ERP package and from my CRM system combined. So I want to see sales, actual sales and number of meetings coming from CRM in the same report. And then finally I also want to see sales broken down by state, you know, a geography analysis and seeing how I'm doing my big, small and medium sized invoices throughout my territories. So let's do it, let's go for it. So I'm going to show how easy it is to do this. And I want to see sales, I'm going to drag sales to my report. Those are my sales I'm going to break down by month. So I'm going to drag my month in my report. So by month I see my consolidated sales growing throughout the months. I have a multi company, so if I want to break down this consolidated into individual companies, I can drag my companies to my color. For instance, now for every company I have a different color and I see the line of the company in my chart. This could be division, salespeople, product category, whatever you want. Okay, Now I also want to see number of meetings from my CRM. As I mentioned, this information has already been combined behind the scenes. As a business user, I don't need to worry about where to put that information. I just drag number of meetings into my report. So there it is. I have sales, amount and number of meetings on the same dashboard. And then to tell apart one from the other, I'm making bars for my number of meetings while the lines are sales. So next time when I look at this, it's easy to tell what is what. Okay, that's one good piece of information for my dashboard. The next piece of information I want to see is sales by territory. And I can use, you know, the bill to information, the ship to any, anything that has a geography component I can pick in my list of reporting components and then I choose the map capabilities to show that information. So there it is. I have put my sales on the map. Bigger bubbles are bigger sales. While the slice of each bubble relates to how large the Deals are, as you can tell, all drag and drop. I'm just picking and choosing different reporting parameters from this list. And then the dashboard is taking place. Finally, I want to duplicate this sheet and I want to see also the information using just numbers. Some people, they are not very comfortable with charts, they like to see numbers by the penny. So there it is. Let me actually take some information out of here to be a little simpler. All right, so those are the pieces of information. I want to combine everything into a dashboard and put on an iPad. So let's make the final part which is the actual combination and I'm going to choose a iPad landscape as a format of my dashboard. Everything is point and click, slice and dicing, very simple. And now I drag into my dashboard the different components, the map, the first query that I built. Everything is drag and drop. Very simple. I don't need to spend too much time to learn this tool and being able to build this fairly sophisticated dashboard from scratch. And there it is. Very informative dashboard. It has the main components that I mentioned. I don't need to be an expert. Many of our users who have spent a few hours of training or just poke around and figure out they learn how to do this by themselves and now they can just take ownership of the self service BI platform. Now let me talk a little bit of the concepts behind this. Let me go back to my PowerPoint. So how can a solution be a self service BI? Well, one of the main requirements is the solution must be user centric. It must have a user interface that has been designed to for the people who should be using it. So for reporting, typically people who need reports are business users. So the technology must be user centric for them. Pretty much all of the other BI solutions in the mid market such as Sage, Microsoft, ERP and CRM systems, they are what we call expert centric. The person building and maintaining the reports and dashboards must be an expert that has spent sometimes hours, days, even weeks learning the tool so they can actually serve the business users with reporting and dashboarding. Ours is user centric. Business users will be able to do it a lot of them by themselves. Let me just show here a little personal story related to this user centric approach. So this is my mom and my dad. I'm from Brazil by the way. And about two months ago my mom turned 80 and I went over there for her birthday. But my mom, she never used a computer in her life when she wanted to exchange messages with me or with my siblings or Skype or something like that. She would have to call one of my siblings or grandkids of her to help her connect with us. That was because of computer. Computer is like an expert tool. You need to spend lots of hours to understand the mouse and the right click, left click and how to log in complicated things. So she just couldn't do it. Well, last year I gave her an iPad. And what happens is then, well now mom, because she's using a user centric computer, she can Skype all by herself. We talk often over Skype, we see each other, which is pretty cool. She checks the weather, the news, she even uses Facebook. And why? Well, because the iPad is a user centric computer. So that's what we do. We provide a user centric reporting solution that becomes self service business users that we want to take ownership of their own data analysis. Now they can and everyone is liberated it the experts, the accounting, they can focus on what they are really experts at while users can be more self sufficient anytime, anywhere and do their own reporting. Now let me show a little bit more of the product. So how most people consume the reports and dashboards? Well, many users, many business users, sometimes they're too busy and they just win reports and dashboard that are ready, they just pull it, view it, make a decision, move on. So for all of these regular reporting and dashboard consumption, most of the users will use this kind of web portal to access their reports and dashboards. This is a web portal that can be behind the firewall, so in the private network or it can be in the open Internet or using cloud services like we provide as well. So on premises or in the cloud deployment, both available. So when a user logs to this portal and they can use our regular web browser, or they can use tablets or smartphones, when they log in, they'll be able to see their own dashboards. So let's say if I'm the CEO, I would see the CEO dashboards. If I'm a salesperson, I would see or view the sales team dashboards. Now as I navigate through the dashboards, let me open one of these out of the box dashboards just to give an example. So when I open one of the dashboards then the tool can be configured in a way that let's say this dashboard here, which shows the top customer by sales this year is the same dashboard for all sales team. However, when I open this dashboard and if I were, let's say the California rep, this would only show the top customers in California for me, while the rep from Florida opens the same dashboard and only views the top customers in Florida and the big boss opens the same dashboard and views the top customers across all territories. So security behind the scenes can control who can log into this portal, what reports and dashboards are available, and when you open one of them, it can control for each individual what piece of information they can access. And again this goes back to being self service anytime, anywhere, any person will be able to easily, quickly to retrieve their information, make decisions and move on. Now maybe if I'm a rep and I want to see how I'm doing, let's say I want to see my commissions and there is this dashboard here also available as a sales in commission. And in this example I see my sales growing throughout the month on a daily basis I see the actual sales accumulating and these bars are my commission, how my commission are accumulating throughout the month. This dashboard is something as a salesperson I want to keep track of. And maybe as I go into my weekend I want to see how much commissions I have accumulated because if I want to do something extra, I want to spend some extra money, make some additional party or buy something else. Maybe I want to receive this information every Friday night. Well as part of the self service I can come here and click this subscribe and then I can tell that I want to receive a copy of this dashboard refreshed on a scheduled basis. In this example I'm going to choose every Friday night I'm going to subscribe to receive this dashboard in my inbox. So even if I'm already in a party, I open my smartphone, I get the email showing exactly the dashboard and then again self service I get information, I make decisions and I go about my life. So that's part of the self service being easy anytime, anywhere and delivering the information in different methods because people have different needs. Well let me show some extra stuff here on our PowerPoint. Besides being self service, besides being easy to use, we data self has been business providing enterprise level analytics for mid sized companies for over 10 years now. And over the years we have built a very comprehensive out of the box solution. And today there are more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs ready to go. So you don't need to build all the reports and dashboards from scratch. Quite often what you're looking for today is already answered by one of these reports or dashboards. And if it's not exactly the way that you want, you can pull one of these reports, change it on the fly and very quickly get the information. Let me show an example. So let's go back to the product and let me go back to the whole dashboard list. And this dashboard list that I'm showing here is just a sample out of the 5,000. But I'm going to find one of the reports. I'm going to show how easy it is to modify it on the fly. So let me choose one of the sales dashboards here. Down below, I think sales by geography. Just paste it. There we go. I'm going to choose this sales by geography dashboard. So right here is a very simple dashboard. It shows me a map with bigger bubbles, bigger sales, kind of similar to the one that I built at the very beginning of this presentation with this license by the size of the deal. I also have in this dashboard my salespeople in sales, you know, bigger sales, bigger bubbles. These are the sales amount and the color of each bar is represented by the profitability. Not so profitable to very profitable. And also I have products being shipped in this whole thing. Now if I only want to see sales, let's say on those three states, I can choose using the mouse or my fingers if I'm using a tablet. And when I do that, the dashboard changes to reflect people who are selling to those three states and how much the sales were. Very easy, very intuitively. Any person with very little training will be able to do this and they're not going to be breaking. These dashboards are kind of fixed for easy consumption. And if I come here and I choose another salesperson or only one of them, now I'm changing the dashboard again and I'm showing only for those three states what Sam is selling and what products has been shipping. Very easy, very intuitive again, self service, bi. Well, what if this dashboard is not answering all the questions? What if I need to change it? Well, if I'm a power user and I have the ability to license reports on the fly, then I'm going to have this edit button. I click the edit button and now I have a user interface that is similar to the one that I showed at the beginning of the presentation. And now I can extensively change, slice and dice and build new reports anytime, anywhere. Let me show an example. So here I have one tab for each part of my dashboard that I was looking on the web. And let's say if I want to take this dashboard here, this part of the dashboard and change into a grid approach, I want to see numbers by the penny and then I want to break this down by let's say, product line or something else. Well, everything is easy, intuitive, drag and drop. So I'M going to take product line. I'm going to drop into my report. So there it is. I see. Now buy salesperson by product line sales and gross profit. And if you want to change more, just keep on doing it. Maybe I want to put customer name and put also my report. You just drag and drop. Very intuitive, very user friendly. Everything is designed for business people. Salesperson, customer, product line. Maybe you want to break down by year. You know everything, you drag and drop and you get the result. So the point is being easy to use and allow the consumers do self service bi anytime, anywhere. They just get the information that they need, they make more informed decisions and hopefully they'll grow the business more quickly. So that's one quite a quick example of and then you can save this, you can save for yourself or you can save with a group of users. Very easy to share your findings with other people. Now let me go back to another PowerPoint and talk what's the technology behind this? Well this is Gartner Magic quadrant for BI and analytics platforms. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment for Fortune 2000 companies. And make a long story short on this graph here, These are Fortune 2000 DI and analytics vendors Based on the latest Gartner research. The higher the vendor is on this Y axis, the more successful the best execution, the more traction they are getting. These two vendors Tableau and Microsoft Tableau right now is considered the king of the hill or the most successful company providing ease of use, dashboarding analytics in self service, BI in the upper market and Microsoft is considered the leader in BI infrastructure. Well what about these two vendors? What about Data Self? Well what we provide is actually is the best of the bridge technology available out there. So we're providing Tableau in Microsoft bi we add our own technology that eliminates programming from these other vendors so it's easier to deploy, easier to maintain and we have built more than 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So that's what data self analytics is Best of breed technology enterprise level available for Fortune 2000 in an easy and simplified way. So it's user centric usually takes hours or maybe a few days to deploy so it's fast. We have been doing this for over 10 years so we know the mid market ERP and CRM systems. We know how companies that use those systems need the reporting needs are and we have been working with this enterprise level technology for over 10 years so we know how to combine and make it really valuable for your business. And at the end of the day the solution has a low cost. It's going to cost you. A fraction of the cost is actually comparable to other BI vendors in the mid market. But now you can get top notch enterprise level technology. So that's what we do. We're going to go into the Q and A session and before we do that, let me just show you back on our website how you can sign up for our upcoming webinar where we're going to be taking a full hour presentation of the product and go into many details. So if you want to sign up for that webinar, go to our website, go to Learning, click Upcoming Webinars and then you go to this other webinar here which will be a full hour presentation and then, you know, hopefully you'll be able to join us on the 23rd. So here are the description and the register button. Anyhow, let's open for questions and if you want to ask any question Please use the GoToWebinar panel. You'll put a question and I'll be answering them. So let me check if there are questions. So yes, we have questions. Question from Marilyn. I guess Marilyn, thanks for your question. Is do you integrate with sage 100erp? Marilyn, thank you for your question. Yes we do actually. If you want to know what products we support, in what versions of the product we support, you can come to our website, click Add analytics by product and then here are the products that we connect to out of the box. Quick and easy. We can connect to any product, but these are the ones we have the 5,000 reports and dashboards ready to go. So if you click on one of them, like in this case sage 100, then you're going to get more information about the solution for this, including what Sage 100 versions we support, which is pretty much older versions like from 10 or more years ago up to the latest. Marilyn, thank you for your question. Let's see more questions. Yes, so we have more questions. Question from Amanda. Amanda, thank you for your question. What's the pricing for this solution? Amanda, good question. So typically pricing depends a lot on specifics. What I can tell you is the entry level solution can literally cost you hundreds of dollars per month. We have subscription pricing and you can also purchase the solution. So it can be very affordable. Of course, depending on how many users you have, how many databases you have, maybe you have a single ERP database, maybe you have CRM, you want to combine them or maybe you have a multi company framework. So depending on those needs the price will vary but but it is affordable. The return on investment typically is in weeks or months. Amanda, thanks for your question. Let's see more questions here. Next question is from. Well I already answered this question. Question from Chuck. How do you compare against Sage Intelligence? Chuck, thanks for your question. We get this question all the time and usually the way we compare with all of the mid market other BI packages it goes back to this slide here. It's about being user centric. Pretty much all the other packages in the mid market they are more expert centric. Someone in the organization will have to spend a ton of hours learning how to use the tool and they'll become the experts. So when the users will need new reports, new requests, quite often they'll have to ask the expert to make a change. And then there are great solutions out there, some easier than others, but mostly they will require experts. Ours because we use Tableau. If you go back here in Tableau right now in the Fortune 2000 world is the leader providing self service, ease of use reporting. So because we use Tableau in the front end as an oem, we really are the only one providing enterprise level analytics that are self service and they're really designed for the business user like the tablet of the BI solution. Chuck, that's kind of very high level comparison. If you guys want a more detailed one on one probably we should have an on one call to talk more details and see if our solution is a better fit for you. Let's see if we have more questions. I'm going to answer one more question and then we're going to be wrapping. Let me answer this one. This one too. So Dan is asking can this application import data from other data sources? Dan, thank you for your question. The answer is yes, we can import data from other data sources. If you go to our website again analytics by product and choose software architecture, you're going to see how the architecture works. And here we have let's say data sources. It can be any of the pre configured solutions we have for or any database. It can be SQL database, it can be Access, it can be FoxPro, Oracle, it can be Excel spreadsheets, you name it. This data can be brought over into our what we call ultralight data warehouse out of the box. We already have a ton of things pre configured for the Sage, CRMs, ERPs and Microsoft that you have out of the box. But it's very easy for importing new data into it. Then the data is pushed into this web server that can be behind your firewall or in the open Internet and then at the end of the day the data flows to business people and they'll be able to see all information combined in a very user manner format. So then yes, this can import data from any data source. Folks, we are pretty much wrapping up the time, so let me put my contact information here, my phone, my email, my cell phone, my email, my Twitter. If you have more questions, if you want to discuss if this is a good fit for your business, we will be glad to do one on one discussions and presentations. I hope you have enjoyed. I hope you have learned something new and if you want to learn the full product in more detail, join us on the webinar on the 23rd. Happy Thursday. Thank you for joining and have a great day. Thank you guys.