Tableau for SMBs webinar

Good morning everyone. This is Johnny Girardi, founder and CEO of Dataself. Thanks for joining us today. This Thursday, I hope you're having a great day. We're going to have informative and hopefully very exciting 30 minute session about tableau for small and medium sized businesses. Before I jump into the session, I just want to give you a brief overview of why I founded this company back in 2005. I'm an electric engineer. As my background and in my early career I was doing programming for many years and eventually I fell in love with business. I did my MBA and I became a business person. And for me, reporting and data analysis was never really an issue. I was comfortable working with complicated computer tools and databases and so forth. So this building reports I could do it. Now my business peers, they would have challenges. They had to ask my help or consultants to help them with their reporting needs and even myself, when I needed to do something, it would take me usually a long time, you know, hours sometimes to come up with something because it was just complicated using those tools. I joined the business intelligence world in the year 2000 and in 2005 I decided to start Dataself. The vision was and still is, I want to improve decision making in the mid market for mid sized companies. Mid sized companies, they need better reporting, they need better technology for the decision makers and usually the right technology. The better technology comes from the upper market, the Fortune 2000 market, and is usually too expensive and usually too complicated to get the ball rolling for them. So my vision was and is that I want to find in the upper market the best of the grid technology that fits the mid market buy budgets and sophistication. I want to make it simpler, I want to make it better. So I started this journey in 2005 and what I'm going to show you today is the latest and greatest and it uses tableau as the back end. So hopefully if you are in the small and medium sized businesses considering tableau, hopefully you're going to find this as a good alternative option for your needs. So let's get started. Let me get here. Here's my name, Johnny Girardi, the way it's spelled. First of all, all lines are muted and if you have questions, Please use the GoToMeeting chat in box and we will address them at the end of the session. So let me just talk overall a little bit about why people look for analytics in tableau, you and why us. And then we're going to look at tableau in practice using our approach and then we're going to open a Q and A session. So most of the time people come to us looking for analytics and tableau is because they want to improve their sales, their supply chain and even for financials. Yeah, so let's talk about that. So analytics for sales, the most common need that people come to us is to try to have a better understanding of their sales and profitability. The basics, some people say, but kind of knowing to whom they're selling, who is selling, who is the sales people doing the better job, what products are being sold, is it profit or not, who's growing, who's declining, who's no longer buying, things of that nature. So sales and profitability hot button, that is, you know, analytics can help people. Some people want to have a better ordering and invoicing system. You know, it's taking too long from order to invoice and they don't know how to make it better. So analyzing the process is critical and analytics can help people with that. Sales commission. You know, sales commission sometimes is very time consuming. It takes hours, days, even weeks at the end of the period to process. Analytics can often automate the process 100% activities. If you get into large long term contracts, let's say with big retailer boxes like Walmart and Target, you better come up with the right price strategy, a win, win price strategy. So it will be good for both of you, you and the client. So analyzing components for the price strategy is critical and analytics can help with that. Forecasting. You want to forecast your sales, is it going to grow or decline? Maybe looking at your past history from your ERP system, maybe you want to combine data from the ERP with Excel files coming from salespeople, or maybe data coming from your clients, you name it, analytics can help you with that. Data integration kind of goes on the same topic. Is the ability to combine data from different data sources. Maybe Excel, maybe a point of system sale you want to combine with your ERP package, your CRM. Data analytics provide many ways to do that. And people come to us on the supply chain having a better understanding of your inventory management activities. Where the items are, how long they have been sitting on shelves, inventory and turnover, movement between warehouses, all those things can be greatly improved by analytics analysis, inbound and outbound routing, logistics. You know, if you're shipping things, maybe coming products from overseas, you need to know when you get them. It may take weeks or months. So analytics can help you be on top of those things. If you collaborate data with your vendors and clients and shipping companies and you want to combine into your decision making process, analytics can help with that. If your purchasing processes are complicated and you need to improve their efficiency, analytics can help you analyze them. Forecasting your inventory or your services are going to be able to deliver on time, analytics can help you with that. And again, data integration that goes back to many of these topics. The ability to combine data from different data sources into a single place, analytics can help with that. On the financial side, usually tableau is not a good fit for financial reporting. But the way that we do things, the way that our framework works, we actually use the framework to support financial analysis. It makes, you know, reduces. If it's a labor intensive process, it becomes highly automated. It helps a lot in multi company frameworks. And you know, with the tableau, we can help people slice and dice their financials on the fly. So we can also help with financials. Now if you are familiar with the tableau buzz, probably you're familiar with the latest Gartner magic quadrant for bi. Just a quick overview here. This was released in February. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies making assessment of upper market vendors like BI in this case. And then the more to the right on this X axis is better for Fortune 2000 companies. So not a big deal for mid sized companies. So not so important here for this webinar. But the higher you are on the Y axis, the better. And right now Tableau is the top dog. I mean they're the best company tackling data visualization, analytics and dashboarding. So exciting to be at the top. And we also have Microsoft as a top provider on the BI infrastructure. What about these players? What about us? Well, it goes back to my vision. Mid sized companies usually need something simpler, something better because they may not have as much IT in house to put so much time into getting these things working. So what we do data self is we take right now the top leaders tableau being the leader in the visualization, Microsoft in the infrastructure. So we take those two products we put in the box, then we add our own technology that eliminates programming from these other people and we add more than 2000 reports KPIs to make it better. So we simplify and we amplify it. Let me spin it a little differently again, top notch technology, probably you're pretty aware of those things, but usually when you're doing those things you have to use programming, you have to know the data source, connections. It's a lot of work. You got to know those things. So we use our own technology that eliminates A lot of the process, programming, mappings and so forth. Then when you deploy a solution, usually you get thousands of reports, dashboards and KPIs out of the box. So as a starting point you have more than just a plain, beautiful empty tableau product. Can you do what we do? Absolutely. If you have good people, absolutely. However, what we do is we use easy to use technology, Tableau in the front end, SQL Server, BI in the back end, which eliminates a lot of the headaches when you're using tableau technology against data sources. And we do through our ETL technology, which eliminates programming from SQL. So much easier, much better. So easier to use is a big benefit. But time to deploy is going to take us hours or days to deploy this whole solution. It most likely will take you months if not years to get the same starting point. So we make it much faster to get value out of IT expertise. The core team of dataself has been working with mid sized companies NBI for 14 years. We know mid market ERP packages, we know BI, we know how to interconnect them and to make them work for mid sized companies. So you get also expertise to make this happen for your business. And finally, low cost, price wise, license wise will be comparable to Tableau on the tableau license per se. But when you look at all the mappings you have to do, the building, the dashboard, the reports from scratch, we're going to be costing a fraction. It's very easy to get Tableau and make the solution cost into the high five figures and well into the six figures. We usually have the cost slash to a fraction. So our value is speed to deploy, ease of use, backend and front end expertise and low cost. Because we use Tableau and Microsoft BI in the backend in the mid market we call our solution like a Ferrari. Many other vendors they provide but they're like the bimmers, the Mercedes, the Porsches with the Ferrari. So I'm going to break my presentation, my test drive now into three buckets. Secure access, simple KPIs out of the 2000 and then we're going to do some ad hoc analysis. So have a seat at the passenger seat, buckle up, let's put our helmets and let's have some fun. Alrighty. So this is the, you know, familiar for you if you know Tableau already, the web portal from Tableau and it's actually we have an OEM with them, it's called data self analytics. When users access it, they will access through a highly secure web portal on premises or in the cloud, we have both deployments. Now when they log into my portal, it would give me my own information. So if I'm a salesperson, I would see the sales team dashboard. If I'm a person from the finance team, I would see the finance team dashboard. Now when I open one of these dashboards, like the top custom by sales, we can set up security to show my own specific information. So if I'm the rep for California, I would see California top customers, while the rep for Florida would open and see top customers in Florida while the big boss opens exactly the same dashboard and views top customers across all territories. So specific to your own information. Now when we build our reports and dashboards, we try to make them simple but insightful. And this is an example of a top performer dashboard. And we have lots of top performer dashboards. This example is my top customers. So here are my top customers. And I have bars, bigger bars represented by bigger sales. And then the color of the bars is represented by gross profit being not so profitable to very profitable. So very quickly I can look at this now and see that some of my clients like this one, my top clients is not so profitable, maybe something to work on and improve, see what's going on. We also have the percentage as this black dot. So once you view this dashboard and have this insight, which doesn't take long, next time it's going to take you seconds to look at this and find which one deserves your attention. So we'll help you focus on fixing the problems or take advantage of the opportunities. Not spending time analyzing the data or shortcutting that process. Some other ways to analyze data that may be even more critical. Looking at the tip of the growth curve of your major key performance indicators is usually critical. Let me give an example. This report shows the top growth of the top of the sales growth curve from last year to date. So bigger bar, bigger sales increase, big abroad in this direction, big decline. These customers are growing. The most, most likely happy customers. Sales people are working closely with them. So maybe not so important in this dashboard. How about these ones, the ones declined the most? If I have recurring customers, this may be a big problem. So I better check if something is wrong and fix before it's too late. So looking at the tip of the growth curve of your KPIs or key performance indicators is critical. And we have many reports like this. Check sales, profitability, quantity shipped, quantity on hand, cost on hand, expenses, you name it, very important and out of the box. We have many of those reports. Let me show Another report here that's very critical for many businesses. It's called exceptional reporting. Exceptional reporting is a technique to look at things that are no longer happening. This is a good example from the sales side. If you have recurring customers, why some of these are no longer buying, they are no longer doing something and may be critical. So keeping track of things that are no longer happening, like customers no longer buying, if you're selling items, items are no longer moving. You got to know what they are and maybe do something about it. So knowing who they are first is critical. The point is we help you get to the insight quickly so you can do what you're supposed to instead of spending hours to figure out what you need to do. So we shortcut that process. Also for upper management, like say I'm a CEO and I want to have on my iPhone or my tablet a dashboard like this that show my top hot buttons and I just look, is it green? Beautiful. I don't need to pay attention. Is it yellow? Well, maybe I need to work on if it's red. Geez, I need to call someone and get things going. And these dashboards can be very simple, like this one giving you insight, let's say, oh, my sales is kind of yellow, but I have good profit. Oh, I just remembered that we're making some larger sales, very profitable. And even if the sale is not as big, it's okay because profitability is green. So I don't need to worry. I'm going to play golf, let's say. So dashboards for CEO can also be simpler, like that one, or a little bit more elaborate like this one. You still have colors to represent things not doing so good, but you know you have right here on the dashboard more insights as far as know the goals, how you're doing, colors and so forth. So anyway, the idea is to give insights to people so they can make decisions quickly and move on to take advantage of opportunities or fix issues. And we do a great job with that. Let me show you one more dashboard and then I'm going to show how easy it is to change things on the fly. So suppose I'm the VP of sales and I open this dashboard and it shows me sales by state, bigger bubbles, bigger sales, and then they are sliced by the size of the deal. Large and medium and small deals. So pretty good insight into my sales by territory. And if I want to see if it's growing or declining, I can use this filter here and see that from 2012 through 2014, bubbles are increasing and blue slides are getting Bigger, if that's what I want. Bigger, larger deals I gotta tap on my back. I'm doing a great job. Now I also have sales by account manager, how profitable they are and what products are being sold. Now, if I'm meeting the west coast team with my iPad, I'm the big boss VP of sales. I can come here and use my fingers on my iPad and select those three states. And when I do that, I see my salespeople, sales for those three states and what's been shipped. Easy. What if I want to see only one sam? What is SAM selling? How profitable it is. I click on Sam and right there I get a new snapshot, just SAM sales and what products have been shipped. Very easy to do this. Most business users with little or no training, they'll be able to take their desktop, web and mobile devices, take their dashboards, and do things like this very easily. Now, some people, they want more power. They are the power users and they want to extensively change things on the fly and build their own reports anytime, anywhere. These people will have the edit button on this web portal and they click on it and they go into the edit mode. If you're not familiar with this, this is tableau. This is tableau engine. And the engine behind this was designed by tableau founders. They were Stanford University professors who studied how business people look at business data and have insights from it. And as you may know, it's a journey, it's a process. When a business person wants to see a report, they have an idea of what they want to see. But until they see something, they don't know. Exactly. And that's why when you have a business person asking questions to a consultant or an IT person, to get the answers, it takes usually many interactions. The guy builds, the report brings back. And the business person, well, can you change this? Can you add some summary filter? The guy goes, comes back, oh, can you add a chart? Can you change the color? Sometimes it takes several interactions, many hours, many days, even weeks to get it ready. And sometimes people cannot afford the time they need to make a decision right now, not later. So this tool was designed by these Stanford University professors who came up with this engine that helps decision makers walk through the journey by themselves with little or no assistance from experts. So let's see how that works. So I'm in the edit mode of the dashboard and I'm seeing the three tabs for each quadrant of my dashboard. Let's say I want to go to this quadrant here and I want to see numbers by the penny So I can click the show me button and I can choose different graphical representations. I'm going to choose the grid approach. So right there I see sales by the penny. Awesome. Easy. What if I want to break this down by product line? Well, I go to the product session on my data panel, I find whatever component that I want and I drag and drop with my fingers, let's say, on my iPad. And there you go. Buy salesperson, buy product line sales and gross profit. Very easy, very fast. Maybe you want to break this down by a customer. It's the same idea. Find a component, drag and drop before the salesperson, between or after. You just drag where you want and there you go. Buy salesperson by customer, by product line, sales, gross profit. Maybe you want to break it down by year, by quarter, by month, fiscal period, rolling periods, you name it. It's usually a matter of dragging, dropping reporting parameters into the report, filtering, summarizing it. And there you go, you get information. Now what if I want to get this information into a PDF or Excel? You name it. You can choose, let's say a piece of information and one way you can view the data. You can choose all underlying records with all rows, you know, invoice, number all the details and then you download and you get information right into Excel very easily, very quickly. So the point is it's easy to get information and easy to export it. And easy. The point is it's easy to get insights, make decisions and move forward. Instead of spending time on coming up with information to make a decision, we shortcut that process. So that was my Ferrari spin. I hope you have enjoyed it. Let's go back to our PowerPoint and resume the presentation and start our questions and answers. So as I said, if you have questions, please take the Gotomedi panel chat in box, ask questions and we're going to address them right now. So let's see if we have questions. Yes, we have some questions here. First question is from Sarah. What ERP systems do you support? Sarah, thank you for your question. ERP system. So let me show actually on our website, if you haven't been there, this is going to answer your question. If you go to dataself.com and you go to the analytics by product, you're going to see here a list of all the products supported. If you go to Products Overview, sometimes it's a little easier to look at things. So if you go to Products Overview, you're going to have listed here the out of the box, the products that we have out of the box solution for and we're also looking to build new ones. So if you don't have any of those, contact us. We'll be glad to check if there is a need for it, if we're already working on it, and then we'll be glad to incorporate. Our goal is to cover the most popular ERP and CRMs from the mid market and make this outstanding solution available out of the box. Sarah, thank you for your question. Next question. Let's see here. Question from Tony. I'm not quite clear on why I would buy from you instead of Tableau. Can you elaborate? Awesome question, Tony. Why would you buy from Dataself and not from Tableau? Let me go back to this slide here and I think this is going to tell the the story. So first of all, we combine Tableau with Microsoft bi. You know, we have an ultralight data warehouse. Actually I should show you also the architecture. So let me go back here and show the architecture because it's going to validate the way that we work through things. So this is the architecture of our solution. This would be your data sources. We bring data into a ultra light data warehouse, then we use Tableau to give information to users. What you may be thinking is I want to use Tableau directly against a data source. Absolutely. Many people do it successfully and it works, but sometimes you need to massage the data before you get into Tableau. And we have found that quite often that's the case. And usually in the tableau community people talk about data warehouses. People don't like, they have a bitter taste in their mouth when they hear about the word about data warehouse. We have actually a ultralight data warehouse. The regular data warehouse is usually understood as something expensive, slow and with a high failing rate. That's the traditional data warehouse. We have the ultralight approach, which is easy, which is quick and which is really inexpensive and out of the box. For those ERP packages that I showed, it's just kind of plug and play and you get a lot of value out of it. So actually we use the ultralight data warehouse as a staging database to facilitate Tableau's job. So we when you and when your users want to build new things, want to slice and dice, the data is really nicely organized, has been cleaned, has been combined and it is the one responsible for keeping the ultralight data warehouse. So maybe thinking, wow, if I have to put it involved, what's the point? The point is keeping the one version of the truth in your business. It will be sure to keep the information in the warehouse validated. And correct. So when people are pulling from it, they're pulling from the same source that is validated. If you give tableau users complete freedom, sometimes they start bringing their own Excel files from different places and then you start having the several versions of the truth people go discuss numbers that they are comparing apples to pineapples. So the ultralight data warehouse is a way to guarantee that you're going to have a single version of the truth. So that's pretty much from a technology standpoint how we believe the value is. But if you believe this makes sense then you would go the traditional approach of build a data warehouse that would be too complicated. But our ETL simplifies the process significantly and the out of the box solution usually makes a great starting point. And that's what we do. We sell ease of use, fast deployment, expertise in low cost. Let's enter. Tony actually has a follow up question. But my needs are unique and I think your canned solution won't bring much value. Tony, that's an awesome question. I don't want to say we are great for everyone. I think we should take this call offline so we can understand exactly what your needs are and see if our expertise in combined technology would be a good fit. So definitely let's make a call after. We love to hear give our insight, educate you better. If you go with someone else, it's okay. You know we are here to help, we're here to educate and if we add value we would love to have your business. So thank you for the elaborate. We'll be back to you. Well, we're running out of time. We have some other questions but we'll address on a 1:1 basis. So thank you very much for attending the session. You can contact me at any time. Here's my cell phone, my email and my Twitter account. By the way, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. We're always releasing some interesting news. I hope you have a great Thursday and looking forward to seeing the near future. Thank you, have a great day. Bye.