The board had questions, and the CEO had to have answers from Sage 300
Johnny Girardi demonstrates DataSelf Analytics, a reporting tool for Sage 300 companies that lets business users build their own dashboards without IT help. The platform includes 5,000+ prebuilt reports and drag-and-drop analysis for sales, profitability, and customer trends.
Chapters
Self Service bi. Self Service bi. What is it? Who needs it? Well, at the end of the day, people who need reports, who need business intelligence are the decision makers. These are the people who understand the business threats and the business opportunities. And they are the ones who need to be empowered with tools that they can actually find information anytime, anywhere. They may be at the office, they may be in a meeting, in a coffee shop, visiting a client, visiting a vendor. They should be able to pull their own reports. They should be able to slice and dice the reports anytime, anywhere. So this is what we're going to be talking about here today. It's a little case scenario where this, this distribution company from the west coast where the CEO, where the board has questions and the CEO had to have answers. From sage300. Thanks for joining us. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm the founder and CEO of Data Self. So the whole topic here is showing how Self Service BI is helping this decision maker, this CEO and actually the whole decision making team of this company with Self Service bi. Before we jump into the product, let me give you some foundation of Self Service BI and how we do it. First of all, this is Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment for Fortune 2000 companies. Making a long story short, Tableau has been considered for the past three years by Gartner the most successful self service BI, which is analytics dashboarding business intelligence solution for Fortune 2000 companies. And Microsoft has been one of the most successful companies providing BI Infrastructure for Fortune 2000. What about them? What about us? Well, Data Self analytics is actually a packaged solution that includes nothing but the very best from Fortune 2000 companies. We are using Tableau as the leader for Self Service bi. We also include SQL Server BI which is one of the leaders when it comes to BI infrastructure. But then we add our own secret sauce. We add our ETL that makes deployment and maintenance of this kind of technology easier and faster. And then we add more than 5,000, yes, 5,000 reports, dashboards and KPIs. So not only we're using what is considered the gold standard for Self Service BI, but there's a ton of reports, dashboards and KPIs available out of the box so you don't have to create everything from scratch, big value right off the box. So it's fast to deploy, usually takes hours or days. We have been working with Sage 300 in enterprise grade technology for about 15 years as a team and overall the cost of the solution is comparable to other mid market BI solutions. So we're not going to break the bank. So let's do this product presentation and again I'm going to be playing the role of the CEO of this distribution company. And in my quarterly board meeting I have to show them a lot of information. My decision making team, including myself and even my board, we're very data driven. We like to make decisions looking at data and then using our gut feeling. But data is critical and until now, before we acquired Data Self, my IT team and actually my whole staff, accounting, marketing, so forth, they would spend several days before my quarterly meetings crunching data to give me information. So I go to my board and quite often the board would ask me questions that I did not have reports to answer. So we would have to postpone the discussions because I could not have information changed on the fly during my board meetings. So recently we acquired dataself which is a self service BI and the goal is we want to make it faster. So I don't want my people spending days and days crunching data. I want them to be selling, building, doing their stuff instead of crunching data. So one idea is to cut costs from a reporting building standpoint. But most importantly, I want myself and my team, my decision makers to be able to get information and slice and dice it anytime, anywhere. So let's take a look how Data Self can help me with that. And in my board meetings I have these five questions which every month I go prepare to answer. One is they want to see my discord sales in detail, you know, customers, sales to customer by product, invoice number, quantity shipped and so forth. That's one of the reports. The other one is showing how our marketing, you know, our website visitors are affecting our sales. So when I see trends comparing website visitors and sales, then I want to see original sales by state and how big the deals are. That's another important information. Then because we're a distributor, we want to keep a close look at clients who have declining sales. Who are they, you know, are they declining a lot in sales and no longer buying? So those questions come up a lot. So we're going to show some reports in that regard and also we're going to see our revenues and projection for the current quarter. So these five pieces of information my staff spend days crunching and hopefully today during my presentation I'll be able to tackle by myself without nobody's support. Finally, the business has been growing significantly for years in a row from a revenue standpoint, however, profitability somehow was Pretty low. And my board is asking what the heck is going on, why we're not making some money and I have no idea. So the last part of my presentation is actually data discovery. I want to see if I can find some trends in my data showing where profitability is low and hopefully we're going to be able to address it moving forward. Let's do it. Let's do it. So first of all, let's build this quarter sales details. And now I go to my data self analytics desktop which is the most powerful client tool of my technology in most of these reports. Reports are sales focused. So right now I'm looking at my sales information. However out of the box. We cover from Sage 300 and CRM information. We cover sales, sales order, purchasing, payables, receivables, inventory, financials. Many modules from Sage 300 are out of the box pre mapped. We have more than 5,000 reporting KPIs available. So in my sales connector I have my sales dimensions, customer, product salespeople and so forth. And then my measures right here. So the first thing you want to see is sales by customer. So what you do is you just drag and drop sales by customer. So just find customer information and drag to the report. That's it. Drag and drop by customer. I have my total sales. Well, I want to see this quarter sales. So let's put some time frame into this report. Let me add invoice date. There it is. I have all my company history for years and sales by customer by year. Well if I want to see quarter, I can drill from year to quarter. So now I'm seeing quarter information. I could drill to the month level and I could drill to the day level. I could go to week number, fiscal period, whatever you want just by expanding the framework. Let me go back to the quarter level. I just want to see this quarter information. Always is this quarter. So let me filter this report. I'm going to drag and drop my invoice date to my filter area. Just drag and drop. And then I can choose different time buckets, but let me use relative date because then I can choose the quarter level. And now choose this quarter. And there it is, second quarter of 2015. Now the beauty is this is always this quarter. I don't need to refresh this report anymore. It's always this quarter. And sometimes the board asks me what about last quarter, this year, last year, whatever. I just have to come to this report here next time and choose previous quarter. And there you go. Previous quarter. Maybe I want to see the last Three quarters maybe I want to change to years, months, weeks, whatever. It's very easy. Next time when the board asks me, they throw me a curve ball. I think I can handle it now. Right there on the spot. Awesome. Okay, so there you go. Buy customer sales this quarter. Now what about product sales? Just drag and drop. Very easy, very intuitive. Many of our clients, they have learned how to build reports like this. Just watching a presentation like this, it can be that easy for some people. It's very intuitive. All right, buy customer by product, sales by quarter. What about if you want to see quantity shipped? Just drag and drop, Quantity sold. Drag and drop. And there you go, you get quantity sold and sales. What if you want to measure that is not available? And actually let me delete one measure here. What if I have a measure that would be called, let's say average price sold and I come here and I don't find it. Oh my gosh, what should I do? Should I call it to ask for a new measure average price sold. Should I export to Excel and build a calculation Excel and then every month go there and do it again and refresh and crunch? Maybe some mistakes. Yes, you can do both. But here, because this is a self service bi, hopefully I can tackle it and actually because I went through training, I can tackle it. I'm going to build a new measure. So I'm going to double click here and call sum of sales. Sum sales divided by sum of quantity sold. So I just do the measure from scratch. I press enter and then now it's calculating. There's more than. Let me just see if I did it right here. Oopsie. Sum of sales. Okay, this one I misspelled. Going to use sales. All right, that sounds good. There you go. Looks like I got it right. So now I have a new measure called this equation. Now the average price sold I'm going to be using all the time. So I actually want to add this measure to my list of measures. So next time I don't need to calculate it again. And I need to give a friend a name like average price sold. So I do that. And also right now it's just a number, an integer. I want to make this number actually to show dollar amount. So I just choose dollar amount. Click OK and let's put the measure at the bottom. And voila. I just added a new average price sold with dollar amount. And as part of my framework now any new report that I want to add this calculation is available and I don't need to worry. And I was able to do it. I didn't have to export Excel. I didn't have to call it. I did it. This is self service bi. It's really intuitive. Awesome. Okay, now they want to see invoice number, invoice date and salespeople and whatever just drag and drop. So if I want to see invoice number, I drag. Invoice number, just drag and drop. And then I got invoice number. This sales information, there are more than 2 million records behind it and still my reports run in seconds. When I put dates, you just drag and drop. You can pick the location in the header. I'm sorry, in the rows and the columns you just drag and drop and bam, you got the answer. That's self service bi. I can do it. And next time the board asks me what, when, how shipped the product and what is the ship to location, whatever it is on the fly, I can just drag and drop and I'm sure they'll be very impressed and I'll be very proud. All right, awesome. So the first report down, I made it. I'm so excited. In this automatic next month, next quarter it's ready. I don't need to ask my poor IT team to crunch numbers. I just opened and it was going to be showing me information for this quarter. Very good. Now marketing sales trends. So let's build marketing sales trends. So a new sheet. I want to see sales, you want to see sales by month. So let me drill to the different time bucket in this case by month. So I see my sales growing throughout the months. Now my IT has combined website visitors with my sales coming from Google Analytics. Now as a business person I drag and drop and this is my website visitors. Let me make bars so I can tell bars are website visitors and sales are line. And since I want to compare them side by side, why not put them on a dual axis and look how beautiful this is. Now I have website visitors as orange bars and sales as a line and I can see the trend. Awesome. In the past I had Excel spreadsheet. It was hard to see the numbers. Now with this chart is going to be so more informative. That was easy. Okay, so the one second one down, regional sales, regional sales. You know we had a spreadsheet showing sales by state and deal size and it was informative. But you know, it could be better. Many of my decision makers, they are more graphic oriented. So let me choose here customer state. This could be bill to ship to whatever has an address. We can map it. So customer state, I want to see deal size or Invoice size and sales amount. Now here we can put this information on a map so it's much more visual. Let's make the bubbles a little bigger. And usually we only use we only look at the United States continental, so United States continental area. So let's zoom into that area. And now we have bigger bubbles, bigger sales and bubbles are sliced by these colors which represent how much sales for large, medium and small invoices. Beautiful. So much more informative than Excel spreadsheet per se. We could also have the spreadsheet format tabular. But I think this is a great starting point for my next meeting. Now I want to add these three reports together on a dashboard input on my iPad. So how can I build a dashboard? Just drag and drop. When I add my map, I want to add my trend analysis. In my other detail report, I just drag and drop and then voila, I got the dashboard. As you can tell, I do not need to be an expert. Just by dragging and dropping and clicking, right clicking, I was able to build something fairly sophisticated and I did not have to ask it. I even created a new measure without calling for it. That means this is really self service PI. It can help decision makers to do things that typically only experts could. Now in my board meetings sometimes one of my board members asked me, hey, I'm traveling to these three states, can you tell me how they're doing? And boy, I would have to tell. Sure I would make a note and I'll send you a report later on. Now next time they send you this curveball, I can just come here and select, let's say Texas, this other state here and this other state here. When I choose those three states and I let it go, the whole report changes to reflect whatever I have in the other quadrants to show the KPIs and metrics for those three states. I'm sure they're going to be impressed and being happy that the investment in Data Self was really worth it because now we can make much more timely decisions with actual data. Awesome. So I was able to answer those three reports in a few minutes. Main customers with sales decline. Now some good news is we bought Data Self and it comes with more than 5,000 reports Dashboard KPIs and I know some of them will answer this question. So let me go to the portal that I have and this is a web portal where most people will be consuming data and let me put customer top customers and see what I get. Well, one of these reports, actually we have several of these reports in the production System. But one of these reports shows me top customer by sales change, biggest increase in sales and biggest decline. And that's what I was looking for. The biggest decline in sales on a year to date basis. I do have to build it. It's out of the box. Awesome. No problem. Also another report here shows customers with no sales in the last 30 days. No sales the last 60 days, one year and two years. Awesome. This is a great starting point for my discussion. I don't have to do a thing. I'm moving to my next item here. So this is done revenues and projection. This is a financial report. Well, financial report is an example that I have my quarterly revenues by different cost center and then I have more detailed information in this quarter like revenues, gross profit percentages and then for this month I have current bookings coming from GL system. I have open sales orders coming from the sales order module. And then I have expected new revenues from my pipeline which can be CRM system, excel, it doesn't matter. It's just data I combine with my financials and for decision making they're all together. I just plot as charts like I was doing before. So beautiful. I don't have to do this. It's all set. So all of these five reports I'm ready. It took me like 15 minutes. Self service bi. Now my last topic for my meeting is something I don't know yet. Why profitability isn't higher. Well, let's see if we find some trends so when I go to my next board meeting I'll have at least some answers. So let's start a new report. I want to see profitability but let me start with sales which I'm more comfortable with. So sales and typically we look at customer groups territories. So let me add those two pieces of information. So by customer group, by territory I have my sales. So far so good. There's no novelties but very visual. Now let me add gross profit percentage to my report as a color. So light color is very low profitability. Very green is high profitability. And now I see some trends regardless of the territory. My SH is very whitish, so low profitability. While the other territories are all very green, other customer groups are very green. So actually territory doesn't matter. So let me remove territory. I only care about customer group and as you can tell, SH is 9% while the other three are above 50%. So my problem is with SH customer group. How about that? I didn't know. So let's focus on that one. Just look at SH customer group which is 9%. I'm going to pivot it. And is this changing over time? What is going on? Let's check it out. I'm going to add invoice date to my report and I'm going to go to the month level and see what's going on. Now I'm seeing some trends here. Red is negative profitability and I can see that last year in November I lost money. I mean, how crazy is that? My gross revenue should be 50% above and I actually lost money. Not only that, but the prior year I also lost money around the same time. In the prior year it was pretty low. So definitely there's something going on at the end of the year where my profitability just crumbles. And what can it be? Well, let me take last year which was pretty significant and let me drill into all the details of sales. So right now I'm looking all the details, the sales detail information showing customer product invoice date, invoice number, salespeople, all the details. I have 36,000 records here for that particular month showing everything. And now I can email this information to my account manager for sh and ask this person what the heck is going on with profitability at the end of the year and hopefully by the time we go to our board meeting we have more answers. But boy, I'm so excited that just by using data self I was able to spot a trend that I didn't know in a few minutes. Not only that, maybe I want to see some, you know, some trend lines, you know, is it growing or not? I can see it's growing. Actually, let me just do a little differently here. Let me see if I go here back to the year level and then drill, I'm sorry, I want to see actually to the year level and drill this way this is going to be looking a little better. Okay. So every year I have a different segment and I see a trend line in every year. So I see the trend line going up, which is awesome. And then I also want to see some forecasts. Everything is kind of drag and drop. Now the forecast shows this green line, the most likely scenario for my sales based on the prior years in this gray band shows where my sales may fluctuate depending on my activity. So kind of, you know, easy. Anyhow, this tool is really self service bi. I mean it's not a magic wand. It's not going to make all your wishes come true. But it's pretty much as close as you can get. So let's wrap up the presentation here. So what are the main benefits. First of all, it's empowering decision makers with a tool where they can make more informed decisions anytime, anywhere. And that's thanks for first of all being a truly self service bi which is powered by nothing but the gold standard analytics available for Fortune 2000. So we bring it to companies who usage 300 products. So it's really much easier to use than most other tools. And we have more than 5,000 pre configured reports dashboard KPIs. So this really helps decision makers get the whole reporting analytics to a whole new level. Not only that, but if your company is spending many hours per week or per month or per year with reporting tasks, this tool most likely will cut by more than 80% the time it will take your team to get the information. We'll be automating a lot of the procedures. People get reports refreshed automatically and they'll be able to slice and dice anytime, anywhere. Alrighty, we have a few minutes for questions. If you have questions you can use the GoToWebinar panel and I'll be addressing the questions. So let me see questions here. First question from suzy is what Sage 300 versions we support. Suzy, thanks for your question. Let me actually show the answer in our website. So if you go to our website and you go to Solutions by ERP and CRM and then you choose Sage 300, then you're going to see here the product supported. Actually we start at version 4.0 all the way to the latest so we cover all of that. Suzy, thank you for your question. More questions, let's see. Question from Paul Will this webinar be available as a recording? Paul yes, absolutely. If you go to our website on resources webinars, you have first of all the list of upcoming webinars but then recorded webinars button you go to our recorded webinars and by tomorrow we should have a new entry here with recording for this webinar. Folks, we're running out of time, so if you have more questions, we have one more question here. I want to address one more from Bruce. All 5,000 reports work with Sage 300 ERP. Bruce yes, all 5,000 work with Sage 300 ERP. That was an easy answer. If you have more questions, if you want to learn more about our solution, how we compare with others, or if you want to learn more about analytics, we're here to educate you to see if ours or another BI solution is a right fit for you. Definitely we're not the right fit for everyone. So there's always consideration about your specific needs. I would love to talk with you about BI analytics data warehousing, how we fit into the game and how other players may be a benefit for you. Give me a call. These are my cell phone number. You have my email address as well as my Twitter account. I hope you found this session informative. Have a happy Thursday. Thank you for joining us and hope to talk with you the short term. Thank you.
