Reducing Data Management Costs with Analogyx BI
Today we’re going to look at how we can use analytics to reduce data management costs. These are often hidden costs that eat away at your budgets and bottom line. Hidden costs, even in sharing information such as scanning it, emailing it, setting up report routing, etc. And a lot of the time that information’s outdated by the time the person even sees it.
An integration software or bridge software could easily cost thousands of dollars to build just to pull all these data sources together. Plus, how well do they hold up when you start hitting upgrades or patches in Epicor?
Let’s jump out to Analogyx so I can start to show you some examples of cost savings.
First of all you notice it's a website which means that it's cloud-based, so you're always in the latest version with no need for patches or upgrades. No need for additional hardware, software, or refreshes every three years. And it doesn't matter which version of Epicor you're on either. Actually, it doesn't care which version you’re running of anything.
Here, we have our basic layout. On the left, you'll see this navigation tree here with our dashboards. This is only going to be seen by admins and power users as they're given permission to see it. Your viewers not see this, but this is where basic administration is done: user security, if you want to manage charts, maybe create some new ones, manage your data sources, etc. Another thing we’ll show you as well is how you can schedule emails to be sent automatically.
So this is the viewers’ world. It is highly customizable based on user level permissions. We can have a user who sees everything or just finance or just sales or even just one dashboard. Each of these tabs we've named in a way that’s familiar to Epicor users, but you can actually name whatever we want. (We could name it Billy Bob if we wanted to.)
As we move through the dashboards in the video, you'll see we have sales, orders, quotation. Everything you're seeing here today — every dashboard, every chart, every example we’re doing — this is all out of the box. There's no additional modules to buy or content packs to buy.
Refinancing, AR, AP, we have series of cash management, CRM, production, supply chain, warehouse management, etc. So we cover every module in Epicor, and then also added things like an executive area.
These are dashboards that streamline information executives may want to access quickly and easily. One example we have here is Opportunities. This gives us insight into what our quotes are such as what amount by customer. We can even create stage funnels based on how your company defines them. So that's just a very quick look at a little bit that our Opportunities dashboard has to offer.
Another crowd favorite is Income and Expense. Now we already have financial reporting built in, so this is one of our financial reporting tools. We have speedometer type readings for all of our revenue or cogs, expenses (whatever you may want to see) up here, and our monthly net profit.
Over here we have a waterfall type dashboard showing us our net income by sales, from service, and then our our negatives tend to take us back down so we end up at our net.
To the right, we have our GL Account Balance. We can actually blow these out so just with a click of a button, we can now see each one of our GL accounts and what our current GL amount is for each account. We even have search capabilities built in, so you don't have to filter through everything.
One thing to mention real quick is how Analogyx was actually created. In Epicor, when you want to create a new report or dashboard, you start with the BAQ, then you have to go link the tables together, then decide what fields you want, and then create calculated fields. That whole process is really time consuming, so in Analogyx, we use what’s called a data set. We’ve pre-built connectors in Epicor and pre-built data sets that automatically pull together data for the most commonly used things, such as sales order, AR invoicing, customer shipments… Data that's typically used together.
These data sets are in the background, driving all these charts and dashboards. And since we've already predefined these, there's no more questions of “Where'd that data come from?” or “Are you pulling from the right spreadsheet?”
And finally, if you want to share information from here, we’ll quickly demonstrate how an admin or power user can create a schedule.
So let’s say I want to share a dashboard. (We already have a couple in here, but we’ll edit one of our records to show you.)
First, we go in and pick the dashboard we want to share, then make it active. (Do we want to share weekly, monthly, daily? What time?) Next, we put in our recipients; we can use the email groups if we want to. We can even select if we want it as an attachment on the body of the email.
Then we save it, and now our recipients are receiving dashboards or charts — whatever we want to send them — with the information they have permission to see. And better yet, they don't have to be Analogyx users. You can send dashboards to anybody, even suppliers about shipment statuses.
The goal of Analogyx is really to simplify all your data management, pull it all into one place, and get rid of all those hidden costs that eat away your budget. There's no extra integration software required. If you have multiple data sources, we just schedule it, pull it in the into Analogyx, make it part of a data set, and there it is. It’s all about making people and companies more efficient.
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To learn more about Analogyx BI and the myriad of ways it can help your company reduce data management costs, check out our ABI Role Call Series below or sign up for a Free Demo and 7 Day Free Trial here.
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