How to Power Up with Real-Time Data (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Hashim: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar. And this is Hashim Alvi, speaking from Prophix Software Inc. in partnership with Encore Business Solutions. The purpose of this webinar here today is to talk about how to power up with real-time data.

And when we talk about that, we’re talking about leveraging tools to create a more dynamic financial presentation. You know, think about concepts such as being able to pull data into Excel for Office 365, being able to run complex simulations, and then pushing those results back into the Prophix CPM solution in order to leverage dynamic capabilities that we have to offer.

Before we get into the demonstration, let’s take a look at a quick agenda here as to what we’ll be discussing today. Firstly, we’ll start off with an introduction to Prophix. It is a web-based solution. So we’ll take a look at some of the key functionality and capabilities that Prophix has to offer you at a high level. We’ll then take a look at Prophix’s integration capabilities with various Office 365 components, such as Prophix for Excel, Prophix for PowerPoint, as well as being able to leverage automated report distribution directly from Prophix.

With that being said, let’s get right into the software. Here on screen, what you’re seeing is an example of a Prophix dashboard. In my case, because it’s a web-based interface, I’m accessing Prophix leveraging my organization’s unique URL. Once I access my instance of Prophix, I’m brought into a login page where I can leverage single sign-on.

So the same credentials you’re using to log into your laptops or desktops, those same credentials are gonna be passed through and log you directly into Prophix where all security applies as well.

Once I’m successfully authenticated, I’m brought here to a dashboard, which may look something similar to what I’m showing on screen. I have a variety of different charts and KPIs that I’m leveraging for my analytical needs. The great thing is that everything that you see here is blanketed by Prophix security.

So, no matter which user is logging into the system, each user’s being provisioned for information that they have access to see. In the case of each of my different departments, department heads may only be able to access their own information, again, dependent on the security that’s been set up.

As far as Prophix is concerned, this is where you have the capability of leveraging Prophix’s dynamic dashboards, the reporting aspects, the budgeting tools available to you, as well as forecasting and so on to really put together your dynamic presentations and leverage the software for an all-inclusive unified solution.

With these dashboards, you have the ability to dive in deeper, look at linked reports, see the underlying information on any specific report, and analyze your information even further. Prophix enables your users to leverage centralized calculation, removing the need for Excel cells or formulas within the solution, as well as enabling your users to leverage the dashboard for drilling in deeper capabilities.

There will be situations in which you wanna leverage your existing financial models within Excel and then integrate those with Prophix so that you can take your Excel information, upload it back into Prophix to be able to then generate these types of various charts, KPIs, as well as these financial reports that we see here.

So let’s take a look at an Excel file I have here on my desktop. Here, I have one example of a production capacity sheet. Now, as I open this up, you’ll see I have a variety of different tabs here in my Excel workbook. In my case, we’re looking at a production forecast by a variety of different product SKUs.

Of course, as far as your business is concerned, Prophix is quite agnostic as far as industry or planning or budgeting, so whether we’re talking about, you know, production items here or some sort of services organization or not-for-profit or really any sort of different situation you may have, you can leverage Prophix with its Office 365 integration as well.

So in my case here as you can see, I have a variety of different tabs. We’re currently looking at production lines and as well in addition to my production lines, which we’re looking at a SKU by SKU level, I’m tracking here my contracted production versus my capacity production, and then I’m also tracking the gap between the two.

So what’s the gap between what I’m contracted to complete versus my capacity? Do I have enough capacity for that contract or do I have a positive or unfavorable variance with each? Additionally, in addition to each of these production lines, we’re also looking at a detailed bill of materials here.

So in this case, for each of my various products or individual SKUs, we’re tracking the amount of raw materials needed for each of the products. In this case, we’re looking at about pounds, and then we also have the cost per raw material. Ultimately, that then gives us our total cost or in this case, our 100 sheet equivalent.

Now, coming back over to my production line, this is where you can see we have that aggregation occurring for each of these combinations, multiplying our bill of materials to arrive at the production. Ultimately, you’ll want to then be able to leverage this information and feed it back into Prophix.

So if we come over to our summary tab, this is where you’ll see that I’m leveraging what you’re seeing here as a Prophix data view. So this view that you see is coming directly from Prophix.

In my case, you can see in this row that I’m summing up all the various calculations that I have in my Excel model and then adding them back here into Prophix so that I can then push that information back into our solution so that you can leverage it for your dynamic financial presentations, reporting, charting, and so on.

And the way you leverage that Prophix for Excel add-in capability is simply by going here to our insert tab and going to my Prophix add-in. Now, with this Prophix add-in here, I have the ability to log right in, and again, as I mentioned, Prophix supports single sign-on. So the same credentials that I’m leveraging to log in to my laptop or desktop, those same credentials can be leveraged within Prophix as well.

This is where you then have the ability to take all your information that’s been aggregated using your Excel model, as you can see here, thanks to my formula, and then push this information back into Prophix to look at your updated reports. All right. And in order to do that, this is where we leverage our integration capability here. So, I’m gonna go ahead and push that information back into Prophix.

And it’s important to note here that everything that we’re doing as far as the Office 365 integration is concerned can all be done within Prophix. You don’t need to build up these models outside of the system. It’s simply more of a preference’s sake being able to leverage Excel or PowerPoint from that Office 365 integration standpoint.

However, all these various models that you’re seeing that we’ve built out over here in Excel can be built directly into the Prophix system. At this point, you can see we were able to push that information successfully back into Prophix.

So let’s go back into the system here and take a look at a report. So, coming back here to Prophix…let’s come back over to our dashboard, and under here, you can see under my tasks I have this revenue planning task. So let’s go ahead and open up that specific task.

And here you can see my information has now come across those same values that we saw in that Excel file have been pushed back into Prophix, giving us an updated view of our revenue planning, wherein my case, I am tracking it by various product types as well as being able to track it by different customers here as you can see. So if we were to filter to a different customer, we’ll see updated information regarding the specific customer we’re looking at.

And it’s important to keep in mind that this is where Prophix security plays a role in ensuring that users are only accessing the information that they’ve been given access to. So in this case, I’m logged in as an administrator with full access to all my various products, all my different types of customers, enabling me to easily focus on the information that’s been specifically assigned to me.

And this is where you can leverage Prophix to go a step further. Now that your information that you need is within Prophix, you can leverage Prophix to carry out detailed scenario analysis, you know, do further analysis on your information until you’re satisfied with the overall results. For instance, let’s say now that we have our revenue planning done, we now wanna carry out a couple of different scenario analysis.

Here, I can come to my revenue scenario analysis, and in this case, what you’re seeing is Prophix’s ability to leverage a scenario like view where we can leverage the system to take our budget, populate a variety of different scenarios, and from that standpoint, you can see that it’s a section at the top there where we can make a couple of adjustments and then leverage Prophix to kind of see the impact on those various adjustments as well within the system.

And this is where we get into the conversation around Prophix as AI capabilities. In Prophix, you have the ability to leverage what we refer to as our tasks assistant, where the task assistant can create those scenarios for you on the fly, leveraging our various assistant right here in the top right corner. For instance, clicking on this, you can see a Prophix assistant will pop up much like you’re used to seeing today in Excel. Oh, sorry, not Excel.

We’re talking about Siri, Google Home, Alexa. Those types of assistants are now transcending into the world of business. So, as far as AI is concerned, Prophix is here today with our AI capabilities so that you can leverage these assistants directly within your financial tool and be able to carry out analyses such as, you know, asking Prophix to populate a forecast for you, asking Prophix to create a scenario, so on and so forth. And once that’s done, it helps saves you time and effort and being able to leverage Prophix’s scenario capabilities.

So let’s take a look at what that would look like here. Coming back here, I can ask Prophix, run create scenarios. That’s where you can see Prophix is then taking our scenarios and then creating a scenario for us. So once we refresh this report, you can see our scenario has been populated. You can see now my budget and my scenario are matching to give us an identical starting point. And at this point, I can apply assumptions in order to calculate a scenario analysis.

So, if for my revenue I wanted to see the impact of a 5% bump for scenario A and a 7% increase for scenario B, I can also come up with some implications as far as my costs are concerned. For direct labor, let’s say we’re looking into a 10% increase and an 8% increase as far as scenario B is concerned, and maybe we’ll be saving some money as far as our materials are concerned.

So, we’ll decrease our direct materials in both cases by a couple of percentage points. And you can see how quickly we can come up with these scenario assumptions and then be able to refresh our report here and see the implications throughout the entire system.

These implications carry out throughout the entire Prophix solution because Prophix provides you with a unified solution as far as your financial information, your revenue, your expenses, even your operational information. All of these can be directly linked together so that you’re not having to worry about, you know, linking cells, linking formulas. Prophix is taking care of all of that for you to the power of centralized calculations and formulas within the system.

And to kind of showcase that further, at this point with this report, we can take it a step further and look at a linked report where we now have more of a higher-level overview of our revenue scenario analysis. So at this point, I’m looking at a high-level view of all my P&L information, my balance sheet information, as well as my detailed cash flow information. Again, we’re comparing both scenarios A and B and able to easily see the implications across the board.

And on the flip side of things, you saw how we went from a revenue scenario analysis view to more of a high-level view of our financial situation. At this point, we can also go into a very granular view.

If I wanted at this point, I can look at a more detailed view of my P&L information, see a more detailed breakdown, as you can see here with my income statement, on a line by line basis. So here you can see all the implications of all the assumptions that we made and what the impact was on our bottom line.

So in the case of scenario A, it would result in this unfavorable variance, whereas in scenario B, we have this large favorable variance. This is a power available to you leveraging Prophix as unified solution and being able to leverage even the Office 365 integration component by making those adjustments within our Excel workbook. Here, we were able to update our production lines, update our bill of materials. Have that feed directly into Prophix.

And from that standpoint, once that information was available to us here within the system, we were then able to look at our detailed revenue plan, and ultimately, this revenue plan then fed into our analysis. All of this can be handled very easily and efficiently within the system, enabling you to carry out a variety of different scenario analyses and then be able to leverage Prophix’s report distribution to then send this out to the corresponding users.

In addition to being able to leverage Prophix for report distribution and pushing data from Excel into Prophix, you can also pull data from Prophix into Excel. So let’s actually take a look at what that would look like in this environment. So what we’re gonna do is come out of here out of Prophix and come back over to Excel workbook.

So let’s say we added a new sheet here, and I now have a blank sheet that I’m leveraging for my purposes. So at this point, what I can do is I can leverage Prophix to pull data directly from the system into this blank sheet. So, as you can see here, I have my folders, which I can leverage for pulling information. So what I’m gonna do is go into my financial information. And let’s say that I wanna pull in a view for my P&L on a monthly level.

So here I’m gonna specify where I would like this information to be pulled in, and I’m simply clicking the insert button. What you’ll see is that Prophix will populate my blank Excel sheet with information directly coming out of the system with all my various accounts being displayed neatly in the rows for me. My time period’s going across the top.

And now you can see very easily I now have essentially a monthly P&L available to me for the current year that I can leverage within Excel. If there’s any further adjustments or calculations you’d like to use in Excel such as we did with our production lines or with our bill of materials, you can apply those here within Excel.

And then similarly, you can then push this information back into Prophix to then leverage those formalized reports that you can distribute out of the system. And it’s important to remember that we’ve been talking about Prophix here being available for Office 365 as well as being able to leverage Prophix in Excel 2016 as well as 2019.

At this point, we’ll go ahead and close this production capacity report of ours, and in addition to Excel, this is where we have the concept around, not only being able to do Office 365 for Excel, but also being able to leverage Prophix as integration capabilities with PowerPoint.

So, if for instance, I had this Prophix for PowerPoint presentation. Here you can see I have a simple PowerPoint presentation. Here I have my cover page. Inevitably, when it comes down to doing presentations for your board or any sort of annual meeting or a quarterly meeting when you’re doing any sort of analysis, inevitably someone will ask a question about a specific financial number you’re displaying on screen.

This is where you can leverage Prophix for PowerPoint capability. Let’s say we were to add a new slide here in this presentation, and this is where you can add a live instance of Prophix directly into your PowerPoint presentation.

So coming here again to our insert tab, I can leverage my Prophix add-in, and you’ll see that it will generate an add-in where it’s essentially the same login screen that we saw earlier. I can make this my entire slide here for you, and then we can log, again, same credentials directly into Prophix right from within our PowerPoint presentation.

And once we’re logged in, what you’ll see here is we’re brought here to our Prophix dashboard. Again, this is the same dashboard that we saw a moment ago using our web interface, and I’m accessing it directly within my PowerPoint presentation.

And as far as this PowerPoint presentation is concerned, the same sort of capabilities that we saw on the web interface can be leveraged within our PowerPoint capabilities. So, for instance, if I wanted to see the underlying information for a marketing department, I can still click in, see the underlying information here, still access all my various favorited files, reports, and leverage the linked template capabilities as well.

So, again, it’s important to remember that what this enables you to do is when you’re carrying out a presentation, you can do that directly within Prophix without or directly within your PowerPoint presentation without ever having to leave the PowerPoint and being able to address the questions that come up.

So, for instance here, if we’re looking at this full-screen presentation mode of PowerPoint, I can take this view here, and I can access a linked report. That linked report will be the same one that we saw on the web version of Prophix. So here you can see that same information.

So if anyone were to ask you what’s the underlying information behind my marketing department? This is where you now have a dynamic and interactive dashboard directly within your presentation that you can leverage to dive into a deeper report.

And I can now see my underlying information for my marketing department, see all the various underlying costs, again, being able to filter to different sub-departments, such as product marketing here.

And as we do that, you’ll notice, again, the numbers will update to reflect my selection, and you’re able to then analyze and drill down even further to identify specific variances and identify the source of those variances. And all of this is being run directly within the PowerPoint presentation.

And to take this another step further, imagine we now looked at our travel cost. And again, during that presentation, you’re being asked to identify what’s the source of that variance. In Prophix, you have the ability to leverage our concept of drilling across to your source transactions.

So directly from my PowerPoint presentation here, I can drill across to my source transactions. And this view that you see here is entirely configurable by you as far as the various fields that we would bring into Prophix.

So whichever fields from your ERP system regarding your transactions are most important, those are the ones that you’ll see come across in the system. In my case, I have account, department, month, value, and so on. And all these values will be available to the users who have the correct security access.

And if there’s any invoices as well being stored within your system, you can access them directly within this view. Again, recall that this was all being done through that presentation, enabling you to carry out a very dynamic presentation and ensuring that you’re able to address any questions that may be asked.

At this point, let’s close this presentation, and let’s go back into Prophix and take a little look further as to how you can leverage a system to carry out your analysis. Now, coming back into Prophix, as you recall, this dashboard is the landing page for all your various users.

They can leverage these dashboards the first thing they see when they log in, And because Prophix is directly integrated with your ERP system, all the information on your dashboard will dynamically update to reflect the latest and greatest information available for analysis.

At this point, I can go directly from this chart that we saw here into a linked report, and with these linked reports here, you can take this a step further from an analysis standpoint.

At any point, I can download this report out to Excel or PDF and enable my users to view it in an external downloaded format with all the various formatting you see here still intact, or you can leverage Prophix to analyze on your information even further. In doing so, what you’re gonna see here is we now have what we refer to as a ad-hoc view where we’ve stripped away all the formatting, all the charting that you saw in that previous report, leaving us with the underlying data.

So I still have the same rows, the same columns, and the same information here. With this view, I can now think of it as a pivot table. But really on steroids, you know, there’s a lot of ways in which you can slice and dice this information to analyze your company’s performance.

I can expand on my marketing costs here and see the underlying accounts down to the GL level. Let’s say I wanna focus on just my actuals. I can simply drag and drop my time period on top of my actuals, and you’ll notice that the two will now pivot in place. So I’m now looking at a monthly breakdown for my current year for each of my different marketing costs.

I could then take it a step further. If you’re looking at this from a multi-entity standpoint, I could take my total entities, drag and drop that on top of my total cost, and be able to expand and see all the underlying information if you have any for different entities, similarly for department. I could take my department and drag and drop that.

So I’m now seeing my marketing departments all broken out for my total marketing costs as well. And this is where we can easily filter between our actuals or budgets or any sort of variances that you may have as well directly within the system. So let’s say we wanna look at this at a total entities level, and we wanna focus on our budget information. So if there is any budget information, you’ll be able to access that directly within the system as well.

Ultimately, when it comes to your various ad-hoc views here, you then have the capability of being able to save them and leverage them for the future. So, if at any point any user wants to be able to view this information at a later point in time, you can simply file save as and save this in a public folder so it’s accessible by other users or also save it into Excel so that you, again, have that downloaded format.

And then if you do have any Excel models that you wanna link back to Prophix, you have that capability to do so and then be able to push that information back into the system. This is where Prophix provides you with an immense amount of flexibility as far as how you’re leveraging that information within the system.

And when you look at a view such as the one we’re looking at here, you’re essentially 90% of the way there towards generating a report within Prophix. In this case, we’ve already specified what’s gonna be displayed in our rows, what’s gonna be displayed in our columns. And really the last part at that point is just specify the formatting. So, at any point, your users can take this view here, be able to apply formatting and then distribute that out of the system.

At this point, what we’ll do is we’ll discuss the idea around then being able to distribute reports out of Prophix, leveraging our automated report distribution system. So coming back over here to our dashboard, this is where we get into the conversation around Prophix’s report package distribution process.

As far as Prophix reporting distribution is concerned, users have the ability to set up reporting packages and specify all the various files that they would like distributed out of Prophix, as well as specifying the distribution list. And all of this can be part of a workflow that you’ve set up within the system.

So think about the process today and what that may look like within a Spreadsheet environment where, you know, you have multiple different Excel files, you may have multiple different workbooks that you have to then split out based on security access. So having to split out and parse out files based on security access can be a cumbersome process for many customers and many companies across the board. And this is where Prophix enables you to automate that process.

When it comes to a reporting workflow, we can take a look at how Prophix can help automate that process for you. So here in my favorites, I have my reporting workflow. Viewing this from a flow diagram standpoint, this is where Prophix can automate this entire process and streamline it in a nice and easy to follow manner.

So what we’re seeing here is from start to end, I have my month-end closed process, and this is where Prophix can automate the process, send automated emails out to anyone who’s been assigned a task, whether it’s for journal entries, any sort of worksheets or reconciliation. You can see we can go through multiple levels of validation as well through the system.

And what’s great is that Prophix will send an automated email to anyone who’s been assigned the task, and within that task, they will receive a direct URL link that will take them back into Prophix to that specific task that’s been assigned to them.

And you can see here that the last step we’re ending off is with our report package distribution. So this is where once you’ve gone through your entire month and close or even your budgeting process, Prophix will then automatically kick off a reporting package that you’ve specified and distribute that to the distribution list that you’ve also identified.

It’s important to note that this report package distribution doesn’t have to be just available via schedule. You can also leverage it on demand at any point, especially when it comes around month-end time and you need to send out reports multiple times in a week or in a day. You can easily send them on demand through Prophix.

Let’s take a look at how you would leverage Prophix as report binder capabilities. Again, within my favorites here, I have my revenue reporting binder, and within this binder, you can see that I’m leveraging a variety of different Prophix reports that I’ve included that I wanna distribute as well as some external reports.

So, in this case, I have a couple of different Word files that I wanna send out as part of my reporting package, and thanks to Prophix’s capabilities. I can include them in my reporting package and then send this out as either PDF, Excel, Word, even PowerPoint presentation where Prophix we’ll take these reporting packages and add it to a PowerPoint presentation.

And once we’ve specified all the files that we’d like to distribute, really, the last step here is specifying who’s the distribution list that we’d like to send this to. So here, I can add in more users. So let’s say we’re adding Nick Fury and a couple other users here.

So not only can I send this to individual users, but I can also send this to a group. So in my case, you can see I’ve added the executives group, where if you do have multiple people with the same level of security clearance, Prophix enables you to group them into a user group so that you can easily distribute reports based on user groups, such as different departments or different divisions or regions, anything of that nature.

The last thing we’ll take a look at here as part of our webinar today is the discussion around what the final product would look like coming out of Prophix. So once you’ve specified your reporting package, and you’ve specified whom the end-users or the stakeholders will be that will be receiving this reporting package, the last bit of information is what does that final product look like in Prophix.

So coming back to our dashboard in my favorites here, I have an example of a financial reporting package. So if we were to open that up. Here I can open this financial reporting package for you, and what we’re gonna see here with this reporting package is all the same reports that we’ve kind of seen within Prophix today.

Here, you can see I have my cover page, some Word text that I may have included as well as part of my document. And as we scroll a little further here, we’ll see that here we have a couple of different Prophix reports. Now, all the formatting that you saw a moment ago within Prophix, you can see that they’ve carried across into the system as well. So in my case here, I’m looking at my integrated financial statements. I have my balance sheet view, my cash flow view, as well as a P&L view.

So it’s a great way where you can leverage Prophix to get a snapshot of all the various aspects of your business, and then as we saw, you can drill in deeper and see a more detailed view of all these various aspects, whether we’re talking about expenses, whether we’re talking about revenues or operations or even capital expenditure or personnel planning. Prophix can be leveraged for all your various needs.

And as I scroll through this reporting package here, you’ll notice I have a variety of different reports. And one of the most important ones that you’ll notice is this monthly variance income statement. Now, with this variance income statement, you’ll notice that I have a couple of different performance reporting comments here. So this is the whole concept of being able to add row notes to an entire row of information or data. In this case, you can see I have variety of different comments left here by my users. And these comments are dynamic in nature and that they’re tied to that data point.

So, they’re not static on a workbook that you may be familiar with seeing today. Instead, anywhere this piece of data travels, you’ll be able to leverage this specific comment tied to that data. That’s just one of the many ways in which Prophix provides you with a dynamic reporting capability and adding to the overall experience of being able to leverage Prophix to create a dynamic financial presentation. And with that, we’ll close our reporting package, and that brings us to the end of our discussion today. Thank you for listening.

Tess: Awesome. Thank you. We don’t have any questions that have come in.

Hashim: Okay.

Tess: But they can reach out to us or to you if they have any questions, and we’ll be sending out and sharing out the recording.

Hashim: Perfect. It sounds good.

Tess: Okay. Thank you. Have a good day.

Hashim: Thank you. Take care. Bye.

Tess: Bye.