Alliances, Partnerships, and Acquisitions

Alliances, Partnerships, and Acquisitions

Modern BI suites should be able to access and present key business measures for sales, customer service, the supply chain, financials, purchasing, inventory, and many other areas. It should then allow this information to be used as the basis for comparisons, calculations, ratios, and metrics. Users should be able to dynamically combine business measures to derive key performance indicators (KPI), such as product profitability, margin analysis, book-to-bill ratios, return on investment (ROI), and other vital metrics. Typical data that manufacturing enterprises should know about, on a daily basis, include inventory situation, rejected items, throughput, booked sales, order status, on-time shipments, warranty levels, etc. In each of these categories, users may want to get behind the numbers and the trends to discern the root causes or find out what items, regions, channel partners, or customers are involved.

Striving to meet this need, SAS has recently enhanced its demand management module , High Performance Forecasting. High Performance Forecasting is aimed at consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, and allows users to crunch millions of predictions over hundreds of different stores, locations, or products in short timeframes. The tool is designed for companies with a large number of product stock-keeping units (SKU), which creates a vast number of potential combinations for a forecast. The tool not only looks at historical sales data, but it can also factor in seasonality, holidays, and promotions. The key difference between High-Performance Forecasting and traditional forecasting products is its ability to automate forecasts by embedding so-called "smart defaults" within the data in order to determine the best forecasting model and to pick different forecasts for different models. Up until now, a good forecasting required a savvy analyst to handcraft a forecast, but no human can possibly build a sound forecast for thousands of items.

So far, SAS has a notable track record with its customer profitability projects. Examples of such projects include Auna Group in Spain, Vodacom in South Africa, and One in Austria, whereas SAS Telecommunications Intelligence Solutions are used by many of the world's leading carriers to drive their broader BI efforts. Customers range from Hutchinson 3G in Austria to MTS in Russia and Omnitel in Lithuania. In addition to helping identify customer, product, channel, and tariff profitability, the enhanced SAS Telecommunications Intelligence Solution also includes the following capabilities:

* Customizable telecommunications-specific analytic and reporting components for customer retention, payment risk, cross-sell and up-sell analysis, customer behavior and segmentation to speed implementation and increase ROI.

* Flexible and scalable telecommunications-specific data architecture that supports modular and more rapid implementations for both mobile and fixed line systems.

* Enterprise wide business scorecard with telecommunications-specific KPI that enable a more strategic single view of the enterprise.

In addition to enhancements to products, SAS has also created a strategic alliance with Amdocs, partnered with Aprimo, and acquired Marketmax.