What is SAS ? : Business Analysts and System Analysts FAQ

SAS or Statistical Analysis System is provided by SAS institute, headquartered in North Carolina, USA. It’s an integrated system with software modules which are designed for business intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IT and financial Management and many more. The main purpose of SAS is to collate, manipulate and present data. Hence, it’s also widely popular as a data and statistical analysis tool. One of the major advantages of SAS is that it’s highly compatible in many computer environments, making it suitable to be used for different purposes all over the world.

SAS business solutions help the organizations in transforming enterprise data into strategic information which in turn will help in the increased performance of the enterprise. Its products range from Business Analytics, CRM, and Data Analysis to Performance and Risk management.

SAS can be used across industries and large to small, medium enterprises. Say for example, the use of SAS Enterprise solution in the Insurance world will ensure better forecast of business trends, provision of insurance data models which will ensure that the main enterprise systems are integrated. Also, SAS business solutions provide a business intelligence framework to ensure an end-to-end solution for data integration, manipulation and storage.

Some of the major solutions offered by SAS software are given as follows:

a) SAS Analytics - Analytics provides the basis for

· Data mining – the huge volumes of data is synonymous to each and every organization and to mine to find trends and setup data models is part of the solution provided

· Data categorization – Automatically categorize huge amounts of content based on set business rules

· Forecasting – Analyze the patterns and predict the trends

· Quality Improvement – monitor, implement and improve the business quality processes.

· Statistics – Use statistical models to arrive at strategic information.

b) SAS Business Intelligence - provides the organization the ability of analyzing and presenting the data. It has the unique integration with Microsoft Office tools so as to make it more user friendly in accessing, gathering and manipulating the data.

c) SAS CRM comprises of the various sub modules such as

· Customer experience analytics – data collection, analysis and presentation especially in graphical manner to understand the customer requirements better

· Marketing Analysis – impact of the marketing investments and the bottom lines can be investigated

· Resource management – includes the planning, budgeting and performance management of the marketing initiative

· Decision management – provides real time decisions based on the data collected on the various media.

d) SAS Performance Management provides a holistic view to the cost control initiatives, understanding the business drivers, identifying the business and process risks and how to manage them as a whole.

e) SAS Supply Chain Management provides valuable insight to a company’s customer management, demand forecasting models, supply networks to effectively achieve business objectives.

The solutions given above are only a subset of the business suite provided by SAS. Even though SAS is more widely known as the statistical analysis software, it can greatly enhance the workings of an organization from all modules, departments and systems and help in the progress towards its business and strategic objectives!

photo