Beyond Business Intelligence with SAS 9

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1 Enterprise Intelligence Supplier Intelligence Organizational Intelligence Customer Intelligence Intelligence Platform Beyond Business Intelligence with SAS 9 Enabling breakthrough decisions that transform the way you do business

2 There is no other suite of products in the market that has the breadth of capability that SAS 9 can provide with the level of integration that underpins it. Put that together with the scalability and other features that the platform provides and we concur...sas has produced an enterprise-class business intelligence platform. Philip Howard, Bloor Research, May 2004 Keyspan fuels business intelligence with SAS 9 Keyspan Energy supplies natural gas and electricity to some of the most densely populated regions of the United States and demands for energy are constantly growing. Whether adding new transmission lines or constructing new plants, the Transmission and Distribution Project Management department counts on SAS to provide the business intelligence that managers and executives need to meet corporate goals. Offering daily reports to hundreds of users, including capital cost summaries for every project, Principal Engineer Mike Barra supplies business intelligence customized for each user in a variety of formats and delivery methods. I support a broad variety of data analysis activities, going across all the platforms and delivery methods, says Barra. Everyone from the vice president of our business unit down to the individual department managers can count on these reports to make fact-based decisions. With SAS, Barra says he can get data from any place in the organization. I don t care if it s in a flat file, a mainframe database, an Access table or somebody s Excel spreadsheet; if it s out there I can go get it. SAS gives me the ability to process all these different types of data without having to learn the rules for all those different systems. That s a tremendous time saver. Most importantly, Barra says SAS 9 provides a complete system for him to easily accomplish any business intelligence request that is thrown his way. Using SAS, I can access data, process the data for business intelligence and target the output exactly how the user wants to see it. SAS allows a single user like me to do things that would normally take an intense IT effort.

3 Going beyond business intelligence with SAS 9 Harsh economic and regulatory realities have caused many organizations to turn toward business intelligence (BI) applications in hopes of extracting greater insights from all of the data generated by operational and transactional systems. Unfortunately, even after acquiring conventional BI systems, true competitive differentiation often remains elusive. Much of the software labeled by vendors as business intelligence is actually just query and reporting tools with a thin veneer of so-called analytics that make use of simple and limited algorithms. While these systems may help companies understand where they ve been, they cannot point the way to better future directions. Simply put, you can t drive a business forward by looking in a rearview mirror. A solution that delivers foresight and true intelligence is required. SAS 9 goes beyond other vendors narrow definition of business intelligence. It offers integrated metadata and data management and predictive analytic capabilities that can tell an organization not just where it has been, but where it should go next. It delivers the foresight and understanding that is required to outperform the pack and achieve competitive advantage. SAS 9 expands the definition of business intelligence, enabling enterprises to break through to a higher level of understanding, beyond the hindsights offered by traditional BI tools. SAS 9 is the only BI software that delivers these advantages: A single technology platform that builds on an organization s existing investments to deliver high-quality information to every desktop or departmental server, adding value every step of the way and providing a single version of the truth. Expanded access to legendary SAS analytics across the enterprise, for understanding an organization s business past, monitoring and communicating the present, and reliably predicting the future. Targeted user interfaces that are fit to task, designed and tailored to the varying skill levels and usage patterns of information consumers, domain experts, executives and technologists. An ever-increasing range of SAS solutions built on the SAS 9 Intelligence Platform. SAS 9 takes an organization s intelligence operations to a new level, placing intelligence into the hands of the broadest possible user population throughout an organization more efficiently and at a lower cost than ever before. Foresight Foresight

4 Is your organization prepared to go beyond BI? All companies use information to set strategies and accomplish business objectives. But how many CEOs and CIOs would say they are satisfied that their companies are leveraging information optimally to drive business value? How many have a systematic plan for evolving their organizations information usage to the next level? Level 1 Operate. Companies operating at this level of information evolution emphasize day-to-day operations. Going beyond BI is more than just buying a set of tools. It depends on the enterprisewide IT context how information is gathered, managed, used and shared. SAS has developed an Information Evolution Model to help organizations assess how information is being used to drive the business forward. Level 3 Integrate. Organizations at this level have established an integrated information environment. Access to information is widespread, and processes are repeatable. The model outlines five levels of business intelligence evolution based on how information is managed and used as a corporate asset. It enables organizations to objectively evaluate use of information and lay out a roadmap for improvements that optimize business returns. Level 4 Optimize. At Level 4, an organization focuses on process optimization and extension, and improved understanding and alignment with customers, partners and suppliers. No matter where your organization is on the continuum, SAS 9 can adapt to your situation and drive evolution to the next level, while leveraging and extending the value of existing IT investments. That s because SAS 9 was developed to support an end-toend framework for creating and sharing enterprise intelligence, which we call the SAS Intelligence Value Chain. No doubt your organization already has many elements of an intelligence value chain in place: data captured from business processes, storage and manipulation capabilities, and various query and reporting tools, perhaps from multiple vendors. With SAS 9, you can optimize and extend the value of these existing systems while setting the stage for new levels of business intelligence not previously possible. Level 5 Innovate. These organizations reach the pinnacle of focus, alignment and agility by expanding knowledge to create new products and markets. It is at this level that sustainable competitive advantage is most possible. SAS 9 offers an integrated Intelligence Platform that lets you focus on the weakest link of your intelligence value chain and make additional improvements over time all while integrating with your existing IT infrastructure and processes. Level 2 Consolidate. Level 2 organizations focus on data and information at the departmental level. Departmental needs and goals take precedence over larger company strategy. Evolve Word Negotiation Evolve Word Negotiation

5 A closer look at the SAS 9 Intelligence Platform SAS 9 ushers in a wave of new technologies and solutions that expand access to SAS world-class analytics, data management and reporting capabilities. SAS Enterprise ETL Server SAS Enterprise ETL Server provides the industry s most powerful, highperformance data integration platform, helping to reduce the cost of enterprise ETL and deliver a single version of the truth. It efficiently synthesizes corporate data from disparate sources in a timely, cost-effective manner and manages metadata for the entire enterprise. It offers platform-independent extraction, transformation and loading using a range of data access engines, a multithreaded transformation engine, integrated metadata management and a graphical interface. The benefits touch all facets of your ETL strategy. With SAS Enterprise ETL Server, data managers can: Develop ETL processes faster at lower cost with an interactive ETL development environment, easy-touse metadata management tools, full support for SQL capabilities, a wide range of predefined transformations and out-of-the-box access engines to industry-leading RDBMS and ERP systems. Reduce cost of ownership by taking advantage of standard and customized data cleansing capabilities that resolve quality and consistency problems and reduce the ongoing costs of data stewardship. Ensure robust data delivery in multivendor environments with a single-platform approach and powerful transformation language. Extract, transform and load processes can take place on the platform where the data resides, in native format, thereby reducing network traffic, data duplication and hardware requirements. SAS Intelligence Storage Tightly integrated with SAS Enterprise ETL Server is SAS Intelligence Storage, a dedicated platform designed from the outset to efficiently disseminate information for business intelligence and analytic intelligence applications from SAS or third parties. SAS 9 Intelligence Storage offers relational, OLAP and parallel storage options to suit all types of application profiles everything from simple reporting and OLAP dissemination to advanced forecasting and data mining. This open, flexible platform with a variety of storage options ensures optimal performance of BI and analytic applications while keeping the costs of ownership and maintenance under control. SAS Intelligence Storage minimizes overhead and maximizes I/O performance by using fixed record lengths, advanced indexing and large block sizes. Together with multithreading and physical partitioning, SAS 9 Intelligence Storage typically improves loading and query performance by an order of magnitude, compared to orthodox RDBMS configurations. Response times start fast and stay fast, even as data volumes increase. SAS Enterprise BI Server SAS Enterprise BI Server empowers users by giving them access to information in the format they need, when they need it. Appropriate interfaces are provided for various user skill levels and needs, enabling users to generate their own answers while IT retains control over the quality and consistency of the data. Fully integrated with SAS Enterprise ETL Server, SAS Enterprise BI Server can incorporate all data required for analysis, regardless of data source or format. This integration ensures that data used in analysis is complete, sequenced and properly cleansed without excessive proliferation of metadata, a common problem in legacy business intelligence architectures. SAS 9 clients can transparently reuse SAS analytical procedures without the users needing advanced statistical skills or support from IT. Analysts and business managers can seamlessly integrate analyses of the past into accurate models and forecasts of the future. New query and reporting tools deliver the highest quality of information when and where it is needed to improve decision making for all employees. Reports can be saved,

6 About SAS shared, published and distributed via multiple platforms and channels, including the Web, customized business portals, and wireless devices for better collaboration and shared intelligence. When the whole user community has access to company-standard analytical routines and reporting templates, you can be sure of consistent, trustworthy results and greater cooperation among disparate teams, leading to greater success and sustainable results. Building on the SAS 9 Intelligence Platform with SAS 9 Solutions On top of the SAS 9 Intelligence Platform, SAS 9 offers an everexpanding range of solutions tailored to information and reporting demands across the enterprise (performance management, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, human capital management, supply chain intelligence and more) and across industries (financial services, pharmaceuticals, health care, retail, telecommunications, automotive, energy and more). SAS Analytic Intelligence SAS Analytic Intelligence is what sets SAS apart from other BI vendors. It provides the industry s widest portfolio of analytic algorithms, mathematical data manipulations and modeling capabilities, which can be applied to many different business problems. This enables you to choose a targeted capability rather than compromising by force fitting lesser, poorly coordinated tools. Best-in-class modeling capabilities support a variety of sophisticated analysis scenarios that go far beyond the basic sorting, filtering and ranking that some vendors call analytics. SAS takes the mystery out of these high-end statistical techniques by coupling them with a wide range of user interfaces and graphics. Nontechnical users, analysts and statisticians all have analysis workspaces that are appropriate to their roles, making it easier for them to interact with data, model business scenarios and send the output to hundreds of different devices. Furthermore, the Intelligence Platform can be extended and customized as you wish to reflect unique business requirements and domain knowledge. Unlike black-box systems, SAS 9 is a versatile intelligence-creation platform that offers a wealth of prebuilt capabilities yet invites you to build on that foundation in ways that optimize ROI for your organization. And of course, SAS consultants stand ready to leverage SAS 9 technology to take you beyond BI faster applying their experience, methodologies, best practices and industry-focused models. SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500 to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. Whatever your existing infrastructure and whatever your destination, SAS can craft a unified solution to take your organization beyond business intelligence so you can achieve sustainable profitability. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know. Let us show you how. To find out more, contact your local SAS representative or visit us on the Web at SAS technology excels in complex business scenarios areas that other BI vendors fear to tread. Butler Group, Integrated Business Intelligence: Delivering Intelligence Across the Enterprise

7 Scandinavian insurer leverages SAS 9 for enhanced data management and faster, better decision making Jørgen Falkesgaard Project manager, IT Competence Department People soon discovered that the changes we made brought them benefits in their work though improved analysis and reporting. The Codan Group is one of Scandinavia s most successful insurance companies with annual revenues of approximately 19.3 billion DKK (US$3.3 billion). The company has been using SAS software for 20 years, and Codan s data warehouse supports a range of core activities, including insurance accounting, customer profitability analysis and scoring, campaign analysis, sales reporting, product reporting and ad hoc analytics. However, with demand rising within the business to make analysis even more powerful and easy to use while also cutting costs, it was time to move to the next level. We ve got one of the best data warehouses in Denmark, says Codan s Chief Information Officer Johan Agerman. Now we are working on getting the information out to the real decision makers. Prior to implementing SAS 9, IT experts were combing through 200 data sources to pull out information and deliver it to employees. This could take one or two days, and today s marketplace no longer tolerates such a time lag. Agerman says, It s key to have the right data at the right time. If we can give a customer an answer quicker, we have a business advantage, a competitive advantage. With SAS 9, data and information became readily available on each employee s desktop. With minimal training, people can now self-sufficiently leverage information in their daily decisions for instance, analysts determining pricing and claims and executives setting strategic directions. As Jørgen Falkesgaard, project manager in Codan s IT Competence Department, explains, People soon discovered that the changes we made brought them benefits in their work though improved analysis and reporting. SAS 9 interfaces are tailored to varying skill levels and usage patterns, making it even easier for the widest range of employees to access and use essential information to help them excel in day-to-day business activities. Falkesgaard adds, Because SAS 9 is built on industry standards, we could integrate the business intelligence environment with our production systems and insurance systems. Customer-facing employees have access to all the information our analysts can retrieve from the data warehouse, and we route that information directly back to our Web systems. The new approach provides the basis for improved marketing and customer retention campaigns. With its move to SAS 9, Codan has streamlined and boosted its analysis capabilities, with efficiency gains having a significant impact on the bottom line.

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