Features

SAS Offers Enhanced Solutions to Span Performance Management Spectrum

By Sophia Mayengbam

SAS, a provider of business intelligence solutions, has introduced a series of new and enhanced software as part of the company's performance management offering at its customer event, SAS Forum International. Also new to SAS is its way of communicating new offerings in context to latest developments in performance management.

"SAS software helps leaders not only understand what is going on in their organization, but also measure and align around goals, and predict the future state of operations to improve the performance of their organization," stated Allan Russell, Senior Vice President for strategy at SAS International.

SAS' latest amendments to its product suites come in the light of helping organisations drive business performance. These include four enhanced cross-industry solutions ranging from human capital management, financial management and activity-based management to strategic performance management. These enhancements are complemented by new telco solution and new capabilities for the banking and insurance industries.

Adaptations addressing latest technology requirements round off SAS' latest product developments announced to roughly 2000 visitors attending SAS Forum International in Geneva.

With new capabilities in its enterprise intelligence platform, SAS supply to a full spectrum of Service Oriented Architectures for business intelligence, including data, analytic, reporting and composite services for business areas.

The company said, a new world record was set within a benchmark performed by Sun Microsystems and SAS in which the tests reveal that SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server can outperform other vendor's ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tools by more than 230 percent. These capabilities provide organisations with the flexibility, reliability and agility to respond quickly to new data integration requirements.

"The concept of performance management has evolved and is now about the ability to link enterprise planning and operational activities to corporate strategy that will influence business performance - and ultimately shape success" Russell explained further.

SAS Human Capital Management delivers enhanced analytics and refined user interfaces. The SAS Human Capital Management Adapter 4.2 for SAP leverages the business rules in SAP and helps lower the cost of ownership through repeatable processes and enables faster implementation.

SAS Financial Management delivers instant consolidation so users can view information in real time. It now has improved performance and scalability to help speed budget preparation data entry and help managers more easily validate data.  SAS Financial Management Adapter for SAP enables faster implementation by delivering pre-defined mapping between R/3 and SAS FM.

SAS Activity-Based Management is now integrated with the SAS Enterprise BI Server to enable powerful cost analysis and faster deployment of reports to those who need to separate cost from value drivers.

SAS Strategic Performance Management now allows content from the scorecard to be displayed via the portal, which lets executives and analysts monitor the scorecard from any device.

SAS strengthens vertical solutions 

•  SAS Revenue Assurance for Telecommunications equips telcos with a way to identify and stop revenue loss caused by problems with business processes and technical issues. 
•  SAS Ratemaking for Insurance and SAS Customer Lifetime Value for Insurance are new solutions enabling insurers to effectively carry out targeted strategies, maximize profits, retain and grow customer accounts, manage risk and execute efficient marketing campaigns.
•  The SAS Banking Intelligence suite now includes enhanced cross-sell and up-sell functionality, as well as upgraded solutions for customer retention and customer segmentation.
• In the risk management market SAS is rounding off its offering for financial institutions with a new version of its software for credit risk management, credit scoring and operational risk.

"We are strongly positioned to meet increasing demand for performance management, because of our breadth and depth of offerings across business lines and industries - all built on an enterprise intelligence platform" said Jim Davis, Chief Marketing Officer at SAS.