“Some people see data
as facts and figures. But it’s more than that. It’s the lifeblood of your
business. It contains your organization's history. And it’s trying to tell you
something”
SAS is a business analytics
tool that helps businesses transform a vast amount of data into valuable
insights that companies can use to make smart business decisions and improve profitability.
SAS helps companies to get insights about what they’re doing right, what is
working and what isn’t working.
SAS is utilized by a lot of
Industries such as: retail, banking, health care, government, manufacturing,
hotels, insurance, defense and security, media, utilities, travel and
transportation, sports, capital markets, automotive, communications, small and
midsize businesses and many others.
Some of the main uses of SAS
are:
ü data entry, retrieval
and management
ü statistical and
mathematical analysis
ü business planning,
forecasting and decision support
ü report writing and
graphics
ü operation research and
product management
ü quality improvement
ü applications
development
By utilizing SAS, companies can gain
competitive advantages by:
· Integrating
large amount of a high quality data
· Performing sophisticated
analysis and make a faster decisions
· Improving information
management and governance
· Making faster
recommendations
SAS
software consists of more than 200 components, some of the most widely used are:
· Base SAS - basic
procedures and data management.
· SAS Enterprise Miner -
allows performing data mining and based on analysis conducted on vast amount of
data helps to create highly accurate predictions.
· SAS Studio - allows to
access data files, libraries and create new programs.
· SAS Visual Analytics -
enables to create a variety of graphs, dashboards and reports that helps to
gain a better understanding of a business performance.
· SAS Enterprise Guide –
enables to analyze data and publish results in fast in a time efficient
way.
· SAS Data Management-
provides efficient way to clean the data. Enables to easily remove the outliers
that can mess up the outcome, Input a missing data values or drop the missing
variables of data so the system could deliver more sophisticated and accurate
results and predictions.
· SAS STAT – by
providing the latest statistical technics it enables to conduct a variety of
statistical analysis such as: market research, regression, predictive modeling,
multivariate analysis, cluster analysis, distribution analysis and many
others.
· SAS Enterprise BI
Server - provides an easily associable data and enables business users to get
an access to SAS Analytics by using Microsoft Office applications.
An example of how we can
utilize SAS Enterprise Miner in practice: A grocery store is planning to
arrange products by placing items that are usually purchased together on
different aisles of the store. The plan is to make people walk through the
entire store in order to find the products they are looking for. The idea is to
expose people to other products that they may like while they are searching for
a specific item. By doing so, customers are exposed to certain brands for a
longer period of time and therefore there is higher level of brand exposure. In addition, customers will spend more time
in the store thus improving the chance that customers will purchase more
products. SAS Enterprise Miner has a function that is called Association
analysis (it finds products that are bought together or are somehow related to
each other). After uploading large data sets of item purchase history and
running the associations analysis node, the SAS software will illustrate the
results of the products from the store that are usually bought together. See
the examples provided below in pictures A and B. Picture A is output form the
model that illustrates the likelihood that customers will purchase certain
items together. Picture B Illustrates the way we would allocate the products on
different aisles of the store based on the data that we received from the SAS
results.
Picture A
SAS is a great software to analyze data. I love it!
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