BPM Partners survey ranks SAS highly for performance management

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, has announced that BPM Partners' Pulse survey findings ranked SAS higher in overall customer satisfaction than other core vendors in performance management, beating Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects, OutlookSoft and Cartesis.

Specifically, early results show SAS scoring 4.0 on a 5-point scale in overall customer satisfaction, citing strength in SAS' product-functionality and product quality.

BPM Partners is the leading independent authority on business performance management. The 2007 BPM Pulse survey included more than 500 responses across industries and geographies. Final results of the survey will be published in April.

"SAS is one of the core vendors offering a complete solution on a proven technology platform," says Craig Schiff, CEO, BPM Partners. "SAS' offering of business intelligence, profitability management, human capital management and predictive analytics, extends beyond the traditional budgeting, planning and financial consolidation components of performance management, enabling clients to leverage operational analytics as their BPM activities extend throughout the enterprise."

While other vendors in the survey have just acquired activity-based management, data quality and operational analytics vendors to complement their offerings, SAS has had these capabilities for years.

Among the 17 applications and tools vendors, only SAS, Hyperion, Cognos and Business Objects include all of the core and BPM 2.0 ready capabilities listed in the Annual Business Performance Management Software Buyers Guide. Of the four, SAS distinguished itself by rating the highest of these in customer satisfaction.

In the analyst firm's newly published Buyers Guide, SAS covers all the components BPM Partners considers essential in a performance management offering. In fact, SAS for performance management links SAS business solutions with industry-specific solutions, supported by pre-built data models, processes and techniques in banking, insurance, communications, retail, manufacturing and others.

SAS business solutions span finance, customer and IT intelligence, and include solutions for marketing performance management, profitability management, human capital management and others. These solutions share a common business intelligence infrastructure.

And the entire performance management process can be monitored and managed through SAS' industry-leading score-carding capabilities. Benefits include:

Better aligning resources with strategies. Predictive score-carding capabilities tie traditional scorecard features such as traffic lights and speedometers to powerful predictive analytics.

Synchronising financial and operational strategies. With one integrated solution for financial consolidation, planning, budgeting, reporting and dashboards, SAS provides financial transparency, allows companies to link budgets with strategic goals, and improves the speed and quality of their reporting and decision making.

Responding quickly to business and market changes. At-a-glance dashboard visuals ensure efficient access to an organisation's current status, and strategy maps set up cause-and-effect relationships based on the company's unique environment.

Ensuring a single view of enterprise information. SAS for performance management offerings are all built on the SAS BI platform, which offers unmatched data integration, storage, business intelligence and analytics, so decision-makers can be confident that their choices are made using accurate information, thus better delivering expected results.

Identifying the true value of customers, products and channels. Profitability management creates highly accurate profitability metrics from detailed transactional data that drive strategic decision-making and instil confidence in performance management programs.

Reduce costs without compromising profitability. SAS provides activity-based management to deliver a complete operational view of cost and cost drivers.

"Among the best-of-breed vendors, Hyperion Solutions, Cognos and SAS Institute are ranked the top three in terms of revenue size," according to Kathleen Wilhide, Research Director, BPM and Compliance at IDC, Framingham, MA