North West University acquires Institutional Wide Licence for SAS

North West University has signed an institution wide licence that will give all its students exposure to use SAS software across all three campuses, namely: Mafikeng, Potchefstroom and the Vaal triangle campus, and will be renewed on a yearly basis.

The campus-wide licence has been implemented at North West University (NWU) for academic purposes, and will provide all students with the opportunity to develop SAS skills that may prove invaluable in the business world. The SAS software will be of particular relevance to business mathematics and information students and post-graduate students of medicine usage in South Africa, in the School of Pharmacy.

NWU is a tertiary institution with campuses spread across two provinces, with a single set of policies, systems and standards. The university has a long-standing successful relationship with SAS Institute through Professor Machiel Kruger, who successfully runs the SASLab at the Centre for Business Mathematics and Information (BMI) of the North West University.

Since its conception in 1998, the Centre for BMI has strived to become a centre of excellence in risk management solutions for the financial services industry. The Centre for BMI presents four specialist training courses, namely: Quantitative Risk Management, Actuarial Science, Financial Mathematics and Business Intelligence/Data Mining. The courses received international recognition when the centre received accreditation from the Professional Risk Manager's International Association (PRMIA, New York, USA), the Enterprise Risk Management International Institute (ERMII, New York, USA) as well as the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFA, London UK).

"The institution wide licence is a realisation of the dream of the university as it expands our training on SAS software to all our campuses, and will allow all our students to develop skills on SAS' leading analytical software," says Riaan de Jongh, Director of the Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics.

"SAS plays an important role in the curriculum for BMI on our campuses because most large banks and other financial institutions here in South Africa and globally use SAS for risk management and business intelligence," says de Jongh.

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Currently about 25 Masters degree students are delivered into industry each year, but the demand for these students has grown to more than 40 project requests each year. On average, more than 95% of students are employed by the client for whom the student project was done.

"We are placing our students ahead of the pack by educating them on SAS software, which ensures they have the skills they need for their future positions in the financial industry. I have heard in the past of students struggling to find employment in the financial services industry simply because SAS was not yet on their curriculum.

"From their first year, all BMI students will now be exposed to SAS. The SAS exposure ensures that students can hit the road running in their first project on employment. SAS skills, together with the skills obtained in the BMI training programmes, ensure a win-win situation so most of the student projects are highly successful, and keeps our students' skills in demand," ends De Jongh.

The university decided to implement the full SAS licence after realising the demand for SAS skills through the demand of students from several departments at the NWU. In the past, SAS had been used at North West University for statistical purposes and by the students, as an analytical and mathematical tool. With the institution wide licence, the university is expanding its use of SAS' software to ensure its business, mathematics, statistics and medical students have access to leading analytical SAS software from Base SAS, SAS Stat, through to SAS Data Integration, which is used to build enterprise data warehouses.