SAS named 'leader' in business performance solutions by independent research firm

SAS received the top rank for cost and profitability analysis - earning a perfect score - while also receiving the top score in product strategy and vision in the 16 November 2009, Forrester Wave: Business Performance Solutions, Q4 2009 report.

“This past year, many organisations had to scale back,” said Francois Beyleveld, Head of Performance Management at SAS South Africa. “Without a true understanding of what drives cost, profit and value, many have unfortunately cut muscle and bone to meet short-term targets at the expense of future prosperity. There is a better way. SAS enables customers to model, predict and optimise future scenarios so they can make fact-based decisions.”

Today's economy makes it imperative to implement exceptional planning and measurement processes and systems. According to Forrester Research's report: “Planning, forecasting, financial reporting and performance measurement solutions are essential for addressing economic uncertainty. Forecasting, especially, has helped companies cope with market volatility in the face of the economic slowdown and economic instability that now seem to be easing.”

Paul Hamerman reported: “SAS has sophisticated capabilities in cost and profitability, forecasting and strategy management, and it focuses on business issues well beyond the scope of finance.”

To improve performance and outpace the competition, companies do well to forecast and measure leading indicators rather than relying on lagging indicators and historical accounting. Companies that can identify opportunities and threats more easily than competitors, understand the implications, update strategy quickly and execute consistently across the organisation will be the winners.

“With leading capabilities in cost and profitability management and predictive analytics, SAS is a smart choice for sophisticated companies. The predictive technology supports complex planning and forecasting applications,” Hamerman notes in this report.

SAS offers a comprehensive set of business performance offerings, delivering on all core capabilities evaluated for this Forrester report: planning and budgeting; consolidation and reporting; strategy and performance; and cost and profitability analysis, together with foundational BI capabilities. SAS offerings are well integrated and move beyond the traditional purview of finance to give a complete picture of performance.

SAS for Performance Management, implemented at more than 1 500 customer sites, enables organisations to organise and cleanse data as a critical first step. Many then address financial aspects of budgeting and planning as a foundation for strategy management. Others focus on understanding what drives value. To help organisations improve performance, SAS' intertwined solutions include:

* Dashboards and scorecards
* Financial consolidation, budgeting, planning and reporting
* Cost and profitability analysis
* Human and IT capital analysis
* Customer and supplier intelligence
* Enterprise risk management
* Sustainability management
* Advanced analytics

SAS solutions are built on a common, scalable platform - the SAS Business Analytics Framework - to address the end-to-end process. With SAS, companies can start with a single solution and evolve at a pace that suits their needs.