Some years ago, corporate performance management based on intelligence was impossible to achieve. The cost of intelligence was too high, and the time to intelligence too long.
Companies were still struggling with day-to-day operational problems and data capture, and it was almost impossible to consolidate information. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) was king, and many people equated corporate performance management with ERP.
"It took businesses years to figure out that ERP, although extremely important for day-to-day operations, cannot pull things together at a corporate level," says Phil Winters, Vice-President, Customer Intelligence of SAS Institute, leaders in business intelligence.
Until about three years ago, technology was a good excuse for organisations not to manage corporate performance.
"Managing corporate performance was possible, but experts said it would it would take 20 years and cost the equivalent of the GDP of some small country!" says Winters.
Today, however, all the technological boundaries have been removed, and corporate performance management is not only possible, but imperative.
"Corporate performance management is not just about compliance, but about pulling information together and using this combination of new knowledge to steer the company," says Winters.
"It must become part of company culture, and it is a process that never stops. However, results are needed quickly - within a maximum of nine months, but preferably in six months."
Because SAS understands the complexities of the issues affecting corporate performance, it works with companies to help them zero in on where they should start.
"It is a bit like learning to dance - everyone will start in a different place, and this needs to be individually defined. This may be in manufacturing or the people area for one business, while a credit card business may need to focus first on risk. The point is that firms need to start in areas that will give maximum value first," explains Winters.
SAS's greatest strength is in taking massive quantities of data, both historical and current, to show up patterns and trends. This information gives great information on customers. Amazon, for example, uses SAS not only to predict who are its good customers, but also who are the bad ones. It has become so good at predicting who will commit credit card fraud, that it has reduced this by 50%.
Barclaycard, which uses SAS, has so much information about its customers, it can give instant voice activated credit card approval to good risk customers.
"The biggest issue for most companies embarking on business intelligence projects is not about having the data, but being confident in the quality of that data," says Winters.
"We spend a massive amount of time helping companies with data quality. 70% of any project is spent helping the client with the data before he can do the project.
"Data capture is easy, and data volumes are thus exploding. We now need to concentrate not on capturing data, but on cleaning it."
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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