Frequently asked questions about SAS and MUNIS

Q: Who is SAS?

A: Headquartered in Cary, NC, SAS is the world's largest privately held software company. SAS provides a new generation of business intelligence (BI) software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at 40,000 sites – including all 15 U.S. federal departments, within all 50 states and by many local governments – to develop more enhanced relationships with constituents and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations 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^®.

Q: Why is MUNIS partnering with SAS?

A: By adding SAS, MUNIS customers are able to increase efficiencies and effectiveness in budgeting and program management. Together SAS and MUNIS help local governments and K-12 schools transform their operations and maximize resources.

The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is designed to provide deep analysis and broad intelligence capabilities across the organization. SAS provides a true layer of enterprise intelligence that lets government and education leaders go beyond transactional capabilities to:

• Understand what their data is telling them about the past and present.
• Predict the future.

Q: What is the difference between ERP and BI?

A: An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system optimizes operational efficiency and effectiveness, while an enterprise decision-support system enables strategic decision-making capabilities, leveraging both ERP and other types of data relevant to the organization. BI from SAS gives organizations the power to know how to integrate data from across the enterprise and deliver self-service reporting and analysis to everyone in the organization. BI allows decision makers to spend less time looking for answers and more time driving decisions.

Q: What are an enterprise intelligence platform and a decision-support environment?

A: Because IT infrastructures are complex, heterogeneous environments, integrating data and applications can be a constant challenge. The integrated, open and extensible SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform serves as the foundation for creating and delivering accurate, in-depth intelligence. A platform-independent data integration capability creates a decision-support environment for sharing enterprise intelligence, which is necessary for fact-based strategic decision making.

Q: Why add a decision-support environment to an ERP environment?

A: A decision-support environment allows an organization to realize its full potential for operational efficiency and effectiveness and gives it the ability to take advantage of cutting-edge strategic decision-making capabilities.

Q: Why use SAS as the decision-support environment for Tyler Technologies/MUNIS?

A: SAS offers powerful query and reporting and unmatched analytics so organizations can discover new insights, predict with precision and drive better decisions, minimizing risk and optimizing performance. In addition, SAS’ end-to-end linked technologies increase consistency in data and business rules so the entire enterprise shares a single version of the truth. Also, MUNIS customers will benefit from SAS’ ability to align organizational strategies, thereby improving efficiency and ensuring confidence in data.

Key benefits of SAS include its ability to:

• Allow changes to data in one application or system and maintain a single version of the truth across an organization.
• Lower the cost of IT support, given SAS’ ability to leverage existing systems.
• Reduce the potential for errors, complexity and maintenance requirements with a consistent platform.
• Address activities associated with a fully functional decision-support system, including ETL, data quality and storage, analytic intelligence and BI.

Q: How will BI help city and county administrators?

A: Government leaders need more than historical reports, which provide hindsight but limited insight. SAS BI enables data integration from across an organization, delivering self-service reporting and analysis to everyone's fingertips. The capability takes agencies and departments Beyond BI™ by helping them understand the past, monitor the present and predict outcomes as they move forward. BI empowers leaders with a deeper understanding of their operations than previously possible.

Q: How is SAS different from Crystal Reports software?

A: Crystal Reports facilitates the building and viewing of typically operational reports from data and provides information associated with a particular function of an operational system. While reporting is an important component of the SAS BI environment and the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, SAS’ reporting function leverages the full power of SAS software, including historical reporting, predictive analytics, relational data and multidimensional data. With SAS, reports can be viewed statically or interactively, allowing individual employees to modify the look of the report easily by applying filters.