SAS® High-Performance Forecasting
Produce millions of high-quality forecasts quickly and automatically to improve planning and decision making
SAS High-Performance Forecasting automatically generates large volumes of reliable forecasts to support the planning and decision making at all levels of business, including the most operational level. Its automated sophistication enables you to produce better forecasts in less time, with less effort.
Benefits
- Produce trustworthy forecasts that reflect the realities of your business.
- Focus on what’s most important.
- Reduce bias and forecasting error.
- Improve inventory management.
- Improve forecasts for items that rarely sell.
Features
- Data preparation
- Sophisticated modeling techniques
- Automatic model selection
- Customized output and reports
- Superior scalability
“ We expect the costs in connection with the precise predictions to be able to be reduced by up to 50 percent. So it is a matter of considerable savings. ”
—Mikael Gynther
Energy Market Manager
Copenhagen Energy
How SAS® is Different
- The combined scalability and modeling sophistication of SAS High-Performance Forecasting produces huge volumes of dependable forecasts.
- Powered by award-winning analytics, SAS High-Performance Forecasting automatically selects the time series models, business drivers and events that best explain your historical data, optimizes all model parameters and generates high-quality forecasts.
- SAS gives you a clearer view of the future so each day you can operate your business with more confidence.
Benefits
- Produce trustworthy forecasts that reflect the realities of your business. Automatic selection of business drivers, holidays and events aids in the forecasting process, producing trustworthy forecasts that reflect the realities of your business environment.
- Focus on what’s most important. By providing automatic, reliable forecasts on a large scale, SAS High-Performance Forecasting makes complex forecasting processes manageable so forecasters can focus their attention on the most critical forecasts.
- Reduce bias and forecasting error. Statistically sound forecasts are produced automatically, reducing the potential bias and politics of an entirely judgemental forecasting process.
- Improve inventory management. SAS forecasting provides insights into future demands for your products, enabling you to better match supply with demand, avoiding excess inventory and the associated expenses. Forecasts can be calculated for every product at each location, ensuring you are getting the right inventory to the right place at the right time. Forecasts are generated in a scalable batch process so they can be easily integrated into a production forecasting environment.
- Improve forecasts for items that rarely sell. The software includes intermittent demand models designed to forecast slow-moving goods so you can match inventory with the next spike in demand.
Features
- Data preparation
-
- Aggregates transactional data into time series format.
- Takes care of missing values.
- Accumulates data into any frequency time series.
- Sophisticated modeling techniques
-
- Automatic outlier detection.
- Trend analysis.
- Optimized model parameters.
- By-group processing for flexible forecasting hierarchies.
- Seasonality and intermittent series tests.
- Handles zero-padded data (leading or trailing zeros recorded in the data).
- Extensible model repository.
- Predefined as well as customizable holiday and calendar event definitions.
- Automatic indicator variable creation.
- Reconciliation of hierarchical forecasts.
- Automatic model selection
-
- Seasonal and non-seasonal exponential smoothing models.
- ARIMAX models.
- Intermittent demand models.
- Unobserved components models.
- User-defined models.
- Automatic variable transformations (log, square root, logistic, Box-Cox).
- Model selection based on performance in a holdout sample region (optional).
- Several goodness-of-fit statistics and overall performance metrics.
- Automatic regressor and event selection and model specification. Determines whether lagged and/or dynamic relationships are present.
- Automatic generation of model selection lists.
- Choice of automation level for all three forecasting steps: model selection, model parameter estimation and forecast generation.
- Customized output and reports
-
- Output produced in several popular formats: HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, etc.
- SAS ODS graphics (experimental).
- Several output data sets available, including forecasts, goodness-of-fit statistics, model parameters, seasonal and trend statistics, and more.
- Superior scalability
-
- Runtime is linear with the number of forecasts.
- No limit on the amount of historical data or forecast horizon.
- No limit on the number of events or regressors.
Screenshots
SAS High-Performance Forecasting can automatically account for seasonal fluctuations and other business drivers, and selects the best method for generating forecasts.
System Requirements
Supported platforms
- AIX: Version 5.1 and Version 6.1 on POWER architectures
- HP-UX PA-RISC: HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)
- HP-UX Itanium: HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)
- Linux for x86 (x86-32): RHEL 4 and 5, SuSE SLES 9 and 10
- Linux for x64 (EM64T/AMD64): RHEL 4 and 5, SuSE SLES 9 and 10
- Microsoft Windows (x86-32): Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista*, Windows Server 2003 family
- Microsoft Windows on x64 (EM64T/AMD64): Windows XP Professional for x64, Windows Vista* for x64, Windows Server 2003 for x64
- Microsoft Windows (on Itanium): Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems
- OpenVMS for HP Integrity Servers (Itanium): 8.3
- Solaris on SPARC: Version 9, 10
- Solaris on x64: Version 10
- z/OS: V1R7, z/OS V1R8, z/OS V1R9 and higher
* NOTE: Windows Vista Editions that are supported include Enterprise, Business and Ultimate.
Required software
- Base SAS
Ready to learn more?
Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.
