SAS Releases New Forecast Server

Saving money and increasing sales are important objectives for any business. With these goals in mind, SAS will deliver its patent-pending forecasting product, SAS Forecast Server, to help companies improve the accuracy of their forecasts and the manageability of the overall forecast process.

This latest forecasting product from SAS will feature critical new capabilities, such as time series mining to uncover time-related patterns and trends. This represents an advance that’s well ahead of what other vendors can currently offer. An interactive user interface for easy forecasting will also be included.

Critical information – faster than ever before
"SAS Forecast Server will allow businesses to ‘turbo charge’ their forecasting efforts to better anticipate and meet customer demand, enhance supply chain efficiencies, and boost profitability on their often razor-thin margins," says Anne Milley, director of technology marketing at SAS.

"SAS has long been known for its ability to provide deeper analytic capabilities to our customers than other vendors can, and SAS Forecast Server will raise the bar even higher in the predictive analytics market," continues Milley. "With SAS’ sophisticated modeling techniques – such as time series mining – and unsurpassed scalability, we can create reliable and understandable forecasts that automatically adjust to changing market conditions. This makes it easy for critical information to be distributed throughout an enterprise faster than ever before."

Planning for the future
SAS Forecast Server will deliver significant value to organizations within any industry, allowing them to plan for the future more effectively. For example:

• Retailers will be able to automatically forecast sales for millions of SKUs, helping them account for seasonality, changing customer preferences, regional differences and other key factors that directly affect the bottom line.
• Banks and other financial institutions will be able to better allocate their dollars by understanding ATM usage patterns over time.
• Manufacturing and pharmaceutical businesses will also gain significant value by using SAS Forecast Server to anticipate and plan for product and customer demands.

"Many forecasting solutions we’ve worked with previously were too slow to react to our constantly changing environment," says Michael Festa, manager of product and inventory planning at CAPSUGEL, a division of Pfizer Inc. and the world’s leading provider of capsule solutions for the pharmaceutical and dietary supplement industries. "We appreciate the value SAS High-Performance Forecasting can give us through dynamically created automatic and accurate forecasts, and we expect SAS Forecast Server will allow us to make predictions much faster and with better results than ever before."

SAS Forecast Server will ship by Q4 2005.