SAS International unveils winners of Enterprise Intelligence 2004 Awards

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK   (June 16, 2004)  –  SAS International today announced the four winners of the Enterprise Intelligence 2004 Awards. Presented annually to organizations that have demonstrated productivity gains, cost or time savings, or achievement of organization or business goals through the use of SAS® software, this year’s recipients are:

Enterprise Intelligence Award 2004: Commercial Category

This year’s commercial winner is the UK-based Barclays Group in recognition of its innovative use of SAS throughout the enterprise. Throughout the Barclays Group there have been a number of successful projects and implementations that involve the use of SAS, including the award-winning Prospect Customer Warehouse Solution for Barclays UK Consumer Finance and the Pre-approved Mortgage Limits solution for Barclays Home Finance. Each project focuses on using SAS to turn operational data into information that enables the best decision making possible.

“The utilization of SAS in our business has become so critical that I would rather turn off some day-to-day production processes than turn off my ability to execute some of the programs and applications that we have built using SAS technology,” said Keith Coulter, chief operating officer at Barclays UK Consumer Finance. “SAS has become a cornerstone of how we drive our business, and we would seriously falter without it.”

Enterprise Intelligence Award 2004: Small and Medium Enterprise Category

Hjemmet Mortensen (HM), a Norwegian media company that produces and sells magazines to readers mainly in Scandinavia, was recognized in the Small and Medium Enterprise category for outstanding results in using BI/analytics in marketing.

The company, which has 28 magazines for the Norwegian market and 14 magazines for the Swedish market, uses two market channels to drive sales: subscriptions and non-subscription sales in bookstores. HM currently has 700,000 active and 1.5 million passive subscribers in its databases.

It faced multiple challenges, including getting non-subscriber customers to subscribe to the magazines, better targeting of existing customers and extending their purchasing life cycle, as well as automating and making the subscriber channel more efficient. To meet these goals, HM complemented its operational CRM system with SAS Marketing Automation.

Enterprise Intelligence Award 2004: Academic Category

The 2004 academic winner is the Warsaw School of Economics, the leading university of economics in Poland and among the best management schools in Europe. Founded in 1906, the Warsaw School of Economics is recognized for its innovative teaching of SAS as well as use of the company’s solution in university-generated research.

“Students who get hands-on experience with SAS enter the world of business with a huge competitive advantage,” commented Ewa Fr¹tczak, Professor in the Institute of Statistics and Demography at the Warsaw School of Economics, Secretary General of the Governmental Population Council, Head of the Demographic Committee Polish Academy of Sciences, as well as Head of the Ph.D. Program at the Collegium of Economic Analyses. “We aim at good and professional education for our students, which would prepare them for both research work and business activity. We do appreciate the initiatives of SAS in this field.”

Enterprise Intelligence Award 2004: Government Category

Taking home the top prize in the government category is the Slovenian Ministry of Labor, Family and Social Affairs.

To become a member of the European Union on May 1, Slovenia was required to implement European employment guidelines. This required analyzing national labor market policy documents and the effectiveness of active employment policy programs. To make its entrance into the EU as professional as possible, the Ministry of Labor, Family and Social Affairs implemented SAS Strategic Performance Management to link the European and national labor market policies.

The results have been significant. "I was very impressed with how fast SAS was able to gather the data and produce results," said Dr. Tanja Cesen. “Today SAS Strategic Performance Management delivers over 200 indicators about the labor market which gives us very good insight to what is happening across Slovenian workplaces.”

“Congratulations to our 2004 winners,” said Art Cooke, President of SAS International. “As Barclays Group, Hjemmet Mortensen, the Warsaw School of Economics and the Slovenian Ministry for Labor, Family and Social Affairs have shown, business intelligence and predictive analytics deliver significant and demonstrable value in achieving corporate and organizational goals.”

Winners of the 2004 Enterprise Intelligence Awards were announced at SAS Forum International 2004 (www.sas.com/sasforuminternational), the most extensive business intelligence conference outside the United States. Formerly known as SeUGI (SAS European Users Group International), the name was changed this year to better describe the conference’s role as a forum for exchanging ideas, best practices and future directions in business intelligence.

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