A Complete Platform for Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

Intellidyn Stores, Optimizes, Mines and Manages Data with SAS®

With a business model that rests on creating and leveraging a 360-degree view of more than 200 million US households, choosing the right partner for data warehousing and business intelligence is an essential ingredient for success. Intellidyn, a leading information and analytical services company, found its partner for success in SAS.

Established in 1998, Intellidyn lays claim to the most atomic-level storehouse of consumer data in the United States and the only 360-degree view of the coveted U.S. consumer – a view that includes purchasing behavior; demographic, lifestyle and credit information; and e-channel activity.

Today, when multibillion-dollar corporations with millions and millions of customers look to combine their unique customer data with the intelligence and analytical capabilities of the most sophisticated consumer database available, they turn to Intellidyn. With the help of SAS, Intellidyn has moved well beyond the concept of a "household database" to providing an accurate, consistent view of the consumer and the household over time.

The company's SAS-powered data warehouse contains atomic-level data and analytically derived information on virtually everyone in the United States and is updated continuously with data from Acxiom Corporation, transactional databases, credit bureaus and other proprietary sources. The data is extracted, transformed and loaded into Intellidyn's dynamic database with SAS/Warehouse Administrator® software, and the SAS Data Quality Solution ensures the accuracy of every record in the warehouse.

ETL^Q, a unique benefit of the SAS Data Quality Solution, makes it easy for Intellidyn to delete erroneous data, merge data between databases and match common data each time the data is handled. As a result, the company's data cleansing efforts are automated and painless, enabling Intellidyn to deliver real-time performance metrics and fact-based decisions to its clients.

To round out this complete solution for Direct Marketing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), SAS' Enterprise Miner ^TM   software allows Intellidyn analysts to combine its huge stockpile of consumer data with its clients' historical data. The integrated platform for decision support lets clients drive marketing campaigns, risk management and channel management strategies, and derive dynamic performance metrics consistently over time.

Finding answers in a fraction of the time
When discussing the end-to-end solution provided by SAS, Intellidyn President and CEO Peter Harvey breaks it down into two categories: systems-level components and application-level components.

Regarding the robust system-level components, he says, "The major components of our SAS system include data transformation utilities, with a logical and physical architecture that enables data to be translated from operational data stores to our systems and back. In other words, SAS provides maintainable metadata that's embedded or inherent in the whole suite. Then the database is designed so that we can work with a single or a multithreaded platform. And SAS provides the ability to optimize the initial staging area, the processing area and the outbound staging area of data."

When he describes the sophisticated data mining and campaign management features of SAS, Harvey says, "SAS easily supports campaign management and performance metrics. It automates most of the time-sensitive, redundant tasks and enables us to concentrate on what is of real value to our clients: validating hypotheses and deriving insight to support business decisions. Finally, SAS provides strategic analysis, which allows us to integrate marketing, risk and channel tactics so completely that we can just sit back and analytically ask, 'Well, what if?' And we're drilling down to any subcell level to find our answers."

KP Onn, Director of Analytics at Intellidyn, is often the man in charge of finding the answers for clients. His team works hands-on with SAS Enterprise Miner to build predictive models, which guarantee successful results for direct-to-consumer marketing campaigns. He says SAS helps make his job easier.

"Enterprise Miner allows us to explore many models within SAS," says Onn. "With other data mining products, you have to do all the coding, and it's very time-consuming. With Enterprise Miner, it's just click and drag. So you save a lot of time and can focus on the more important matters." In fact, Onn says work that would take six to eight weeks without SAS can now be done in a week.

The art of model building with SAS®
When building predictive models, according to Onn, you can either focus on routine data manipulations, or you can spend your time building a more powerful model. SAS removes the burden of tedious, routine tasks and lets Onn spend more time applying his creativity and business knowledge to the model-building process.

"Modeling is a science and an art. With Enterprise Miner you can spend less time doing data manipulations and focus on the art of model building," says Onn. "In modeling or analytics, there is domain knowledge, data knowledge and scientific knowledge. Enterprise Miner helps me apply all of these skills and dig deeper to build better models."

With very little coding, he says, SAS Enterprise Miner compares different modeling techniques. "It allows you to compare methods to find the best one. We look at the conventional regression method, the tree-based method and the artificial intelligence method," says Onn. "With Enterprise Miner, you can compare these on one sheet."

In addition to its strong analytical capabilities, CEO Harvey commends SAS Enterprise Miner for its dynamic, real-time capabilities, which are especially important in the fast-paced world of online marketing. "On the Web, the quicker you can get an individual to exactly where they want to be, the more likely they are to make a transaction. That's why we use a dynamic product like SAS. It lets us leverage data outside of the operational data store, and if you need to reload and recast it, then you can do that quickly."

For example, Onn uses SAS' neural networking methods for on-the-fly analysis. He explains: "We like to build a 'challenger model.' So, you start with one model that is built from a static data set, and then with all this new data, you build another model on the fly, as a challenge to this original statement. Using SAS Enterprise Miner, we apply the latest model, so we can change our predictions on the fly. It helps us create a more dynamic model, and Enterprise Miner can process all the information instantly."

Harvey and Onn agree that SAS' analytical capabilities enable Intellidyn to deliver more value to their clients. "Our clients need to make fact-based decisions very quickly in a competitive playing field," says Harvey. "As our partner in delivering these services to our clients, SAS is giving our clients the knowledge they need to make fact-based decisions very quickly."

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