A message from SAS Canada

2006 was a banner growth year for SAS Canada as we grew all aspects of our business to record levels. SAS continued to extend its leadership position in the core markets in which we are focused. SAS received recognition from Gartner as a leader in five Gartner Magic Quadrants for Business Intelligence and from IDC for having the highest diversity of products amongst business analytics vendors, along with the highest growth rate in the market. SAS’ success is reflected by the strong support of our user community, and I would like to take this opportunity to say a very sincere thank you.

We had a goal in 2006 to reach as many SAS® users as possible, and I am pleased to see that subscriptions to this publication have grown quarter over quarter to around 3,000 today. In addition, our user group community has grown to over 15 regional user groups across the country, with over 1,500 individuals attending meetings in 2006. We were also pleased to see increased participation from the many academic institutions around the country. SAS recognizes the value of listening to users in order to improve its many products and services. We continually strive to find relevant information to share with our users to help improve their daily SAS experiences and drive value in their workplaces. I thank the hundreds of you out there who have contributed content and feedback to help SAS bring relevant information to all SAS users and encourage you all to continue sharing your SAS experiences.

From myself and all SAS Canada employees I wish you all a very healthy and prosperous 2007.

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Key Happenings

Better Forecasting Promotes Company Growth...

TD Meloche Monnex Group is the largest direct-response home and auto insurer and one of the top three home and auto insurers in Canada. The Group is also the national leader in group insurance and the reference point in affinity marketing.
As the ability to stay ahead of the industry depends on how information is used, the need to set up a system for comparative analyses and share the findings becomes a major issue. Therefore, TD Meloche Monnex Group turns to SAS for assistance in analyzing marketing campaigns. Using SAS Business Intelligence, marketing information can now be collected and analyzed. These results will help refine the marketing approaches to reach the goals of growth in clientele, policy sales and premiums.
"SAS seems to be the logical solution since SAS software allows us to collect large amounts of data faster," explains Sylvain Leroux, Manager, Forecasting and Business Intelligence at TD Meloche Monnex Group. As data collection is currently handled manually, reports are created by the research team and published in-house. Leroux adds: "With SAS, we are saving a lot of time. SAS allows us to eliminate all the Excel reports by sharing the information directly via our in-house Web site with viewable reports for the entire corporate group. It also provides management with scorecard and dashboard view options."
The ultimate goal at TD Meloche Monnex is to provide a fully functional platform-based system. "My objective is to implement a platform to develop the reports for all decision makers," adds Leroux. This will allow company executives to be more proactive and to evaluate information in more specialized and targeted ways without waiting for researchers to track down and provide data for one requested report at a time.
The company's next step will be an upgrade to SAS Enterprise BI Server, which offers more flexibility and applicability in the use of the data reports. "Providing end users with metadata capabilities will be integral to the next phase of enhancing our BI environment. By allowing our users to access this level of information, they will be able to create their own reports when needed. Ultimately, we will provide more and better functionality and information to management executives. That's our goal," concludes Leroux.

Regional User Group Schedule

Please check our Canadian User Group Web page regularly for updates:

User Group Subscriptions and Schedule

If you'd like to receive information about user groups in your area, please subscribe to our email list. 

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SAS Users @ Work

Yves Deguire Statistics Canada Ottawa, Ontario

I’ve been using SAS for more than 20 years. I don’t recall the exact date I started to use SAS – sometime in 1985 I think – but I do recall the exact circumstances. I was hired by Statistics Canada in 1984 as an entry-level programmer right after I graduated from university. I was programming in PLI on an IBM mainframe. At one point, I was asked to write “one-shot” programs to reformat some sequential files. I was spending a couple of weeks to implement each of these programs. After a while I started thinking that there should be a better and more efficient approach to solve these type of problems. I then talked with some of my colleagues to see if they had some ideas and suggestions. I was told that a package called SAS could help me. So I went on to learn SAS by myself using the only SAS manual available on the floor. That manual was placed along with the IBM manuals in a very inconvenient rack … We now have much better SAS training facilities at Statistics Canada! The first few attempts were not as promising as I anticipated. I made a big mistake by not taking advantage of the DATA step automatic looping feature. Once I realized my mistake and used the DATA step to its full potential, I improved my productivity dramatically. Then those programs which took a couple of weeks to complete were done in a couple of days! Since then, I got hooked!

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Education Tips and Tricks

Josée Ranger-Lacroix SAS Canada Ottawa, Ontario

I have only been with SAS since January 2006 and have been busy training to teach BASIC, SAS®9 New Features, Programming I and SAS Enterprise Guide®. I was using SAS at Bell Canada for 10 years in the marketing group for product optimization, campaigns, pricing index, etc. 

For more on Josée, click here.

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SAS Consulting @ Work

Sydney Archer Consultant SAS Canada Calgary, Alberta

Sydney Archer is a relative newcomer to the SAS family and suite of products, having joined the company in January 2006. She comes to SAS with over 11 years of technical and business consulting experience specializing in Internet technologies. Archer’s previous roles have included project management, technical team leadership, technical architecture, business analysis, teaching and technical instruction, report development, and programming in industries as varied as insurance, finance and banking, telecommunications, transportation, oil and gas, software, healthcare, municipal government, and professional services. Since joining SAS, she has been able to work as both a technical consultant and project manager for SAS Canada’s first retail customer.

For more information about Sydney and her techie tips, click here.

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User Groups @ Work

     MONSUG- Montreal SAS User Group

One of MONSUG’s most memorable meetings was the first one. Everyone was eager to see the number of attendees and get their comments. The organizers stepped up to the plate, and the event was a great success with more than 100 participants. MONSUG received excellent feedback from the evaluation forms, and this positive reaction was the energy burst that launched MONSUG’s success story.

Founded in the summer of 2003, MONSUG holds events twice a year in the spring and fall. Average attendance is around 80, with representatives from various industries, including telecommunications, banking, insurance, education, pharmaceutical, retail and manufacturing. The atmosphere is great during MONSUG’s events because there is a lot of interaction among users, from beginners to experts.

A typical MONSUG meeting usually has three main presentations. Subjects of interest to MONSUG’s users are “techie tips,” SAS unknown features, coding best practices, statistical presentations and real-life stories. Asked to choose the best presentation, MONSUG had a difficult time because of the wide range of topics and the fact that everyone has a favourite.

While the group would love to have an infinite list of speakers and attendance by all the SAS users in Montreal, it takes pride in being able to provide quality events time after time. The executive committee of this self-starting, autonomous users group plans user-centric events by relying on feedback from evaluation forms. This way MONSUG can organize great events with quality presentations, giving Montreal’s SAS users an opportunity to apply new knowledge in their day-to-day jobs.

	For more information visit http://www.monsug.ca/ President and Database Coordinator: Eric Lacombe, TD Meloche Monnex Group Vice President, Webmaster and Database Coordinator: Mathieu Gaouette, National Bank of Canada Event Coordinator and Secretary: Luigi Muro, Bell Canada
From left to right : Mathieu Gaouette, Eric Lacombe and Luigi Muro

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Academic News

Announcement: Bestselling SAS Press Book Titles for Higher Education

Are you a professor or a student teaching or studying SAS? SAS Press offers many books particularly suited for use in higher education. A sampling of the most popular selections is available from our online bookstore, organized by these categories:

• basic statistics
• advanced analytics/predictive modeling
• research/clinical
• data mining
• business intelligence

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SAS®9 Corner

By Tim Trussell, Client Development Consultant, SAS Canada
As a recent student I can distinctly remember the difficulty of turning pages of SAS output into a paper or report. In my querying and statistical analyses I would inevitably generate more output than I needed for the report (more because of the discovery process than inefficiencies). With Output Delivery System (ODS) it has become increasingly easy to get the output into a word processor to discuss in the report. However, this does not solve the problem of selecting output to be sent to the word processor. For my solution to this problem and to read more, click here.

Customer Value Award

We are very pleased to announce the winner of the 2006 Customer Value Award: Greg McLean!  McLean is a Project Leader for the SAS Technology Centre at Statistics Canada. He has worked with SAS for more than 15 years, mostly as an Internal SAS Consultant. Greg has also been involved with users groups, notably with OASUS as an executive member and with SAS Global Forum (formerly SUGI) where he presented many contributed papers. He is well-known for his presentation skills, which were recognised in 2003 when he won the Best Contributed Paper award at SAS' Global Forum. Greg is always happy to share his passion about SAS with his colleagues, his clients and SAS users in Canada and around the world. He will be honoured at a special dinner at SAS Global Forum.  

We had many worthy nominees for this award, and we'd like to make several honourable mentions: Yves LaPierre from Bell Canada, Lee Robson from Terasen Gas, Irek Celejewski from TD Bank, Jason Liang from Alberta Health and Wellness, and Charles Burchill from Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP). All of these individuals contribute significantly to the SAS community, and we thank them for their ongoing efforts!

Many thanks also go to everyone who took the time to nominate these and other worthy candidates. Watch for our special profile on Greg in the spring issue of INSIGHTS!

Did You Know?

SAS has added more community forums.
SAS has recently beefed up their online SAS support community by adding in community forums. This open “blog” like environment allows users to post discussion questions and comments and is moderated by SAS. This is not a space to replace direct questions for SAS as that still should be directed through support.sas.com tech support. Instead it allows for sharing of best practices and common solutions to FAQ’s. See the current 6 communities at: http://support.sas.com/forums/index.jspa. More communities are scheduled to be added as well.

You can share you experience - join other reputable companies telling their success stories! Would you like to join other customers and be the star of a success story? If your company has effectively deployed SAS technologies or is using an interesting application of SAS within your business, we can work with you to share your knowledge and best practice with other SAS customers.
We offer a range of opportunities from conveying your company's story via the website, to speaking at SAS user conferences during the year.
If you have something to share, do not hesitate to get in touch to discuss the options, we'd love to hear from you.  

Read customer success stories

You can easily find out what’s new in SAS 9.1 from new products to updates and enhancements. Go to the SAS®9 link from our support.sas.com Web site.

For details on all of SAS products and solutions, click here

Education News

2007 course dates are now available on the web. Check our website at http://support.sas.com/training/canada/

Credit Scoring Solutions and Modeling for Basel II Using SAS
Offered for the first time in Canada, Brian Baesens developed Credit Scoring Solutions and Modeling for Basel II Using SAS to provide a thorough understanding of all issues involved in developing credit risk models in the context of the recent Basel II guidelines. This four day course also aims at providing a sound mix of both theoretical and technical insight, as well as practical implementation details, which is illustrated by several real-life case studies. For more information or to register, click here.

New Targeted Learning Courses
If you can not spare 2 or 3 days away from the office to take a class, the new one day Targeted Learning courses are for you. One day of training focused on a specific topic. Look for the following courses to be added to the 2007 schedule:

• Proc report Creating Detail and Summary reports using proc report
• Introduction to Tabulate, freq, means, and print
• Introduction to the Output Delivery System (ODS)
• Introduction To Binary Logistic Regression
• Introduction to Analysis of Variance
• Basic Descriptive Statistics and Inference

Upcoming Events

SAS Global Forum 2007
Date: April 16th - 19th
Place: Orlando, Florida
Details: website

Business Value Series
The Business Value Series is a set of interactive offerings hosted by SAS and delivered by leading industry experts. Each non-technical offering provides customers with a clear understanding of how strategic results and analysis can be put into action for more profitable decision making.

• An Analytic Mindset - Leveraging Analytics for Business Success
• This seminar uses an interactive approach where you will explore effective approaches to performing, interpreting, and presenting analysis – with an emphasis on the marketing content.
• Beginning the BI Discussion
• This course is an interactive Business Intelligence discussion that will help you clearly understand how to turn strategic results and analysis into profitable decision making through exploring the fundamentals of BI, the terminology, business value, pitfalls and more.
• Divide & Conquer – Realizing ROI Through Customer Segmentation
• This seminar shows you how to apply customer segmentation effectively and accurately interpret results of analytical techniques through practical case studies and discussions with industry leaders on segmentation readiness and critical success factors.
• Relationship Marketing Strategies
• This course offers you everything you need to know to plan, implement and evaluate a relationship marketing program through real world examples through case studies presented by industry leaders, like Scotiabank and others.

SAS In The News

SAS Named Best Anti-Money Laundering Solution
As part of the July Waters rankings issue, SAS was selected by readers as the best anti-money laundering solution provider. More than 500 readers voted on the best financial information technology vendors and awarded SAS 38.1 percent of the vote in the anti-money laundering compliance category. SAS also ranked second in the best operational risk compliance category.
"SAS strives to ensure our customers' success through focused business solutions and world-class expertise," says David Stewart, Director of SAS' Anti-Money Laundering Program. "This award is a testament that we are addressing the specific industry pains of our financial services customers worldwide, and that our hard work and commitment are appreciated."

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