Sifting through last quarter’s books to fill a multicolored dashboard with KPIs for the CFO is a recipe for failure in today’s "flat world." Web-optimized software and fiber-optic technologies have made it possible for employees to collaborate from many points around the globe to achieve competitive advantage and superior results at the speed of light. That’s why SAS offers a broader and deeper vision for performance management. SAS helps all key decision makers in an organization meet strategic objectives by providing them with superior, enterprisewide intelligence in real time, allowing them to make faster, more effective decisions and succeed in today’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it business world. It’s a continuous process "Performance management efforts will fail if they are set up as a one-time analysis or event to be recorded in a static scorecard, or if they evaluate the performance of individual departments or geographies in silos without taking into account the role played by each unit as part of the organization as a whole," says Jim Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS. "Performance management succeeds in driving superior performance only when it uses a continuous process to evaluate the operation of the entire organization and the roles played by all of its interconnected parts," continues Davis. SAS Performance Management links SAS business solutions - such as SAS Customer Intelligence and SAS Financial Intelligence - with SAS industry solutions through a common infrastructure that delivers substantial improvements through better intelligence and increased collaboration. And the entire performance management process can be monitored and managed through SAS’ industry-leading strategy mapping, key performance indicator (KPI) development and deployment, and scorecard reporting capabilities. An industry-specific approach SAS Performance Management takes industry-specific approaches supported by domain expertise and cross-functional intelligence solutions, and then delivers results through the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, which makes information a generally available resource and supports performance across the entire enterprise. SAS Performance Management leverages the power of industry-specific offerings that address the unique issues facing industry business leaders today. For example, in the retail banking industry, SAS Performance Management is specifically tailored to improve customer profitability through effective cross-sale programs that deepen customer relationships. With SAS, retail banks can answer tough questions such as: Who are our most profitable customers and what do they have in common? What product mix do they use? What channels do they use most often? Which of our customers will become the most valuable in the future? Most traditional costing and profitability software cannot integrate and analyze the massive volumes of data from multiple technologies and business processes all the way down to the individual account level. SAS Performance Management achieves these goals by seamlessly integrating business intelligence with performance management to analyze customer transaction histories, calculate profitability for tens or hundreds of million retail customers at the individual account level, perform multidimensional analysis - by customer, product mix and channel - and then deliver customer profitability insights to the right business units at the right time. Customers supply proof of SAS’ leadership in performance management SAS’ leadership takes performance management far beyond a theoretical or intellectual exercise. Today, customers are using SAS Performance Management to achieve measurable, sustainable improvements to their enterprises. Last month, Brigham and Women’s Hospital was named a winner in the "Corporate Performance Management and Balanced Scorecard" category of DM Review’s 2005 World Class Solution Awards competition. Brigham and Women’s Hospital executives and clinicians have been using SAS Performance Management since 2002 to attain proven results in their balanced scorecard efforts. This honor marks the second consecutive year a customer using SAS Performance Management software has won in DM Review’s World Class Solutions Awards. In 2004, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida Inc. (BCBSF) was named a winner in the Analytic Applications category for its use of SAS® Activity-Based Management (see related story).

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