No wonder that SAS, the world's biggest little-known software firm, has a worker turnover rate of less than 5 per cent annually

Ian Tan
tanyhi@sph.com.sg

YOU might not be familiar with the name SAS, but like a scribe once wrote, it is 'the most important software company you have never heard of'.

Firstly, its employees enjoy some of the best worker benefits on the planet.

At its headquarters in Cary, North Carolina in the US, there are four subsidised childcare centres, an on-site healthcare facility, an almost 1,400 sq m fitness centre with indoor pool, and pantries that are always stocked with free food.

With a perpetual supply of M&Ms, the company is reported to go through an estimated 22 million tons of the chocolate every year.

And don't forget the massage, dry-cleaning and hair salon services, plus unlimited sick leave.

Not surprising that talk show host Oprah Winfrey called it 'the best place to work', with turnover rates unusually low at below 5 per cent annually.

The local SAS office follows more or less the same culture.

According to Singapore managing director Bill Lee, employees are given extra leave or even free overseas holidays for the entire family in return for hard work.

Now that your eyes have glazed over with envy, the next big thing about SAS is that it is the largest private IT firm ($2.21 billion in revenue in 2003) in the world with its fingers in more pies than one can imagine.

Ever wondered how large companies and governments deal with the huge pile of data that goes through their organisation daily?

Be it sales figures from a hundred outlets, inventory takings in a warehouse, the latest health statistics or just the retail prices of goods, someone has to make sense of all this data.

Chances are SAS is helping these organisations behind the scenes.

SIFTING DATA

SAS is currently the leader in business intelligence software, or rather, tools that sift through mountains of data to find specific patterns or meanings.

Of course, there must be someone who defines how the data is organised since computers are not that smart yet.

What the software excels in is the ability to arrange huge gobs of data, take into account thousands of factors and variables, and then give you figures that help you make predictions on how certain business decisions will turn out.

If you think this is science fiction, just visit the SAS website (www.sas.com) and you will be stunned by the sheer number and diversity of companies that use their software to different ends.

Amazon uses SAS software to decide how best to create webpages that make people desire to buy things online.

Governments like the Denmark one uses SAS to create their population census without ever asking their residents a question.

Health insurance companies are able to instantly spot minor discrepancies in claims and prevent millions of dollars of insurance fraud.

The US Air Force uses SAS software to determine the actual effects of Agent Orange (a herbicide used during the Vietnam War) on its war veterans.

A surprising finding was that even without exposure to Agent Orange, veterans' incidence of cancer increased the longer they stayed in South-east Asia.

SAS software is so renowned for its number-crunching abilities, 96 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune Global 500 use it.

According to Mr Lee, some US Homeland Security-linked firms also rely on SAS, though he could not reveal more details on how it is used to combat terrorist activity.

GUT FEEL NOT GOOD ENOUGH

So, how about good old 'gut feel', you say?

Don't many successful businessmen make decisions based on their wide experience and intuition?

Mr Lee said: 'Yes, you can use your gut feel if you are running a business with say half a million dollars in annual revenue. Or maybe $2m.

'But once you get to the point where your company is making $100m to $200m, you get very complex situations.

'You are competing with your customers at regional levels, you have thousands of employees and so on.'

Naturally, SAS' business is benefitting from the fact that we are living in an age where terabytes of information are transforming markets by the second.

According to Mr Lee, more companies have approached SAS with enquiries in the past few years.

Having invested much of its capital in front-end areas like marketing or manufacturing, companies are finding that they have under-invested in background operations like data analysis.

The technology is now readily available for these companies to manage their data but locally, one major obstacle remains.

WEAKEST LINK

Mr Lee said: 'In most organisations, they don't have someone who knows how to work on such information, even if they did have the software. The weakest link here is always the human being.'

As such, SAS is now working with several local government bodies to see how it can help train more professionals with expertise in this area.

If you think handling data that can change lives is your calling, perhaps it is time you turned your eyes to the invisible world of business intelligence.