SAS Knowledge Series

Resources

• Forecasting Errors Undermining Performance
  
  At a time when shareholders, investors, employees and customers are looking for assurance, the ability of organisations to compile and communicate their forecasts is falling seriously short.
  
  In a survey of more than 1,100 Australian and New Zealand CEOs and senior executives during November and December 2007, Ernst & Young found an alarming lack of confidence in the accuracy and rigor around operational forecasting and published forecast results.
  
  Among a host of disconcerting conclusions, Ernst & Young found that:
  
  

  • Only 38% of organisations had a better than 50/50 chance of accurately predicting major sales deals they would win. The remainder presumably would have actually done better had they simply tossed a coin.
  • Nearly half (45%) of three month revenue and margin forecasts were wrong by more than 20% in either direction.
  • Nearly three quarters (72%) of six month forecasts were more than 30% wrong in either direction.

  
  It should be nothing less than alarming that what passes for forecasting in the 21st century frequently turns out to be little more than poorly formulated guesswork - or worse.
  
  
  (PDF: 167 KB)
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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

In a report just issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and SAS, 59 percent of senior business executives said the credit crisis has forced them to scrutinize their risk management practices in greater detail.

This has led to an immediate need to implement a more effective enterprise risk management (ERM) strategy that includes tools for credit scoring, stress testing and assessment of economic capital.

Achieving an enterprise view of risk—and using that intelligence to enact change—requires comprehensive data management, predictive analytics and self-service reporting tools, all within a transparent environment that makes it easier to manage the entire process of identifying, measuring, mitigating and monitoring risk on an ongoing basis.

THE SOLUTION

The SAS approach to enterprise risk management offers a more complete, end-to-end solution that integrates data aggregation, analytics and reporting within a transparent framework.

A leading European bank has used SAS to create a risk data infrastructure supporting daily and ad hoc reporting on market and credit risk, reconciliations and regulatory reporting. Another SAS customer achieved detailed insight into risk exposure—enabling management to take timely, appropriate actions.

RESOURCES

Read a customer success story

Read an article

Read a book

Enterprise Risk Management: A Methodology for Achieving Strategic Objectives by Gregory Monahan

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

This is not the time to reduce marketing!

History tells us those that maintain or grow marketing during a recession, when competitors reduce, improve market share while lowering cost to acquire.

Yes, recessionary fears will leave consumers and businesses feeling poorer and exposed. They will be more frugal and cautious with expenditures. But it is still possible to capture attention. For marketers this means a greater need for insight: an understanding of customer profitability, potential, needs and attitudes—particularly as marketers adapt to a new economy.

With insight, the focus switches to interaction – which channels, touch points and messages deliver the highest return. Analytics helps you optimize and improve both channel effectiveness and customer experience to build profitable relationships.

Analytics, applied with the precision of a laser, affects two things: increased ROI and the ability to demonstrate value to those who hold marketing accountable. This could be the opportunity you have been waiting for. Seize it!

THE SOLUTION

One SAS customer is using our software to not only identify its most profitable customers, but those with high potential and lifetime value. Another relies on SAS to predict future behavior within customer portfolios, to ensure cross-selling doesn’t erode overall customer profitability.

Yet another used SAS to optimize the consistency of personalized touch points across multiple contact channels, products and lifecycle stages.

RESOURCES

Read a customer success story

Read a white paper

Competing on Customer Intelligence: Building Competitive Advantage Based on the Three I's of Marketing

Watch a Webcast

Crack the Customer Value Code: Secure Customers and Profits for Life

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