-- Process Intelligence for Manufacturing --

5 September 2005
Dublin, Ireland. SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced that Analog Devices has selected a SAS Business Intelligence solution to help improve manufacturing efficiency and productivity at its manufacturing facility in Limerick, Ireland.

Analog Devices, Inc. is a world-leading semiconductor company specialising in high performance analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits. As part of Analog Devices' drive to maximise manufacturing efficiency, they recognise that problem detection, root cause analysis and decision-making must be as rapid and accurate as possible.

This process is enabled by quick and easy access to information. Previously, Analog was able to extract data and conduct analysis, but not in a sufficiently timely fashion and had limited capability for reusing reports or automating report production.

"A key reason for choosing SAS was that the system makes critical information much more freely available, allowing us to detect problems and spot improvement opportunities more rapidly," said Shane Geary, staff engineer at Analog Devices' wafer fabrication plant in Limerick, Ireland. "Engineers can automate many of the tasks associated with analysing data, thus significantly improving efficiency and many of the data requirements of process engineering, equipment engineering and manufacturing can be satisfied using a single solution set."

Analog Devices have significantly reduced their report development time; depending on the report, the development work can be completed in one-half to one-fifth the amount of time. Data extraction and analysis can now be fully automated and users can access the data themselves to create their own web-based reports.

"SAS was the company most likely to satisfy all of our requirements in a single product suite and after a successful in-depth evaluation we had the confidence to select SAS as our solution provider" says Geary.

"I am delighted that Analog is able to identify clear business benefits from implementing SAS," comments Brian Croke, sector manager for manufacturing. "Many organisations, particularly in manufacturing, are struggling to accurately gather and distribute information to the people who can act on it. SAS Business Intelligence Server has proven once again to be an excellent platform for providing easy-to-use, self-service reporting to a large and varied user community."

About SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 companies on the 2003 FORTUNE Global 500^® - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know^®.

For further information, please contact Tara McGivern on:
Tel:01-6136406 or e-mail tara.mcgivern@irl.sas.com
For more information on SAS, please visit www.sas.com/ireland

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ^® indicates USA registration. Copyright © 2005 SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.