SAS Forum UK 2004: Making the Breakthrough

Nearly 400 delegates attended SAS Forum UK in Birmingham, 3-4 November 2004, making it the largest SAS customer event in the UK so far. Its theme was Making the Breakthrough. More than 20 SAS user organisations presented how they had made important technical and business breakthroughs with our software, including users who have successfully deployed SAS®9, the groundbreaking new release of SAS software.

Another key innovation this year was the inclusion of SAS Certification testing sessions, available free of charge to any delegate who had pre-registered. The main conference on the second day included general sessions of interest to all delegates, with the rest of the presentations streamed, enabling delegates to choose to follow presentations grouped under the headings Data Integration & Management, Business Intelligence & Reporting, and Analytical Intelligence.

The Special Interest Groups (SIGs) occupied the entire agenda for the first day of the event, and were divided into Industry, Functional and Product & Technology SIGs. Some of them focused on sharing business issues, whilst others were geared around SAS communicating new technology and modern practices to the attendees, and gathering feedback on new functionality from SAS professionals. In all cases the SIGs were very well received, with 59% of delegates stating that they would like to attend another SIG in 6 months time. Here are some highlights:

Retail Banking

Pankaj Mistry, Head of Risk Systems & MI and Paul Scott, Risk Systems Development Manager, presented an insightful paper for Barclays on the theme "Evolving your Environment to Cope with Risk and Regulation", prompting a lot of audience engagement on issues such as managing large volumes of data and the use of the Intelligence Architecture Blueprint (IAB). Carole Roberts, and Jayne Tinker, Senior Risk Analysts at The Co-operative Bank focused on the use of analytical intelligence in the bank's Credit Risk department, raising some good points about the use of metadata, which the Co-op Bank's team published for everyone to use online, and skills transfer from SAS to the user organisation. Marie-Lise Theys, Senior Manager at HBOS presented on "Meeting Basel Requirements with your Data". She showed how the Basel II regulations can be very positive in forcing financial institutions to address key issues such as data quality. Finally, Paul Noble, Senior Manager at Lloyds TSB spoke on the topic, "Identification and Prevention of Fraud", provoking a lot of discussion about how to reduce "false positives" and keep one step ahead of the fraudster.

AXA PPP healthcare and Norwich Union generated discussions in the Insurance SIG with presentations by Mike Callaghan, BI Development Manager at AXA PPP healthcare and Ian Nunney, Data Analysis Manager at Norwich Union. Mike looked at ways to maximise the return on investment in SAS by going "Beyond Business Intelligence" in areas such as reporting, customer value measurement and fraud detection. He also discussed how to minimise total cost of ownership, for example by utilising existing infrastructure, reducing dependence on central IT resources and exploiting SAS web technologies to minimise deployment costs. Ian Nunney considered "The Changing Face of Insurance Data", exploring how both customer and pricing data are changing and growing, leading to more complex analyses and greater insight into customers from various perspectives.

SIG moderator, James Ochiai-Brown, Senior Consultant, SAS UK, commented that "the hottest topic was fraud. It's a challenge facing all insurers, with a common enemy, so they are keen to share information and experiences."

Optimisation and Forecasting

Steve McGivern, Resource Development Manager at British Gas, demonstrated how his company has used SAS to improve the accuracy of forecasting in the Home Services business. For British Gas customers this translates into faster response in the event of an emergency call out, such as a faulty boiler, and fewer cancellations of annual service visits.

Data Management, Integration & Quality

Chris Ferns, Business Data Analyst at Cheltenham & Gloucester, demonstrated how the Mortgage Risk Management Team at C&G implemented a robust SAS data architecture to support credit risk analysis and reporting. Independent consultant Steve Morton showed some of the ways to get maximum value from metadata assets - metadata should not be regarded as "just one more task to tick off the list"! SAS moderators, Leigh Bates, Technical Product Manager and Dave Annis, Head of Technology presented SAS' solutions for data management, integration and quality: SAS DFPower Studio, SAS ETL Studio and SAS Management Console. Major topics under discussion included data quality, profiling, data lineage, and impact analysis.

Applications Development

Other topics under discussion included migration paths from SAS/AF, SAS/IntrNet, the SAS Business Intelligence Portal and the benefits of using a single metadata model. "One of the hot topics was whether customers should continue to develop their own applications, or buy out-of-the-box tools like Business Intelligence Server, and what new skills are required to use these tools - such as JAVA and HTML," said moderator Pete Snelling, Technical Product Manager at SAS UK.

If you were after lots of practical hints and tips on SAS Enterprise Miner, the Data Mining SIG moderated by Simon Williams, Customer Support Consultant at SAS UK, was the place to be. For example: did you know that when building a process flow within a diagram, you should bear in mind that SAS Enterprise Miner 5.1 can run nodes in parallel? Or that you can now schedule SAS Enterprise Miner code to run as a batch program during a quiet period?

British Airways has been using SAS Enterprise Miner since 1999. Dr Simon Cumming, Principal Operational Research Consultant, showed how BA has used decision trees, logistic regression, cluster analysis and self-organising maps to measure customer value, segment customer data and predict customer attrition and the uptake of new technologies such as electronic ticketing.

John Dalton kicked off Thursday's events by welcoming delegates and introducing Allan Russell, Senior Vice President Strategy at SAS International, who gave the opening keynote on "Evolving the Enterprise". Allan's central theme was the organisational changes that you should consider, if you are to capitalise on the opportunities presented by SAS®9. He set out a roadmap for organisations to improve the way they use information, and gave some examples to demonstrate how SAS professionals can leverage their expertise to influence organisational change. Leigh Bates, Pete Snelling and Maria Charlesworth, Technical Product Managers at SAS UK, then gave an end-to-end walk-through of SAS®9, demonstrating how it can be applied to a specific business situation of a company acquisition.

The Business Intelligence & Reporting stream featured a presentation by Tracey Geary, Senior Manager at HBOS General Insurance, which has a relationship with two out of every five households in the UK. She demonstrated how the company is implementing SAS Strategic Performance Management on top of the SAS Data Warehouse to support company executives and senior managers.

The Analytical Intelligence stream featured a presentation by Koos Berkhout, Head of the Business Insight Unit at Loyalty Management UK. Koos introduced Nectar's Points Update Mailing, one of the largest and most complex mailings in the United Kingdom. He showed how the mailing is tailored with laser-printed messages that are generated using a set of decision trees. These evaluate millions of individual customer profiles, selecting the most relevant marketing message from each Nectar Sponsor. There are almost 6.5 million different variations of the resulting coupon sheet!

Throughout the day attendees also had the opportunity to visit the Knowledge Zone, which offered a demonstration area showcasing SAS solutions and technology, Education offerings and information on customer services. Delegates were able to raise their questions with SAS experts in the Knowledge Zone and feedback on their experiences by completing the customer survey.

Congratulations to the delegates who passed SAS Certification Testing while at the Forum. Altogether 68 took the exams, which they could take free of charge if pre-registered. "For those who did not pass, it was a worthwhile opportunity to get some free practice," says Nigel Armstead from SAS Education. Graeme McDermott, Manager, Customer Insight at the AA, endorsed the programme. "The good thing about SAS Certification is that it does not just test your ability to get the right answer to a question. It also tests your ability to write very efficient code and follow the logic. As a result, we're seeing massive productivity gains even from highly experienced SAS analysts," said Graeme.