SAS UK drives retail business intelligence

Hughes and Smalley develop Retail/CPG industry sector team

22 November 2004 - SAS UK, the leader in business intelligence, is further strengthening its retail practice with the appointment of two retail and CPG specialists. David Hughes joins the company as Sector Manager, Retail/CPG and Alan Smalley as Retail Solutions Manager, appointments that will drive SAS in the retail sector.

Earlier this year, SAS launched its Retail Intelligence Solutions, a suite of integrated software offerings that has placed SAS top of mind to retailers by addressing three of their biggest challenges - understanding past customer behaviour and predicting future buying patterns, determining the net profitability of products, and seeing the effectiveness of promotional campaigns across multiple channels. This follows the SAS' integration of Marketmax business into its retail portfolio (see release SAS acquires Marketmax in move to dominate retail intelligence market, 8 October 2003).

"Business intelligence is key to retailers, however many are unaware of the extent of its benefits to all areas of their business. SAS provides retailers with the clarity required to formulate and implement consistent business strategies and performance metrics across the organisation, improve customer service and maximise profitability," said John Dalton, chief operating officer, SAS UK.

"David and Alan's industry expertise will give us further insight to build on our experience and all aspects of not only our relationships with our retail customer base, but importantly, their relationships with suppliers and customers," Dalton added.

Hughes joins SAS with over 20 years of retail practice, most recently with JDA software where he was Vice President of Sales, Western Europe. Smalley, who fills a new role as Retail Solutions Manager at SAS UK, comes from five years at Teradata where he worked across the retail sector specialising in business intelligence applications. Prior to this he had 11 years at House of Fraser, as Merchandising Manager and Trading controller for the Group.

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^®.

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