New SAS®9 product quickly produces millions of high-quality, automated forecasts

27 September 2004 - SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today unveiled SAS® High-Performance Forecasting, a powerful analytics-driven product built on the SAS®9 Intelligence Platform. SAS High-Performance Forecasting provides large-scale automated forecasting that allows companies to significantly reduce forecasting error, increase operational efficiency and improve the bottom line. The automated sophistication of this offering means forecasters no longer need to be statistics experts to create trustworthy, accurate forecasts.

"SAS High-Performance Forecasting represents a leap in forecasting capabilities for SAS and the entire market," said Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. "What this means is that large-scale forecasting processes have become so manageable that forecasters and analysts can now focus their energies on what's most important to them, rather than squandering precious time manually reviewing and overriding every single forecast."

The analytic sophistication and scalability of SAS High-Performance Forecasting generates large volumes of reliable forecasts to support the planning needs of all levels of business, including the operational level. With this product, forecasts can consider the realities of business, automatically accounting for outliers in the data and key business drivers, including holidays, promotions and other events reflective of a company's unique environment.

"SAS' products and services span the entire analytical spectrum, of which forecasting is certainly a part," said Mike Schiff, vice president of data warehousing and business intelligence at Current Analysis. "The new features and enterprise-class scalability of SAS High-Performance Forecasting enhance the overall value of the SAS®9 platform while complementing the interactive project-oriented forecasting capabilities of SAS/ETS."

SAS High-Performance Forecasting, which is now the most analytically advanced large-scale forecasting product available, performs automatic forecasting in a batch environment, enabling users to produce millions of forecasts, while significantly reducing forecasting error. Unlike any other product currently on the market, this product can predict future demands that affect a company's inventories - whether by product type, location or detailed supply-and-demand factors - providing fact-based, trustworthy forecasts that offer unbiased glimpses into the future.

"SAS continues to build on its solid reputation as a statistical, high-end, predictive-analytic provider with the SAS®9 Intelligence Platform and with its emergence as a leader in the business intelligence market. SAS High-Performance Forecasting, with an ability to produce huge volumes of forecasts quickly and reliably, is a significant building block of that reputation," said Todd Kirk, senior vice president of product development, Ipsos FMC, the third-largest survey-based marketing research firm in the world. "SAS brings a new level of automation, speed and scalability to the forecasting process, and the result is the ability to generate large-scale automated forecasts that are accurate and understandable. There's absolutely nothing else like it on the market today."

SAS High-Performance Forecasting helps organizations across the industry spectrum plan at the most operational level - where day-to-day decisions take place. For example:

• Retail: To ensure that retailers can take into account seasonal variations and promotions so they don't run out of products during high demand, which can result in customer loss, or overstock, resulting in cut prices and lost revenue.

• Manufacturing: To help consumer product goods and other types of manufacturers forecast product demand far in advance so they can plan more effectively - knowing what to produce when and avoiding the costly scenario of warehouses full of excess goods that must eventually be discarded.

• Banking: To help banks accurately plan for daily demands of multiple ATM's located throughout a specific location.

"Any industry can benefit from better forecasting," said Goodnight. "And within one company, forecasting can help multiple departments unite their plans. For example, marketing promotions must be reflected in the forecasts for production and distribution. Thanks to the SAS®9 platform, SAS is uniquely capable in enterprise forecasting."

Many companies today need such a large number of forecasts on so many inventories that human interaction is not always realistic; in fact, it often greatly slows down the forecasting process, creating unnecessary error. SAS combines sophisticated modelling techniques and scalability to create dependable forecasts that eliminate the human-error factor and automatically adjust to fluctuating conditions.

SAS High-Performance Forecasting is now available and is currently shipping. www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/forecasting/hpf/index.html

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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