SAS® Education at South Wales Police: outstanding knowledge transfer

The most densely populated of the Welsh police forces uses SAS® in data quality and management, analytics, business intelligence and reporting to support management, improve performance and help ensure public safety. Since 2007, training from SAS® Education has been a vital element in improving skill levels and supporting the SAS platform's successful growth.

Andy Davies, BI Data Modeller, South Wales Police: "We had a complete lack of SAS experience, which meant SAS training was a necessity. We had to do something and SAS Education sounded like the perfect way. It was easy to book courses, we could see the relevant training, we were given a course plan and procedure to go through, and which courses we should attend. SAS Education provided exactly what we needed. We've since based our job titles on roles described on the SAS Education website."

Simon Kinsey, BI Manager: "The study groups were a positive experience from start to finish, and we had tremendous success. SAS Course Leaders lifted me from an absolute beginner to a score of 86% in just five weeks. Online sessions were informative and well paced, and complemented the printed material perfectly with backup video and practice exams. It was a friendly, supportive and highly effective learning environment."

SAS training

South Wales Police has benefited from a wide range of courses, hosted at purpose-built SAS training facilities and onsite at police headquarters in Bridgend, including bespoke training using the force's own data. Training has included:

• Base SAS® software – working with the flexible and extensible programming language for data access, transformation and reporting
• SAS® Data Integration Studio - simplified integration with prebuilt transformations, sophisticated impact analysis and reusable metadata
• SAS® Enterprise Guide® - delivering the power of SAS® Analytics with results deployed in a Windows-client interface
• SAS® Information Map Studio - empowering business users with self-sufficient access to consistent information
• Creating Business Intelligence for your Organisation
• DataFlux® - data quality and integration solutions from SAS
• SAS® certification

Business requirements

With 6,000 staff, South Wales Police covers 900 square miles. Although this is only 10% of the country's landmass, it actually represents 42% of Wales' entire population (1.2 million citizens). In 2010, Home Office statistics revealed crime in the area had fallen by 11.8% compared to 2008-9; South Wales Police was the 8th most improved force nationally, with 14,000 fewer victims of crime.

When South Wales Police deployed a new records management system (RMS), this was a major catalyst for change, replacing multiple silo systems used to record crime, process custody records, prepare cases and manage incidents. The force fundamentally changed how it accessed, processed and analysed data, and how it provided results to users across the business. Since then, it has extended its BI capabilities with a data warehouse, and additional SAS tools for data management, analytics and reporting. This approach aims "to provide every aspect of data needed by modern policing."

Simon Kinsey: "Using SAS we want to empower people in their divisions, reduce dependency on local solutions, avoid duplicated effort and remove inefficiencies." To achieve this, he says, "We had to build our knowledge and develop our capabilities, particularly as our use of SAS has grown. In terms of specific roles, we could see courses for a role and how someone could progress. We used maps for different roles from SAS Education's website."

Transferring skills - sharing knowledge

Andy Davies describes SAS course leaders as "highly knowledgeable, not only with course materials but also ad hoc questions. More than once I left a question and they responded later via email or the SAS Professionals network. Having that ongoing contact is very valuable." The team in Information Services uses the SAS Professionals site to ask questions and connect with likeminded users in similar jobs. "That's very useful when you only have a small team," says Davies. SAS has also delivered onsite training, using the force's own data, and an onsite security workshop. "I like the data SAS provides but using your own data makes training that much more effective. Like any business, we have our own problems to solve, so it's great if we can tailor training to some of those real-life issues. It really makes a difference."

Education: an essential part of the mix

15 staff have undergone SAS training, improving their skills and helping spread the SAS culture across South Wales Police. Davies says, "In terms of delivering value, a number of users who completed Base SAS training courses have started developing code and producing solutions themselves."

Simon Kinsey adds, "We wouldn't have been able to create what we've achieved at South Wales Police without support from SAS Education. We now have well-trained people on our team who can take things forward. We also have people in the ICT team who can look after the SAS environment, which again would not have been possible without SAS training. We started out trying to do things from a position of being uneducated in SAS, so we appreciate how tricky that can be."