A new management model for the information age based on enterprise not control.

Budgets have long been accepted as the way to manage and control activities within organisations. However, traditional budgets are now being challenged, particularly in companies that wish to devolve decision making to the front-line and react quickly to market opportunities. Companies are creating new management processes that encourage responsibility and initiative throughout the organisation. The traditional budget process is being replaced by rolling forecasts, balanced performance scorecards, cost analysis and a focus on the benefits to be delivered from longer term investments.

SAS can assist with the implementation of these principles as follows:

• Target setting - obtain information on competitor activity and link to external databases
• Strategy - make the update and maintenance of objectives and targets an easy process
• Growth and improvement - build hypotheses and scenarios and test against capabilities
• Resource management - track the life time cost and value of resources
• Coordination - search for and use cause and effect relationships across business units and processes
• Cost management - identify areas of cost which need attention through analysis (eg. Activity Based Costing) and data mining
• Forecasting - create and maintain rolling forecasts
• Measurement and control - implement a balanced scorecard with leading and lagging indicators
• Rewards - track actual performance against targets
• Delegation - maintain personal information portals.

SAS is the only software supplier that is capable of collecting, transforming, modeling, analysing and supporting the complex information needs of organisations. Our flexible framework adapts technology to the manage-ment processes - not the other way around.

"Customers want a better management tool - one that focuses on dynamic, strategic targets, rather than measuring results compared with traditional budgets".
John Wilkes, Head of Performance Management, SAS UK