SAS^® Strategy Management

Features

Employ multiple strategy frameworks

• Implement proven strategy frameworks or design your own in a point-and click Web environment.
• Underlying technology makes it easy to create relationships, roll-ups, formulas and specialized visualization techniques in a Web environment to support virtually any strategy framework.
• Use governance frameworks to track key risk indicators and controls.
• Supports: Balanced Scorecard, EFQM, Baldrige, Value-Based Management, Six Sigma and others.

Create and visualize strategy maps

• Show how objectives, metrics and initiatives are connected in cause-and-effect diagrams.
• Design and map out your entire strategy visually and dynamically during executive planning sessions.
• Behind the scenes, the solution creates rule sets and hierarchies to reflect the relationships in various tables and views. 
• Each object can be linked directly to an automated data source and make use of traffic lights, alerts, flags and other related information defined in your strategy framework. 
• Add hyperlinks, launch analytical routines or use objects to navigate through multilayered reports. 
• Create diagrams to depict strategy maps, workflows, geographical information, building and department layouts or even risk dependency diagrams. 
• With comprehensive "drawing" capabilities, designers can work with layers, shapes, images, colors and gradients to make each diagram visually appealing, relevant and unique.

Enforce cascade management

• Ensure that all objectives and metrics throughout an organization are dynamically linked and managed with appropriate security and audit measures.
• After defining a new strategy, cascade it down to other operating units and allow them to map to existing objectives, themes and initiatives while personalizing to local needs.
• Use automatic rules to ensure that objects (reporting entities, objectives, metrics, etc.) cannot be deleted until all dependencies have been removed. 
• Limit who can see entire scorecards or specific objectives and metrics with comprehensive security.
• Create rules for individuals or groups, accessing existing LDAP directories to simplify the process.
• Hierarchies and roll-ups aid navigation, audit and visualization of results.

Simplify data integration

• Automate the collection of data to save time, improve quality and provide a solid data audit.
• For manual processes, use Web forms to capture data electronically.
• Automatically extract, transform and cleanse virtually any data, in any format, on any platform with ease.
• Once set up, the solution provides a complete audit of how data is used.
• Schedule the collection of data to meet your needs – monthly, weekly or even daily.
• Powerful analytics identify suspect data to address quality issues before data is added to reports.

Use interactive dashboards, collaboration and alerts to communicate performance

• Performance data is displayed throughout the system both numerically and textually.
• Navigate through hierarchical dashboards and strategy maps, linked scorecards, diagrams or custom reports.
• Focus on hidden anomalies fast through flags and alerts, and identify objectives from child scorecards that have failed to meet thresholds, even if the parent is showing strong progress.
• Share knowledge and collaborate by using notes and discussion threads.
• Create dials, sliders, meters or traffic lights to quickly analyze results and access notes, trend charts or custom reports.
• Compare performance of multiple scorecards in a single view.
• Add comments to metrics and objectives, and search through comments or threads by subject or person.
• Define thresholds and alerts that create flags, notes and e-mails.

Enable strategy validation and analytics

• Apply point-and-click correlation analysis to prove relationships and test strategic hypotheses.
• Perform what-if scenarios to see how changes ripple through the strategy. 
• Using correlation analysis, prove and prioritize which metrics and objectives deliver the greatest impact on strategic outcomes. 
• Reduce the metrics required to those that are truly important.