A Helping Hand

French social service agency turns to SAS®9 for powerful, user-friendly solution

Caisse Nationale d'Allocations Familiales (CNAF) is France's family benefits agency, administering a €50 billion (US$62 billion) budget that touches the lives of 30 million French residents. It helps deliver childcare, find housing, and provide other services to low-income families and the unemployed.

CNAF already used SAS data warehousing tools to construct a decision information system before choosing SAS®9 to expand the ability of the agency's 30,000 employees to do a better job both in providing services and controlling costs.

"Managers need information to help make decisions, as do the people in charge of statistics and forecasting, but it can also be useful to the staff in our 123 regional offices," says Alain Folliet, the agency's deputy director and chief information officer.

Expanding the Reach of SAS
CNAF has been using SAS data warehousing tools since 1997 to track the increase in service allocations, understand the population it serves better, measure the agency's ability to improve its beneficiaries' lives, and forecast how legislative or demographic changes will affect service requests. From IT-trained analysts looking at the big picture to field office managers making a simple query, SAS has been helping CNAF manage its resources better.

While Folliet said his agency was happy with its SAS tools, it wanted to be able to do more. "SAS was very attentive to those needs. They understood our requests were important. That's how the partnership began."

As a SAS®9 Early Adopter, CNAF has experienced the full range of the platform's power and versatility. SAS®9 gives the agency comprehensive administration tools for extraction and distribution that integrate better with other components for in-house functions. SAS®9 is also J2EE compliant. "The integration is something that we were seeking for a very long time."

CNAF also wanted a tool that could be used not just by trained managers and IT staff, but also by all of CNAF's staff. "SAS always had the advantages as far as professionalism is concerned. But perhaps they were not as strong in the user-friendly area. Now they are strong."

And CNAF needed an intelligence platform that could help it respond quickly. "More and more, you need to know what you're doing in real time to make the decisions at the right time. SAS plays a very important role in letting us do that." Folliet's agency can quickly construct reports and scorecards. "SAS®9 contributes improvements that have a very clear relationship to these objectives."

More Options for Asking Questions
One of Folliet's goals has been to give all of his agency's employees the tools to create their own queries for more enhanced reporting. In the past, either someone skilled in IT created the queries, or those without the skills could choose from a list of pre-written queries. With SAS Web Report Studio, anyone can create queries. "We had a very strong demand for a tool that was easier to use, that didn't require expertise, and SAS Web Report Studio gives us that." SAS Web Report Studio is a zero-footprint browser interface based on the J2EE platform.

Folliet says SAS®9 is more than just a tool. "It has the capacity to integrate into an entire information system, an approach that makes it more of a solution than a tool. SAS is a very effective partner."

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