Making change happen

Portuguese public administrators think strategically with SAS®

The Portuguese National Institute for Public Administration, or INA, provides training, consulting and research activities for nearly 16,000 public sector employees each year. Through its training programs, INA offers more than 500 courses. Its public policy research is often applied at both national and international levels. And its mission to foster the performance of every employee in the public sector is a demanding goal.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about The Portuguese National Institute for Public Administration and its successes with SAS. 

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Customer ViewPoint
You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q& A.

Manuel João Pereira
Vice President, The Portuguese National Institute for Public Administration

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SAS helps INA reach that goal with business intelligence solutions that support information management and knowledge-based strategies for change.

"We've been using SAS to help us get a better view of our management responsibilities," says Manuel João Pereria, vice president of information services. "And we also use SAS when we want to help the Portuguese public administration design objectives and review their performance using information that is available in many different systems."

For example, INA recently used SAS to design an information management board for each of the country's public hospitals. Likewise, many of the country's police departments are turning to SAS for balanced scorecard initiatives that help measure and define strategy through a series of key targets.

At the national level, INA has implemented a data warehousing and balanced scorecard initiative with SAS. The new system integrates an Oracle database with SAP R/3 data and data from a proprietary budgeting system. The result is an executive-level dashboard, designed with SAS Strategic Performance Management, which replaces a series of paper-based reports that executives used in the past to make decisions.

"We try to help the leaders of the Portuguese public administration make change happen," says Pereria. "SAS plays a very important role in that process."

Improved accuracy, reduced time to intelligence
Before implementing solutions from SAS, Pereria says the agency faced a number of obstacles in delivering business intelligence. "We had to extract data from paper printouts, and we also had to extract information from each of these three different systems. It was a process that took us much more time, and the number of mistakes we had was much higher."

With SAS, INA now has timely, accurate information – and a better understanding of its constituents. "The data we extract can be quite useful for the decision makers of our company," says Pereria. "How many students are actually enrolled in a particular area or segment of courses? How long does it take to get an invoice to be paid? What is the perception of our students for a particular teacher? The meaning of information that we get from SAS is really important for us."

With its new balanced scorecard, INA uses SAS to monitor, manage and predict its key performance indicators – quickly and easily. "The integration of key performance indicators where the data is spread around three systems is a really powerful thing for us," says Pereria. "The graphical interface is also quite nice, so decision makers who don't feel comfortable with the technology can get the answer to some of their questions just by looking at the SAS dashboard."

In fact, Pereria's team is working closely with top management administrators and all of the cabinets to make detailed information easily available. "If you want to be proactive in the public administration and if you want to make change happen, looking at the details is very important. SAS likes to look at the details."

Learning from the past, predicting the future
Most importantly, Pereria says SAS provides intelligence that was lacking in its existing infrastructure. "The SAP system is very important in the transactional area, but when we go to a higher level of management where we need more integration between various systems, SAS helps us link data from all those systems. It adds value at a higher level in the organization – not the transactional level but the decision making level, and that's important for us. We use SAS every day for that."

For INA, SAS' predictive capabilities are a key element in helping the organization stay ahead of the curve and face the future with confidence. "We're actually learning from the past," says Pereria. "And the insights from SAS offer continuous learning. SAS brings us the ability to look at the past and imagine the future. And that's important for us."

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