SunTrust Banks Chooses SAS for Reporting and Analysis

In 1998, Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks Inc., began a quiet transformation, streamlining its organizational structure, improving operating efficiency and beefing up the company's infrastructure. As part of this effort, SunTrust marketing managers turned to SAS for improved data analysis and Web-enabled reporting.

While many groups within the commercial banking company use SAS for data management, the marketing systems group has increased its use of SAS recently to deliver timely customer and product information to more than 5,000 business users via the Web.

According to Bob May, SunTrust's marketing systems manager, his group first turned to SAS for data access on the mainframe. Using base SAS and SAS/Connect, they extract more than 16 million account records from the company's mainframe environment, then transform and clean the data to create SAS data sets designed specifically for marketing purposes. They run SAS for UNIX on a Solaris server from Sun Microsystems. "Sun has been a very well supported platform," says May. "We felt the SAS, Sun partnership was very strong, and we chose Sun for that reason."

With a strong platform in place and data transformed for marketing purposes, May and his team use SAS to make the information available online, where product managers and branch employees can search customer information and "drill down" into different customer groups and product categories.

Reporting with SAS/IntrNet
SAS/IntrNet provides Common Gateway Interface and Java technologies for building dynamic Web applications for accessing and executing remote SAS programs and performing sophisticated analysis and decision support – all from the Web.

With SAS/IntrNet, SunTrust sales and marketing employees have direct access to dynamic, up-to-date reports that display customer and household data down to the officer and branch level.

"These reports are produced dynamically with SAS/IntrNet," says May. "We've created a drop down list of reports for branch employees to choose from, and since the reports are dynamically produced, users can change the sort order or re-order the information in any way that they like. SAS/IntrNet makes all of this possible; it's very impressive."

According to May, ease of use is the best feature of SAS/IntrNet reporting. "The key for us was finding a product that was extremely easy to use. With so many users, it's important that our reporting products require no expert skills. And since it's a thin client, we never have to touch the desktop."

Output Delivery System Does It All
For reporting sales activity data, May and his team turn to the Output Delivery System (ODS) in base SAS. Unlike the dynamic customer reports created with SAS/IntrNet, the company's activity reports offer static weekly views of sales and marketing results.

The new ODS feature in SAS Release 8.2 offer SunTrust marketing analysts powerful options for outputting SAS data into Excel, PDF, JPG and HTML formats. "We've been very pleased with the Output Delivery System," says May. "We use ODS to produce more than 23,000 files a week. We use it to produce complex formatting and looping through reports at every single level imaginable."

Sales and marketing managers use these reports to track the progress of weekly promotions and to measure sales performance by employee, product, region and Line of Business. The activity reports are also transformed every week into an executive overview for senior vice presidents and business executives.

"That's the beauty of ODS," says May. "We have so many different requests for multiple formats, and with ODS it's easy to meet everyone's reporting needs."

Dynamic OLAP Reporting
Online analytical processing (OLAP) is the newest reporting method used by the SunTrust marketing systems group. OLAP offers the power to retrieve answers to multidimensional business questions quickly and easily. With SAS OLAP technology, SunTrust marketing managers get fast, efficient access to summarized data and gain complete control over global views of enterprise information.

The SunTrust marketing systems group hired SAS Consulting last year to help establish the program for OLAP reporting. "They came in and did a turnkey application for us," says May. "They did a knowledge transfer and taught us everything we needed to know in three or four days. It reduced our learning curve tremendously."

And now, May's group uses the SAS MDDB Server and webEIS software to surface data in a fast, interactive "cube" format. "One of the nice things we saw right away with the webEIS product was the ability to create your own view of a cube and save it for future use," says May. That means each time the data is updated, users can return to their customized view of the information to see how the business has changed.

"That's our strength," says May, "getting data out to the people that need it, in the right format and at the right time. Our other strength is the extraction and transformation process, the scrubbing and cleaning of data to ensure accurate results. SAS makes it all possible; we couldn't do it all without SAS."

Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved.