UUM spearheads excellence in management with SAS®

University Utara Malaysia (UUM) was formally incorporated in 1984 with the mission to provide academic excellence in the areas of business management education, IT and quality management. UUM plays a significant role in contributing to the social, economic and intellectual growth of the region. 

Dr. Engku Muhammad Nazri Bin Engku Abu Bakar, the Dean of Faculty of Quantitative Sciences at UUM, said that the university's mission is to produce human resources with the competency and commitment towards developing the nation and to escalate the academic entity's status as a center of excellence for management. 

As a means to this end, UUM particularly advocates the science and technique of data mining as a way for organizations in Malaysia to gain competitive advantage. 

“One of our biggest challenges faced is to convince private organizations to invest in data mining as many of them are hesitant in what is still deemed a new concept,” says Dr. Engku. 

“In order to play our part to convince these companies on how the right data can be profitable to their businesses, we require the right tools to demonstrate the wealth of insights that can be obtained from the employment of data mining techniques. 

“But at the same time, we need to provide sufficient training to our students, to equip them before they join the workforce as knowledge workers to spearhead the corporate world with good data mining practices,” he added. 

With this objective in mind, UUM first embarked on its partnership with SAS. 

“SAS was chosen as it provided the necessary curriculum development and course consulting that was essential to UUM,” Dr. Engku says. “Besides providing one of the most complete solutions in the market, it was their customer service that bowled us over. The SAS education team plays a major role in providing UUM with indispensable assistance, which was our core necessity.” 

SAS is used in many courses at UUM, especially under the Faculty of Quantitative Sciences. In fact, UUM is the first Malaysian public institution to offer data mining in subject known as "Knowledge Acquisition in Decision Making," which is currently taught to some 40 undergraduates each semester; and "Decision Support System" and "Statistics" subjects are taught utilizing SAS to 200 students each semester. 

Dr. Engku added that the "Data Mining and Research Methodology" subject is currently being proposed, adding on to the three existing courses.

Undergraduates taking up the SAS data mining courses cover training that allows them to explore large quantities of data and discover relationships and patterns that lead to proactive decision making.  They are also taught to use  SAS Enterprise Miner, which combines a rich suite of integrated data mining tools that empower users to exploit corporate data for strategic business advantages within a single environment. 

Driving graduates to higher recruitment
SAS has enriched the teaching process at UUM as lecturers are able to use suitable real-life datasets in their lectures while students are able to use them to build models and analyze information to create solutions for decision making. 

“Our objective is to furnish our students with the knowledge in data mining to make them more marketable in the competitive job market,” Dr. Engku says. “Students with SAS software knowledge today are not just demanded by the manufacturing industry, but also highly sought after by banks and the telecommunications industry.  In fact, about 80 percent of the SAS-skilled students from each semester gain employment immediately after graduating. 

“Not stopping there, SAS has also helped place students for internship programs, ultimately providing them the much-needed hands-on experience.  UUM is further prompted to go with SAS due to its impressive track record as the premier analytics software choice for institutes of higher learning worldwide, and its credibility as the only vendor that completely integrates leading data integration, analytics and traditional business intelligence (BI) applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data.” 

It came as no surprise to UUM when it won the prestigious IPTA (Public Institutions of Higher Learning) Award in 2005 for its Automated Evaluation System (SAES) that leverages SAS business intelligence. In addition, the SAES has also helped boost the university’s academic and student information system (ASIS). 

Future plans
“Plans are also in the pipeline to offer a world-class data mining certificate program for graduate students and working professionals,” Dr. Engku says. “I believe this will help propagate the importance of decision science among students and corporations alike as it offers the best integration of statistics with data mining.” 

The strong relationship also opened up opportunities for UUM to use SAS in the university's consulting work.

SAS has provided UUM researchers with opportunities to partner with SAS in many ways to solve questions and find solutions as well as partake in joint events and collaborations such as support for analytical seminars. 

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