Yukon Mines Gold with SAS® Analytics

Over the past 10 years, the Government of Yukon has expanded its ability to provide a broader range of services to its 33,000 citizens spread out over 183,000 square miles. To meet that mandate, the Government of Yukon’s IT department has capitalized on SAS Integration Technologies to build simplified Web applications and connections to personal productivity applications to bring reporting and information access to broader numbers of Yukon government employees.

From its earliest days, Yukon has been one of the world’s most productive mining centers, yielding major amounts of lead, zinc, silver, gold, and copper. While the prospectors are fewer (as are hunters and trappers who figure prominently in Yukon’s history), the province today is a magnet for tourism, particularly hunters, fishers, and other outdoors enthusiasts, drawn to the pristine parks and exceptionally broad range of wildlife.

The largest employer by far in Yukon is the government, employing over 4,500 of the 12,500 labor force in the territory, most of them in the territorial capital of Whitehorse. Although relatively small in size, the Yukon government must still provide an array of citizen services, including education, health, social services and highway infrastructure. Today, Yukon has learned that useful, timely, and accurate information can be as valuable as the Klondike gold that previous generations flocked there to mine. 

According to Felix Vogt, manager of application services, SAS plays a central role in the flow of information across the territorial government. “For at least 10 years, we’ve relied on SAS on our corporate data warehouse to generate reports and respond to queries,” he said. “For more than 20 years, we’ve used SAS for financial reporting on our mainframe.  We have hundreds of users accessing that through mainframe terminal emulation. It’s been a dependable mainstay in our IT portfolio. However, that traditional model – having specially trained experts create reports and get information for users – had its limitations.
 
“As the Yukon government has grown, we faced information bottlenecks. We have a range of different users who have different skills and different needs.  First, we needed to find new ways to enable our people to access their own information quickly. That way, an accounts payable clerk could see what vendors were paid yesterday or a manager could see his department’s budget status. We have hundreds of these users. At the same time, we needed to provide more powerful reporting tools to the analysts who perform more sophisticated reporting and ad hoc queries.” 

Bringing reporting to the masses
Yukon has built a corporate data warehouse containing information on the government’s $590 million annual budget.  That warehouse is updated nightly with extracts from the territory’s financial systems – general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.
 
To extend the value of that data warehouse and its valuable SAS expertise, Yukon’s IT group deployed SAS integration technology and built a Java-based interface that runs within a standard Web browser. Using this application, hundreds of users can enter parameters and generate simple reports – quickly and immediately.

“For instance, a manager can just enter an account code and a fiscal year and choose what level of detail she wants to see,” Vogt said.  “The data appears on-screen immediately and creates a PDF for printing or formal reporting.  Alternatively, she can move it into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. We can even leverage those reports and convert them into a stored process that can – with the SAS/Excel add-in –  run directly from Excel.”

Power for the analysts
For analysts who perform ad hoc reporting for the Yukon government, SAS has been the tool of choice for many years. SAS goes directly against the data warehouse and enables these power users to work directly with the data to create scenarios, what-if analyses, and other sophisticated reports.

“SAS gives us fast answers to the non-recurring questions,” said Vogt. “These analysts know the data well and how to get the answers that they need right away.”

Employees at the Bureau of Statistics must produce a broad range of monthly, quarterly, and annual reports and statistical summaries. With SAS, these analysts can compile and report results quickly. 

“As an ad hoc reporting tool, SAS has been terrific for the Yukon government,” said Vogt. “And the Excel add-in has made it easier for us to give more power and flexibility to our end users. They can access stored SAS reports from an Excel menu, enter some parameters, and get their results immediately. They don’t need to run a report, print it out, and type the numbers into Excel.”

According to Vogt, the ability to use new BI tools has been a major step forward for the various government agencies.  “We’re also moving a lot of our financial systems off the mainframe and onto a Web-based system. That’s making things much more usable for more of our people.”

Today, the upgraded SAS implementation is running 10,000 reports a month. There are 50 users of the Excel Add-in and 200 additional users of the Web-based financial reporting system.

“SAS has made us much more productive by providing fast and accurate information,” said Vogt.

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