Products & Solutions / Large-Scale Forecasting

SAS® Forecast Server

Automatically produces statistically based forecasts you can trust

SAS Forecast Server generates large quantities of high-quality forecasts quickly and automatically, allowing organizations to plan more effectively for the future. The unsurpassed scalability of SAS Forecast Server enables your business to operate more efficiently at all levels by quickly and automatically producing statistically based forecasts you can trust. SAS Forecast Server bundles the SAS High-Performance Forecasting engine with the SAS Forecast Studio GUI. 

Benefits

  • Delivers forecasts in a quick and timely manner through a user-friendly graphical interface.
  • Provides forecasts that reflect the realities of the business, improving your ability to plan future events with confidence.
  • Improves forecasting performance across all products and locations, at any level of aggregation.

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Features

  • Easy-to-use GUI
  • Large-scale automatic forecasting
  • Easy manageability

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“SAS will continue to help Staples understand how our business is performing and where it's going. With SAS, we gain knowledge that really tells us what drives our sales and what makes our forecasts work.”

—Alan Gordon

Director of Sales Forecasting

Staples

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Screenshots

SAS Forecast Server uses the SAS Forecast Studio interface.

Screenshot: SAS Forecast Server uses the SAS Forecast Studio interface.
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How SAS® Is Different

  • Automatically performs large-scale enterprise forecasting tasks.
  • Performs automatic hierarchical forecasting—define the hierarchy, parameters and business rules through an interactive graphical interface.
  • Reconciles up and down the hierarchy, preserving locked forecast values and leveraging the strength of SAS’ Analytics.
  • Generates exception reports based on sound statistical logic and business rules.
  • Supports forecasting as an ongoing and repeated process that fits into the organization’s planning workflow.

Benefits

  • Delivers forecasts in a quick and timely manner through a user-friendly graphical interface. SAS Forecast Server automatically produces high-quality forecasts with the ability to modify models interactively without programming. This makes large forecasting processes manageable and allows analysts to focus their time on the most important forecasts. Forecasting requires less manual input, which frees up time for analysis and reporting and improves accuracy.
  • Provides forecasts that reflect the realities of the business, improving your ability to plan future events with confidence. Only SAS Forecast Server automatically selects the business drivers, holidays or events that aid in the forecasting process from any number of variables supplied to the system in the modeling process. As a result, forecasts better reflect the business. SAS Forecast Server automatically builds the most appropriate model for your data and delivers trustworthy forecasts.
  • Improves forecasting performance across all products and locations, at any level of aggregation. A complete array of advanced forecasting methods can statistically estimate the impact of sales and marketing events. The Scenario Analyzer lets planners test "what-if" scenarios such as price changes or promotions, and determine their likely affect on future demand. Graphical displays provide a greater understanding of the effects of holidays, marketing events, sales promotions and unexpected events such as weather, improving the ability to forecast and plan future sales promotions and marketing activities.

Features

Easy-to-use GUI
  • Automatic enterprise forecasting: set up the hierarchy, parameters and business rules through an interactive graphical interface.
  • Project setup wizard: generate automatic forecasts in batch or through the interactive graphical interface.
  • Hierarchical reconciliation: reconcile up and down the hierarchy, leveraging the strength of SAS Analytics.
  • Fix exceptions automatically: generate exception reports based on sound statistical logic and business rules.
  • User override facility: overrule models by manual override to statistical forecast values; override locking facility.
  • Extensible reporting: publish results automatically via hard copy, company portal or Internet.
  • The Scenario Analyzer lets planners test "what-if" scenarios such as changes to pricing or promotion, and determine their likely affect on future demand.
Large-scale automatic forecasting
  • Choice of forecast automation level. Users can choose the level of automation for the forecasting process: Rediagnose and identify candidate models, re-estimate existing model parameters or generate forecasts using existing models and parameters.
  • Facilitates ongoing and repeatable forecasting as part of a company’s overall planning process, surfacing more effective statistically based forecasting methods that can be operationalized throughout the forecasting process.
  • Extensible model selection list: intermittent demand models, unobserved components models, ARIMAX models, dynamic regression, exponential smoothing models with optimized parameters, plus user-defined models.
  • Client/server architecture makes SAS Forecast Server suitable for large-scale enterprise forecasting problems.
Easy manageability
  • Access to the superior forecasting capabilities of SAS through SAS Forecast Studio, the user-friendly interactive graphical interface. No programming is required; users just point and click their way to powerful forecasting capabilities.
  • Functionality to support forecasting as an ongoing and repeated process that fits into the organization’s planning workflow.
  • An easy means to customize several aspects of the large-scale forecasting process, including exception rules, the model repository and events, giving users more flexibility and control over model selection, event identification and exception reporting.
  • Events management console.
  • Manual overrides console, including override locking.
  • Automatic regressor and events selection.
  • Automatic outlier detection.
  • Code generation via GUI: code generation for batch processing.

Screenshots

SAS Forecast Server uses the SAS Forecast Studio interface.

SAS Forecast Server uses the SAS Forecast Studio graphical user interface.

Enlarge

Focus your attention on addressing exceptions and creating high-value forecasts.

SAS Forecast Server provides a quick and easy way to manage forecasting through the new SAS Forecast Studio graphical user interface. It allows forecasters to focus their attention addressing exceptions and high-value forecasts.

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Automatically generate large volumes of reliable forecasts.

The SAS High-Performance Forecasting engine can automatically account for seasonal fluctuations and other business drivers, and selects the best method for generating forecasts.

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System Requirements

Supported Platforms

SAS servers, including Base SAS and SAS Metadata Server, can be installed on one or more hardware systems in a multitier configuration.

  • AIX: Version 5.3 and Version 6.1 on POWER architectures

  • HP-UX PA-RISC: HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)

  • HP-UX Itanium: HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23), 11iv3 (11.31)

  • Linux for x86 (x86-32): RHEL 4 and 5, SuSE SLES 9 and 10

  • Microsoft Windows (x86-32): Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista*, Windows Server 2003 family

  • Microsoft Windows (on Itanium): Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems

  • Solaris on SPARC: Version 9, 10

  • Solaris on x64: Version 10

* NOTE: Windows Vista Editions that are supported include Enterprise, Business and Ultimate

Supported Web Browsers

  • Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Pro

  • Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista*

  • Firefox 2.0 on Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista* and Linux x86 (SuSE and RHEL)

Supported Web Browsers
  • SAS client and mid tier require Sun JRE 1.5

Ready to learn more?

Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.