Products & Solutions / Large-Scale Forecasting

SAS® Forecast Server

Automatically produces statistically based forecasts you can trust

SAS Forecast Server generates large quantities of forecasts quickly and automatically without the need for human intervention unless so desired. The software automatically chooses the most appropriate forecasting model, optimizes the model parameters and produces the forecasts. Time series data management capabilities are also included. The ability to preprocess transactional data can save organizations significant time and resources, and the unsurpassed scalability of SAS Forecast Server enables your business to operate more efficiently.

Benefits

  • Provides quick and timely forecasts from a user-friendly GUI.
  • Delivers forecasts that reflect the realities of the business, improving your ability to plan future events with confidence.
  • Potentially improves forecasting performance across all products and locations, at any level of aggregation.

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Features

  • Easy-to-use GUI
  • Scalability
  • Easy manageability
  • Trustworthy forecasts

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Screenshot

SAS Forecast Server uses the SAS Forecast Studio interface.


Screenshots

How SAS® Is Different

  • No other forecasting solution can provide such a broad offering of automation, scalability and statistical sophistication, enabling even the largest enterprises to operate more efficiently and effectively.
  • SAS Forecast Server uses its SAS Forecast Studio GUI to surface the large-scale automatic forecasting power of SAS High-Performance Forecasting along with the sophisticated time series data preparation and time series modeling features of SAS/ETS® software.
  • Rather than being constrained by a limited number of fixed models with fixed parameters, SAS Forecast Server provides a virtually unlimited range of model types with customizable parameters, making it possible to create more appropriate forecasting models for many different behaviors.
  • Flexible hierarchies enable users to define whatever hierarchy is most suitable for each forecasting task. Other software has fixed hierarchies that must be defined at the time of implementation. The ability to define new hierarchies as needed saves significant implementation cost, time and effort.
  • SAS Forecast Server supports forecasting as an ongoing and repeated process that fits into each organization's planning workflow.

Benefits

  • Provides quick and timely forecasts from a user-friendly GUI. SAS Forecast Server automatically produces high-quality forecasts with the ability to modify models interactively. This makes large forecasting processes manageable and allows analysts to focus their time on the most important forecasts. Forecasting requires less manual input, reducing the chance that organizational politics or personal agendas will contaminate the forecasts.
  • Delivers forecasts that reflect the realities of the business, improving your ability to plan future events with confidence. SAS Forecast Server automatically selects the business drivers, holidays or events that aid in the forecasting process from variables supplied to the system in the modeling process. As a result, forecasts can better reflect the intricacies of the business. SAS Forecast Server automatically builds the most appropriate model for your data and delivers forecasts that are as accurate as can reasonably be expected, given the nature of the behavior being forecast.
  • Potentially improves forecasting performance across all products and locations, at any level of aggregation. A virtually unlimited model repository makes it possible to create more appropriate forecasting models for a wider range of behaviors. In addition, planners can test what-if scenarios and determine how they are likely to affect future demand. Graphical displays provide visualization of the effects of holidays, sales promotions and unexpected events to help forecast and better plan future organizational activities.

Features

Easy-to-use GUI
  • Set up the hierarchy, parameters and business rules through an interactive graphical interface for automated enterprise forecasting.
  • Generate automatic forecasts in batch or interactively using the Project Setup wizard.
  • Reconcile up and down the hierarchy, for bottom-up, top-down or middle-out forecasting.
  • Identify exceptions automatically and generate exception reports based on sound statistical logic and business rules.
  • Overrule models using manual override to statistically forecast values, with the ability to lock the overrides.
  • Publish results automatically via hard copy, company portal or Internet.
  • Test what-if scenarios, such as changes to pricing or promotions, and determine their likely effect on future demand using the Scenario Analyzer.
Scalability
  • 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.
  • Facilitate ongoing and repeatable forecasting as part of your overall planning process by surfacing more effective statistically based forecasting methods that can be used throughout the entire organization.
  • Create more appropriate forecasting models for a wide range of behaviors using an extensible model repository that includes intermittent demand models, unobserved components models, ARIMAX models, dynamic regression, exponential smoothing models with optimized parameters, as well as user-defined models.
  • Client/server architecture makes SAS Forecast Server suitable for large-scale enterprise forecasting problems.
Easy manageability
  • Access 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.
  • Incorporate forecasting as an ongoing and repeated process that fits into your organization's planning workflow.
  • Customize several aspects of the large-scale forecasting process with control over model selection, event identification and exception reporting.
  • Create and manage events definitions with a specialized events management console.
  • Incorporate individual judgment or outside information using the manual override console that includes override locking.
  • Improve the forecasting process using automatic regressor and events selection.
  • Adjust forecasts for outliers with automatic outlier detection.
  • Build and reconcile models at different time intervals with temporal reconciliation features.
  • Generate code for batch processing using the code generation GUI.
Trustworthy forecasts
  • Automatically perform large-scale enterprise forecasting tasks.
  • Perform automatic hierarchical forecasting. Define the hierarchy, parameters and business rules through an interactive graphical interface.
  • Reconcile up and down the hierarchy, preserving locked forecast values.
  • Reconcile by time intervals.
  • Create ensemble models by combining two or more other models, often leading to more accurate forecasts.

Screenshots

Screenshot
SAS Forecast Server uses the SAS Forecast Studio interface.

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

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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 most appropriate method for generating forecasts.

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System Requirements

Host Platforms
  • HP/UX on Itanium: 11iv3 (11.31)
  • HP/UX on PA-RISC: 11iv3 (11.31)
  • IBM AIX on POWER architectures: 6.1 and 7.1
  • IBM z/OS: V1R10 and higher
  • Linux (32-bit): Novell SuSE 10 and 11; RHEL 5 and 6
  • Linux x64 (64-bit): Novell SuSE 10 and 11; RHEL 5 and 6
  • Microsoft Windows (32-bit): Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista *, Windows 7**, Windows Server 2003 family, Windows Server 2008 family
  • Microsoft Windows on x64 (64-bit): Windows XP Professional for x64, Windows Vista* for x64, Windows 7** for x64, Windows Server 2003 family for x64, Windows Server 2008 family for x64
  • Solaris on SPARC: Version 10 Update 8
  • Solaris on x64 (x64-86): Version 10 Update 8
Client Tier
  • Microsoft Windows (32-bit): Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista*, Windows 7**
  • Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit): Windows XP Professional for x64, Windows Vista* for x64, Windows 7** for x64
Web Tier
  • IBM WebSphere 7.0.0.13 on: AIX, Linux x64, Solaris (SPARC and x64), Windows x64, z/OS
  • JBoss EAP 4.3 on: AIX on Power, HP/UX on Itanium, Linux x64, Solaris (SPARC and x64), Windows x64
  • Oracle WebLogic 10gr3 and 11gr1 on: AIX on Power, HP/UX on Itanium, Linux x64, Solaris (SPARC an x64), Windows x64
Supported Web Browsers
  • Internet Explorer 7 and 8: Windows Vista* (32-bit and x64), Windows 7** (32-bit and x64), Windows XP Professional (32-bit and x64)
  • Firefox 3.6 : Windows Vista* (32-bit and x64), Windows 7** (32-bit and x64), Windows XP Professional (32-bit and x64), Linux 32-bit, Linux x64

You can also review the Third-party Support page for details about which operating environments support the Web application servers (such as IBM WebSphere).

Required Software
  • Base SAS

* NOTE: Windows Vista supported editions are: Enterprise, Ultimate and Business.
** NOTE: Windows 7 supported editions are: Enterprise, Ultimate and Professional.

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