Products & Solutions / High-Performance Forecasting

SAS® High-Performance Forecasting

Produce extremely large volumes of high-quality forecasts quickly and automatically to improve planning and decision making

SAS High-Performance Forecasting automatically generates large volumes of reliable forecasts to support the planning and decision making at all levels of business, including the most operational level. Its automated sophistication enables you to produce better forecasts in less time, with less effort.

Benefits

  • Produces trustworthy forecasts that reflect the realities of your business.
  • Lets you focus on what's most important.
  • Can reduce bias and forecasting error.
  • Improves inventory management.
  • Can improve forecasts for items that rarely sell.

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Features

  • Data preparation
  • Sophisticated modeling techniques
  • Automatic model selection
  • Customized output and reports
  • Superior scalability

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" We expect the costs in connection with the precise predictions to be able to be reduced by up to 50 percent. So it is a matter of considerable savings."

—Mikael Gynther

Energy Market Manager

Copenhagen Energy

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Screenshot

Automatically generate large volumes of reliable forecasts.



How SAS® Is Different

  • The combined scalability and modeling sophistication of SAS High-Performance Forecasting produces huge volumes of dependable forecasts.
  • Built on more than 35 years of analytic software development, SAS High-Performance Forecasting automatically selects the time series models, business drivers and events that best explain your historical data, optimizes all model parameters and generates high-quality forecasts.
  • SAS gives you a clearer view of the future so each day you can operate your business with more confidence.

Benefits

  • Produces trustworthy forecasts that reflect the realities of your business. Automatic selection of business drivers, holidays and events aids in the forecasting process, producing trustworthy forecasts that reflect the realities of your business environment.
  • Lets you focus on what's most important. By providing automatic, reliable forecasts on a large scale, SAS High-Performance Forecasting makes complex forecasting processes manageable. Forecasters can focus their attention on the most critical forecasts rather than manually building models for each individual item.
  • Can reduce bias and forecasting error. Statistically sophisticated forecasts are produced automatically, reducing the potential bias and politics of a judgment-driven forecasting process.
  • Improves inventory management. SAS forecasting provides insights into future demands for your products, enabling you to better match supply with demand and avoid excess inventory and the associated expenses. Forecasts can be calculated for every product at each location, ensuring you are getting the right inventory to the right place at the right time. Forecasts are generated in a scalable batch process so they can be easily integrated into a production forecasting environment.
  • Can improve forecasts for items that rarely sell. The software includes intermittent demand models designed to forecast slow-moving goods so you can match inventory with the next spike in demand.

Features

Data preparation
  • Aggregates transactional data into time series format.
  • Identifies and accounts for missing values.
  • Accumulates data into any frequency time series.
Sophisticated modeling techniques
  • Automatic outlier detection.
  • Trend analysis.
  • Optimized model parameters.
  • BY-group processing for flexible forecasting hierarchies.
  • Seasonality and intermittent series tests.
  • Handles zero-padded data (leading or trailing zeros recorded in the data).
  • Extensible model repository.
  • Predefined as well as customizable holiday and calendar event definitions.
  • Automatic indicator variable creation.
  • Reconciliation of hierarchical forecasts.
  • Temporal reconciliation allows forecasts generated for different time intervals (e.g., hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, etc.) to be reconciled to take advantage of unique seasonalities at each interval.
Automatic model selection
  • Seasonal and nonseasonal exponential smoothing models.
  • ARIMAX models.
  • Intermittent demand models.
  • Unobserved components models.
  • User-defined models.
  • Automatic variable transformations (log, square root, logistic, Box-Cox).
  • Model selection based on performance in a holdout sample region (optional).
  • Several goodness-of-fit statistics and overall performance metrics.
  • Automatic regressor and event selection and model specification. Determines whether lagged and/or dynamic relationships are present.
  • Automatic generation of model selection lists.
  • Choice of automation level for all three forecasting steps: model selection, model parameter estimation and forecast generation.
Customized output and reports
  • Output produced in several popular formats: HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, etc.
  • SAS Output Delivery System (ODS) graphics.
  • Several output data sets available, including forecasts, goodness-of-fit statistics, model parameters, seasonal and trend statistics, and more.
  • Hierarchical aggregation of forecasting data sets.
Superior scalability
  • Run time is linear with the number of forecasts.
  • No limit on the amount of historical data or forecast horizon.
  • No limit on the number of events or regressors.

Screenshots

Screenshot
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.

View Screenshot

System Requirements

Host Platforms/Server Tier
  • 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; Oracle Linux 5.5 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
Required Software
  • Base SAS®

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

Ready to learn more?

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