Manufacturing

Precise forecasting based on up-to-date, accurate data. Inventory that’s balanced with demand in near-real time. Supply plans aligned with demand forecasts. Our manufacturing solutions include demand-sensing and shaping capabilities for:

• Demand-driven planning. Generate accurate forecasts at every level. Even for individual SKUs.
• Multiechelon inventory optimization. Manage production and logistics to match fluctuating customer needs and changing marketplace dynamics.
• Demand sensing and shaping. Translate demand signals – like seasonality, price, promotions, events and merchandising – into a more effective, market-driven response.

Sense market signals that shape – and help you predict – demand. Unify data from across your organization, and beyond. Then optimize responses throughout the supply chain. With SAS, you can:

• Share customer and supply chain intelligence collaboratively – among sales, marketing, finance, operations and supply teams, as well as third-party stakeholders – in support of the S&OP process. An interactive dashboard lets you monitor, track and report on forecast performance. And a forecast planning workbench generates automated, statistically driven consensus forecasts.
• Avoid under- or over-stocking with near-real-time insight into supply and demand dynamics. Calculate optimal inventory policies using multiechelon optimization with state-of-the-art simulation. And use predictive modeling and what-if analysis to find out how different variables will affect the supply/demand balance.
• Improve planning outcomes by generating unbiased consensus forecasts that work in conjunction with S&OP processes. Use time-series forecasting to build models that consider intermittent demand, new product launches and retired products. And use sophisticated optimization algorithms to choose the best action based on forecasted demand.

A single view of quality across people, places and processes. In-depth knowledge of customer perceptions. And early detection of potential problems. Our manufacturing solutions include data mining and predictive analytics technologies that address:

• Customer insights. Protect your brand equity by listening to all your customers, across all channels.
• Data integration. Get a single, comprehensive view of all quality-related data.
• Total cost of quality. Reduce scrap and rework.
• Predictive maintenance. Cut down on unscheduled maintenance.
• Early issue warning. Quickly identify design and production defects before they become widespread.

Enable and support your quality-driven strategy.  Work quickly to address issues. Then link customer feedback and expectations with design, engineering, manufacturing and packaging. With SAS, you can:

• Address quality and performance issues before they escalate. Drive continuously improved reliability, efficiency and quality by quickly combining and analyzing huge quantities of data using predictive modeling and analytics. Ensure more uptime and smoother operations by using root-cause analysis to troubleshoot and correct issues fast.
  
• Gain insight into real and perceived quality issues. Access and analyze all types of data from CRM systems, traditional news sites and social media forums. Then integrate the data with your issue detection process for earlier warnings and corrective action guidance.
• Limit unnecessary warranty work, and slash contact center costs. Pull together warranty data from multiple sources into a single database, and quickly decode its meaning. Reduce the cost of high quality with automated quality control measurement combined with monitoring, tracking and reporting. SAS also supports proven quality methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma.

Exceptional customer service and a positive brand image. Control over service costs. And a smarter approach to tackling service issues. Our manufacturing solutions help you detect, prioritize and define warranty and service issues as you manage:

• Perceptual service quality. Integrate and analyze all types of external and internal data sources to understand and manage the perceived quality of your products.
• Early-warning signals. Compare sentiments and set alerts before and after product launches.
• Suspect claims detection. Identify potential fraud and reduce service costs through automated reviews of every claim.
• Issue resolution analysis. Conduct efficient root-cause analyses with powerful filtering capabilities.
• Service parts optimization. First-call fix with the right part and the right skills. Reduce stockouts and overages with accurate parts demand forecasting.
• Asset utilization. Optimize asset performance by predicting failures and reducing unnecessary scheduled maintenance and increase productive uptime.
• Contact center resource optimization. Make solid predictions of service volumes, and give managers and agents continuous feedback to improve the service experience.

Integrate and decode data from warranties, sales, call centers, engineers, technicians and more. Identify emerging issues, see early warning indicators and identify root causes. Then send prioritized alerts to the appropriate people. SAS helps you to:

• Empower problem solvers with information in a format they can understand and use. Combine structured and unstructured data, and uncover valuable information hidden in warranty claims and service reports. Analyze relationships among isolated claims and spot patterns and anomalies by automatically categorizing text data and separating it into key concepts. Add sentiment analysis and component-level details for even more insight.
  
• Avoid unnecessary repair and maintenance costs. Score claims and use automated, warranty-specific predictive analytics to detect billing anomalies and suspicious repair patterns. Quickly surface emerging issues, uncover potential problems and determine root causes. And automatically analyze all service claims to uncover inefficiencies – so you can identify training needs. 
• Synchronize your approach to solving problems. Use advanced analytics to detect and send alerts about increases in warranty claim rates for particular parts. Early-warning algorithms automatically analyze millions of combinations of products, components and failures. Failure information feeds into sales, parts and resource forecasting systems so you can ensure that you have the right parts, call center agents and service technicians on hand.
  

Better customer profitability. Streamlined, consistent marketing processes. Along with outstanding brand image and product quality. Our manufacturing solutions help you collect, analyze and report on customer experiences as you manage:

• Social media. Identify and harness top social network influencers and their communities.
• Customer data. Gather all the right data – where and when you need it – from across the entire customer life cycle.
• Customer segmentation. Know which customer groups are most likely to purchase your products and services – and why.
• Marketing mix. Analyze, forecast and optimize your mix of advertising and promotions – through websites, emails, social media, forums and more.
• Real-time decisions. Make the best offers to the right customers at the right time – in real time.

Collect a wealth of customer data in real time, across every channel. Analyze the information to get a single view of each customer. Then use the insights to improve responsiveness, make more relevant offers, and use your sales and marketing resources more efficiently. SAS helps you to:

• Understand the attitudes behind customer behaviors by using real-time data collection, advanced analytics and business logic to reveal customers’ buying plans, significant life changes and other factors that play into purchase decisions and sentiment.
• Create interactive offers and highly targeted campaigns that really hit the mark by segmenting customers based on cross-channel behavior. And use sophisticated communication optimization algorithms to identify the best times and channels for communicating – and the best offer to present at the perfect moment.
• Shrink the amount of time and resources needed for every aspect of the sales and marketing process by optimizing your messages and offers. And use segmentation valuation and next-best-action models to predict customer behavior for more accurate targeting and personalized marketing.

Data silos eliminated across your operations. Trustworthy, up-to-date data to guide every decision. And confident, immediate responses based on precise, real-time information. Our manufacturing solutions provide a single platform that lets you control, improve and analyze your data with capabilities for:

• Master data management. Get a common, consistent – and trusted – view of data across all your applications, systems, plants and locations.
• Data quality. Ensure clean, reliable data.
• Data governance. Develop a consistent set of policies and processes for all your information.
• Event stream processing. Derive immediate analytic insights from the real-time data streaming into your operations.

Access exactly the right data at the right time – all sizes, sources and formats. Eliminate errors and inconsistencies. And use event stream processing to make important decisions in real time. With SAS, you can:

• Get the right data every time. Access data from smart sensors, embedded components, product maintenance notifications, business software – even mobile devices and recorded process activities. Extract, load and transform data at high speeds using batch processes, message queues and real-time processes. And match information within or across sources, standardizing formatting differences as you go.
• Ensure top-quality data. Correct nonstandard or duplicate records, or unknown data types. Establish data hierarchies, reference data definitions and validate against standard or customized rules. Manage entity resolution routines through advanced fuzzy-matching technology. And create multi-record clusters, confidence scores and scatter plots to determine potential clusters.
• Base decisions on data that’s captured in action and shared in real time. Continuously analyze data as it’s received – e.g., from social data streams. Evaluate real-time production and operational data to monitor process efficiency and uptime. And personalize offers based on website search criteria.