Embracing AI is wonderful. From a practical business perspective, though, there are limits. This issue is broader than AI. However, I’ll constrain the conversation to that for now, given the attention AI is getting these days. Yes, some processes are undoubtedly good candidates for automation, but avoiding “technocentrism” is critical to
As businesses continue to evolve and adapt to the changing landscape of the global economy, decision-making has become increasingly complex. To stay competitive and meet the growing demands of customers, businesses must adopt new technologies and strategies to streamline their operations and enhance the customer experience. This is where AI
Leonid Batkhan shows you how to write Windows batch scripts that allow for conditional execution and effective job scheduling.
Customer acquisition and retention primarily fall on sales and marketing teams. But every department within an insurance company has a role to play in these activities. Claims handling is a great example. Any insurer's performance at this emotionally charged time is their litmus test. It can determine whether customers renew
It’s only been three years since Gartner coined the term “hyperautomation.” But a lot has changed since then, both in global events and technological developments. While automation has a long history, it’s evolved rapidly in the digital age. Businesses in every sector – including warehousing, health care, banking, agriculture, insurance,
Utility companies have a choice: aggressive debt collection, or debt forgiveness or ‘holidays’.
"Senior managers adore their dashboards. Are they really capable of understanding what they indicate? I have my doubts!"
Phil Simon flip-flops from his last post.
Free will is the core of a human being. Free will implies making decisions. But how are decisions defined? Decision making is choosing an alternative from many possibilities. It is a process that results in the selection of a set of actions among several alternative scenarios. But what about business?
In automated production (or business operations) environments, we often run SAS job flows in batch mode and on schedule. SAS job flow is a collection of several inter-dependent SAS programs executed as a single process. In my earlier posts, Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux and Let SAS write
SAS batch jobs can generate many log files that accumulate over time. In this post, we present a SAS program that cleans up old log files on your system.
Called out as two common IT threads in my previous blog post, how do artificial intelligence and automation connect with another prominent movement, the Internet of Things (IoT)? First, consider these predictions from IDC on IoT. By 2020, At least 45 percent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analyzed
If Necessity is the mother of Invention, then, perhaps, the father of Automation is Laziness. Automation is all about convenience, comfort, and productivity. Why do it yourself if you can devise something to do it for you! In my previous post Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux, we learned
Robots - everyone has probably been fascinated by the idea of robots at one time or another. From the early science fiction robots (such as Klaatu's robot Gort) to the mid-1980s movie robots (like Johnny 5), they have been portrayed in many different ways in fiction. These days, with the
Employment - that's been a hot topic here in the US lately. Many of the manufacturing jobs we had in past decades are gone now, and it would be great if there was a crystal ball to predict which jobs might be at risk of disappearing in the future. The
When developing SAS applications, you can feed database tables into your application by using the libname access engine either by directly referring a database table, or via SAS or database views that themselves refer to one or more of the database tables. More on Automation with SAS: Let SAS write
Using the DATASETS procedure, we can easily modify SAS variable attributes such as name, format, informat and label: proc datasets library=libref; modify table_name; format var_name date9.; informat var_name mmddyy10.; label var_name = 'New label'; rename var_name = var_new_name; quit; We cannot, however, modify fixed variable attributes such as variable type
Have you ever used SAS to produce reports for publishing? Have you ever thought of or been told about suppressing data in such reports? Why do we need to suppress (in the sense of withholding, concealing, obscuring or hiding) data in published reports? The reason is simple - in order
If you are like many SAS Enterprise Guide users, you've amassed a large collection of project files (EGP files) that contain important content: programs, logs, notes, results, and more. However, to most tools and processes, the EGP file is opaque. That is, you can't see what's inside of it unless
Have you ever selected File->Schedule Project or Schedule->Process Flow in SAS Enterprise Guide? Are you curious about what magic these actions will trigger? Here's what happens: SAS Enterprise Guide creates a VBScript program that contains the instructions to start SAS Enterprise Guide, load your project, run your project or flow,
We call it the "metadata profile", but really it's like a telephone number that connects you to your SAS environment. Just as a telephone number has component parts (country code, area code, exchange), the metadata profile contains information that allow you to "dial in" to your SAS servers. This information
This blog post is a "mashup" of a couple of my previous posts, combining the lessons to create something brand new that I hope you will find useful. First, let's review what we know: SAS Enterprise Guide supports a scriptable object model, which allows you to write scripts or programs
Windows PowerShell is one of my favorite tools to use for gathering information from my PC and network, and also for automating processes. If you are familiar with UNIX shells (such as Korn shell or its variants), you will probably be very comfortable with Windows PowerShell. Just like its UNIX
SAS Enterprise Guide is best known as an interactive interface to SAS, but did you know that you can use it to run batch-style programs as well? SAS Enterprise Guide has always offered an automation object model, which allows you to use scripting languages (such as VBScript or Windows PowerShell)
