Much has been written about the value that North Carolina’s Criminal Justice Law Enforcement Automated Data Services (CJLEADS) system has brought the state’s court personnel and law enforcement officers. CJLEADS integrates dozens of NC criminal justice and law enforcement data sets, a vast improvement over the state’s legacy processes. Law
Data with a geographic component begs to be mapped. That capability is now available to all SAS users. A new mapping procedure in the fifth maintenance release of 9.4 (SAS 9.4M5) allows any user to easily plot data on a map. Unlike previous mapping applications with SAS, the SGMAP procedure
It’s that time of year again! Time for colds and runny noses and sniffles and sneezing. With an 11 month old in daycare, I am very aware that it is cold and flu season. Luckily there are plenty of things that can be done to help prevent colds and other
The 25th annual SESUG conference was held at in the SAS campus this week. I had the opportunity to meet and chat with many users and attend many excellent presentations. I will write about those that stood out (graphically) in my view. One excellent presentation was on "Methods for creating
“The difference between style and fashion is quality.” -Giorgio Armani With an out-of-the-box SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) installation, when you build a report in SAS EG it is displayed in a nice-looking default style. If you like it, you can keep it, and continue reading. If you don’t quite
SAS will be represented by more than 20 attendees at the INFORMS Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center (GBCC) in Houston, Texas. Officially the conference runs from Sunday, Oct. 22 through Wednesday, Oct. 25, but our activities in Houston start even earlier. Technology Workshops on Saturday, October
Analytics-driven forecasting means more than measuring trend and seasonality. It includes all categories of methods (e.g. exponential smoothing, dynamic regression, ARIMA, ARIMA(X), unobserved component models, and more), including artificial intelligence, but not necessarily deep learning algorithms. That said, deep learning algorithms like neural networks can also be used for demand forecasting,
Is There Something Beyond Budgeting? Forecasting is an integral part of the business planning and budgeting process. Presumably the forecast (which should be an "unbiased best guess" at what is really going to happen in the future) can provide a reasonable foundation upon which the annual budget and operating plans
Recently, while reading up on Wilkinson and Cleveland Dot plots, I saw this excellent article by Xan Gregg on the topic. I also saw some interesting examples of Lollipop Charts, kind of a dot plot with statistics along with a drop line, maybe more suitable for sparse data. I thought
Last week I was asked a simple question: "How do I choose a seed for the random number functions in SAS?" The answer might surprise you: use any seed you like. Each seed of a well-designed random number generator is likely to give rise to a stream of random numbers,
The little SAS program’s official name was Extract_Transform_Load_ 0314.sas. But, that name was much too formal, way too long, and did not roll off of the tongue very easily at all. So, everybody simply called her: ETL Pi. ETL Pi was conceived in a 2-hour project strategy meeting in conference
For many years the humble spreadsheet has held many different roles and responsibilities supporting finance, marketing, sales -- pretty much every department in your business. There's always someone with a “magic spreadsheet,” but how effective is this culture that always uses the same format to consume data? My view of
When using the SAS® system to email graphics output, a common request is to use SAS to send an email in which the graphics output is embedded in the body of the email. This functionality is not available until the second maintenance release for SAS® 9.4 (TS1M2). If you are
With new health recommendations suggesting 8-10 servings of low carbohydrate vegetables daily, it’s been exciting to see how the creative foodie community is using vegetables in place of high carb starches in recipes. If you haven’t heard, cauliflower rice is the newest kid on the block. The premise behind the
Quality in every thought, every action, every outcome You might think differentiating on the quality of your products is a no-brainer – who wouldn’t seek to make every product incredibly high quality? Yet experience shows us that many manufacturers only capture data from the production line. While this approach creates
There aren’t many things that keep me awake at night but let me share a recent example with you. I’ve been grappling with how to help a local SAS team respond to a customer’s request for a “generic enterprise analytics architecture.” As background, this customer organization had recently embarked on
Last night I dropped a check into my son’s school’s American Heart Association Fund Raiser and this morning we kicked off #NationalWearRedDay at the RFC with our annual Wear RED for Heart Health Breakfast Run. What’s the deal with all heart health awareness this month? Heart Disease Not only is it
To make it easy to identify non-value adding areas, you can build a simple application using SAS® Visual Analytics software. Such an application lets you point and click your way through the organization’s forecasting hierarchy, and at each point view performance of the Naïve, Manual, Statistical, and Automated forecasts (or
If you are a SAS programmer and use the GROUP= option in PROC SGPLOT, you might have encountered a thorny issue: if you use a WHERE clause to omit certain observations, then the marker colors for groups might change from one plot to another. This happens because the marker colors
With the holidays, and all the tempting sweets and treats that come along with it, behind us, now is the perfect time to kick start the New Year with a clean slate. No matter what your goals or resolutions are this year, eating more fresh, whole foods is an excellent
Imagine making $50K a day out of thin air. Did you know that NASDAQ routinely processes around 10,000,000 trades a day? What if instead of rounding cents for each transaction, market makers truncated fractions of cents in the amount they owe you? Under the assumption that each transaction, on average,
This year’s Polish SAS Forum conference gathered more than 900 enthusiasts of the use of analytics for the generation of innovation. The business session in the Customer Intelligence domain was focused on the methods of meeting the challenge of maximization of revenue while keeping the customers satisfied. Market leaders highlighted
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by my students is which business analytics books to read to support their professional self-development. It is always hard to pick out the best books, especially because I like to mix classics and domain-specific references. I particularly like those that influence business
Like unexpectedly seeing this beautiful bird in nature, SAS has tons of free goodies you might be surprised to encounter as you explore your software. A user asked me how to find products licensed at their workplace and that's how this informative blog got started. While individual organizations may have
Cancer is a pretty scary word and is something that affects most of us, either directly or indirectly. It is a complex condition with possible causes including: poor diet, environmental toxins, genetics, infections, viruses, stress, tobacco use, lack of exercise and more. While no one knows the exact cause of
Con la gran oferta de bienes de consumer packaged goods (CPG´s) que existe hoy en día al alcance del consumidor, disponibles tanto en línea como en establecimientos de consumo o vía aplicaciones móviles, sólo por mencionar algunas, la industria manufacturera se encuentra enfrentando un gran reto para poder alcanzar y/o
Fresh from chairing the Foresight Practitioner Conference on “Worst Practices in Business Forecasting,” hosted two weeks ago at the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, Foresight editor-in-chief Len Tashman previews the Fall 2016 issue. Preview of the Fall 2016 issue of Foresight In the provocative article, “The
I’m a productivity junkie! Living in a culture where productivity is highly valued, cutting corners on sleep is often a life survival skill. We’ve been trained to function this way (at least in the US) for over 50 years. As a result, being tired and fatigued is the status quo
My friend and colleague Charlie Chase, author of the new book Next Generation Demand Management, has developed a 2-day course to go along with the book. The course is part of the SAS Business Knowledge Series, and is being offered in Chicago, October 19-20. Here are the details: Next Generation
Analytics Experience 2016 will be held on Sept. 12-14, 2016 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, NV. There will be a great number of excellent talks and demonstrations at the conference, covering many aspects of SAS analytics and many practical applications. Several of these sessions deal directly with the use
