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I’m going to put “An Operational Definition of ‘Demand’ – Part 3” on hold for a moment, to announce a new favorite article on forecasting, “Living in a world of low levels of predictability,” by Spyros Makridakis and Nassim Taleb (International Journal of Forecasting 25 (2009) 840-844. IJF is a
If you're accustomed to using "shell" commands from within your SAS programs (using the X command or SYSTASK statement, for example), you'll find that those statements won't work when you run your program from within SAS Enterprise Guide. When you try them, you will probably see one of the following
In the last post I argued that we don’t have a sure way to measure true (i.e. “unconstrained”) demand. While demand is commonly defined as “what the customer wants, and when they want it,” it is actually a nebulous concept. For a manufacturer, what a customer orders is not the
Sorry about not getting a post out last week, but I spent a good part of it cowering under my desk in fear. The SAS Security office issued a warning that there were wild coyotes roaming the campus, and I was having post-traumatic flashbacks to a painful encounter I once
It is definitely easier to force single selections for prompts used in SAS Stored Processes, however it isn't very usable when the majority of users need to select multiple values. For example, let us say we create a prompt for region (called 'region_prompt') and then use that in the query
Last week I was a guest of Gaurav Verma on the SAS Applying Business Analytics Web Series, and presented “What Management Must Know About Forecasting.” One of the most important things you can bring to management’s attention is the benefit of making your demand forecastable. In forecasting we tend to
I was struggling with a calculated member that completes a distinctcount of members in a dimension, the performance was simply unacceptable. After attempting several other measures such as count(), processing changes on the source data, etc, I sent out a msg on Twitter asking for advice. Once again, why aren't
There are some things about forecasting that you may only discover by being a forecaster. Simply managing a forecasting process, or being a downstream consumer of the forecast, isn't always enough. If you have something to say to your management about forecasting, but would rather avoid the confrontation, maybe we
Graduate and undergraduate students are eligible to apply for the SAS Student Ambassador Program, which covers the cost of travel expenses and registration fees paid to attend SAS Global Forum 2010. What’s the “catch?” You must complete an application and submit a presentation abstract and working draft by midnight October
A user who is a member of the "SAS Administrators" group and has been granted the role "Management Console: Advanced" can create a Metadata Backup job via SAS 9.2 Management Console. Right Click on 'Backup and Restore' Task under 'Metadata Utilities'. Then select the Backup task created and choose either
The SAS 9.2 XML engine is very very very slick. I created an xml map to generate a dataset from xml generated during a metadata getobjects job to then run call execute statements for a proc metalib update. "Wait, you did what??!@#?&" you ask? Here are my simple steps. This
Before we begin, I want to thank all of you readers who supported my righteous appeal for “THE BFD” license plate from the state of North Carolina. I am sad to report, however, that our efforts were in vain and the appeal was denied by Censorship Board of the Division
In case you haven't heard, the state of North Carolina needs money. Roads are falling apart, parks are left unkempt, prisoners are being released, and public school cafeterias can no longer afford to put anything surprising in their Chef's Surprise. In order to help assuage the crisis, and in my
Most modern programmer text editors allow you to see multiple views of the document you're working on. The SAS program editor within SAS Enterprise Guide is no exception, although we've done a pretty good job of hiding this feature. Read on and learn how to easily "divide and conquer" your
Would you buy something that doesn’t have demonstrable Return on Investment? Of course you would! Whether you realize it or not, you do this every time you buy software. There is no proven ROI. Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine. Maybe I care too much about cause