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I've completed my first day of teaching a two-day course about SAS Enterprise Guide. I'm in Sydney, Australia...but my biological clock is still tuned into Cary, North Carolina time. I woke up at 1 a.m. today and even though I tried to convince my body that it was still time
An alarming percentage of major software implementations fail to be delivered on time, on budget, or even at all. Implementations of new forecasting software, or of new forecasting processes, are not immune from this legacy of failure. Why does this happen, and is there anything we can do about it?
I received this offer in the post the other day: "University apparel just for you, featuring the name HEMEDINGER!" Yes, the offer has it correct. This would be just for me, because I can't think of anyone else who might order it. I regret that I didn't receive the offer
I recently met with five people who have been in state and local government for a combined total of over 100 years. It was a group that covered multiple areas of government including Health and Human Services, Courts and Corrections, Finance and Emergency Management. Everyone came to the table with
Improving campaign close rates is just one of many benefits quoted by Verizon in this quarter’s sascom magazine. But a 250 percent improvement is pretty significant. • How did they do it? • What were the other benefits? • How will they continue to deliver improvement over time? The short
There is a long running debate among forecasting professionals, on whether to use Forecast or Actual in the denominator of your percentage error calculations. The Winter 2009 issue of Foresight had an article by Kesten Green and Len Tashman, reporting on a survey (of the International Institute of Forecasters discussion
Art Carpenter offers tremendous advice to SAS programmers who want to maximize their job security: make your programs impossible for others to read and understand. In his published papers, Art (in his tongue-in-cheek manner) presents practical examples for how to accomplish this. I'm afraid that with our new code formatter
The Summer 2010 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: For so many years, we forecasters have developed and refined models for demand forecasts – forecasts for product and item sales, orders, shipments – without paying adequate attention to the details of how these forecasts
What is Risk Management? Risk Management can be found in many forms. This was emphasized to me while I was Googling “risk management in financial firms.” What I found were hits covering risk management across a wide spectrum of activities, from risk assessment for projects large and small to mathematical
My introduction to the issue of risk in business decision making came rather abruptly and rudely during what I thought was going to be another routine quarterly business review with the executive committee. My particular agenda item was to present the business case for a “lite” version of one of
Better forecasting can, of course, help address many business problems. We want to believe that more accurate forecasts are always possible. “If only,” management bemoans, “if only we had bigger computers, more sophisticated software, more skilled forecast analysts – or if the analysts we have just worked harder!” Unfortunately, there
Have you ever inherited a SAS program from a "gifted" SAS programmer? By "gifted", I mean a person who regards line feeds and white space as a waste of precious bytes, who knows that his program is worth the tremendous effort it might take to read and understand it, as
I come across many government agencies that are tackling very important issues (i.e. fraud & improper payments, bio-surveillance, patient outcomes, etc.) using rules, basic analytics and intuition. These are techniques that have been used successfully for years especially when government was smaller, the dollars involved were less significant, and the
You can use SAS Enterprise Guide to automate most aspects of queries, analytics, and reporting -- including sending e-mail notifications with the results. In this blog post, I'll show you how you can send these results and use Gmail as your e-mail provider. First, some background: SAS Enterprise Guide provides
~ Contributed by John Bastone ~ I read a fascinating piece in this week’s Wired, titled how "Marketers Rig the Social Media Machine.” A cottage industry has been born, catering to the needs of Marketers that are willing to pay for large numbers of followers within a social media property