Over the last few posts, Lee Ann has been exploring how to marry business strategy with day to day pricing decisions. This week, I’m going to take this discussion in another direction by describing how pricing decisions are made, and the importance of strategic pricing in another industry – sports.
This article describes how to generate random samples from the multinomial distribution in SAS. The content is taken from Chapter 8 of my book Simulating Data with SAS. The multinomial distribution is a discrete multivariate distribution. Suppose there are k different types of items in a box, such as a
While I've long advocated the use of Coefficient of Variation (CV) as a quick and dirty indicator of the forecastability of a time-series, its deficiencies are well recognized. It is true that any series with extremely low CV can be forecast quite accurately (using a moving average or simple exponential smoothing
This week's SAS tip is from Ron Cody and his very popular book Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide. If you haven't yet discovered Ron Cody's work, you're missing out. Fortunately, you can learn a lot more about Ron and his many books--as well as view bonus content here. The following excerpt
With the release of SAS 9.4 (which included SAS/STAT 12.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1), you might seriously consider hiring a Chief Versions Officer (CVO). Fortunately, most of the recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide work with the different recent versions of SAS, so you have some flexibility as you
Im fortschreitende Modernisierungsprozess befindet sich die öffentliche Hand im Spannungsfeld zwischen knappen Kassen und demografischem Wandel einerseits und Forderungen nach einer wirkungsorientierten und bürgernahen Auftragserfüllung andererseits. Die zunehmende Komplexität der fachlichen Zusammenhänge innerhalb einzelner Politikfelder und der Abhängigkeiten zwischen verschiedenen Bereichen bindet zusätzliche Ressourcen. Mehr und mehr fordert die Politik
Our perceptions can impact others and influence decisions. As a result, I always like to understand each customer's perception of what SAS is and what we do. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, however the response provides me with a chance to listen to our customers.
While traveling in Europe last month, I noticed that Coca-cola bottles were being sold with different peoples' names on them. I was intrigued enough to take a few pictures, and then I started looking for coke advertisements to see if I could pick up on a broader campaign. While it piqued my interest,
How old is your version of SAS software? The graph on the left shows the release dates for various releases of SAS software, beginning with SAS 8.0. The graph is based on a graph on Jiangtang Hu's blog that shows the major SAS releases. As this graph demonstrates, SAS software
"Forecastability" is a frequent topic of discussion on The BFD, and an essential consideration when evaluating the effectiveness of any forecasting process. A major critique of forecasting benchmarks is that they fail to take forecastability into consideration: An organization with "best in class" forecast accuracy may do so only because
Industry-changing dynamics like mobility, smart products, social media and embedded computing put a premium on big data and the insights you can gain from organizational data. As a result, the opportunity to be disruptive with analytics has never been greater. Yet, when it comes to making analytics work, not all organizations
Previously I've described how you can use SAS Enterprise Guide to send an e-mail message using Gmail as your e-mail provider. In the article, I mentioned that you can also write SAS programs that send e-mail messages, but at the time you could not reach Gmail using the FILENAME EMAIL
Seit 37 Jahren liefert SAS Innovationen im Bereich Analytics. Alle zwei bis drei Jahre stehen größere Renovierungen in der Plattform ins Haus - und dieses Jahr ist es wieder soweit. SAS verschafft der Unternehmens-IT mit der neuen Version seiner Business-Analytics-Plattform SAS 9.4 eine neue Basis für analytische Anwendungen. Grundlage hierfür
Do you have dozens (or even hundreds) of SAS data sets that you want to read into SAS/IML matrices? In a previous blog post, I showed how to iterate over a series of data sets and analyze each one. Inside the loop, I read each data set into a matrix
A friend of mine was telling me a story the other day. Since we live in a 140-character world, I'll summarize it: Basically, boy meets girl, boy goes to New Zealand to spend two weeks with girl, girl comes home and tells boy that she actually met someone else and
There’s a reason SAS is a leader in so many different areas, and the adoption of Agile Scrum is no exception. “Scrum” gets its namesake from rugby, and more specifically, the name of a play where all team members lock arms and wrestle for the ball so that the game
I travel to many conferences throughout the year, and I’ve heard a lot of keynote speeches. Many of them stick with me for a few hours. But one speech I heard three years ago stuck with me for weeks. And then I heard it again at a regional conference. I
Agile Business Intelligence ist aktuell in aller Munde. Ziel ist stets, Anforderungen des Fachbereiches schneller zu erfüllen, als dies mit herkömmlichen Entwicklungsverfahren möglich erscheint. Was jedoch unter agiler BI zu verstehen ist und wie sich diese Verfahren von den im Data Warehousing etablierten Vorgehensweisen unterscheiden, darüber herrscht im Markt wenig
From an Enterprise Guide user's perspective, a SAS library is a library. Whether it was defined in the autoexec or in the metadata or by magic, it is there for them to use with no issues. However, there is a difference as metadata defined libraries do not behave in the
One of my favorite features of SAS/IML 12.1 (released with 9.3m2) is that the USE and CLOSE statements support reading data set names that are specified in a SAS/IML matrix. The IMLPlus language in SAS/IML Studio has supported this syntax since the early 2000s, so I am pleased that this
Marketing optimization has never been more critical because it's never been more important for marketers to know the decisions we make are the best ones. The need is driven by globalization, the accelerating pace of technological change, ever-scarcer resources, and so many other factors. In this environment, leading companies are increasingly
This week's SAS tip is from Michele Burlew and her latest book SAS Hash Object Programming Made Easy. Michele is the author of several extremely helpful SAS books. Visit her author page to read free chapters and for additional bonus content. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Michele
The truncated normal distribution TN(μ, σ, a, b) is the distribution of a normal random variable with mean μ and standard deviation σ that is truncated on the interval [a, b]. I previously blogged about how to implement the truncated normal distribution in SAS. A friend wanted to simulate data
We’ve just published Decision Trees for Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner by Barry de Ville and Padraic Neville. Filled with many figures and examples, this comprehensive book has garnered strong early user reviews. We invited the authors to share a few words about their new book. Neville had this to
In previous versions of SAS, if you wanted to experiment with creating U.S. maps in Proc GMAP, there wasn't any good sample data available. Unless you had your own data available, you probably ended up using the maps.us x/y points as your DATA= ... which is sort of a nonsense
Each major SAS release contains new products and hundreds of new features and enhancements. So how do you discover the ones that will make the most difference for you? For SAS 9.4, the Publications team wants to help. For many years, Publications has produced a What’s New book that provides
Would you like to know how some of the largest and most successful organizations are getting value from their big data? Tune in to AllAnalytics.com today at 2 p.m. ET (US) to find out. In their recently published research report, Big Data in Big Companies, renowned analytics thought-leader Tom Davenport
This article describes how to implement the truncated normal distribution in SAS. Although the implementation in this article uses the SAS/IML language, you can also implement the ideas and formulas by using the DATA step and PROC FCMP. For reference, I recommend the Wikipedia article on the truncated normal distribution.
We know that it is a struggle to gain insight from massive amounts of data. Businesses need the value that analytics provide and want to include analytics in day-to-day decision making in order to gain insights and improve business performance. Data visualization and reporting are like the “easy button” for businesses
You’ve likely played an organized sport at some time in your life - How many different ways were there to keep score? How many different ways were there to determine the winner? Just one – right? It was goals, or runs, or points, or something, but never goals and/or assists,
