Recently, SAS was positioned well into the leader’s quadrant for Marketing Resource Management (MRM). This is a great accomplishment for our Customer Intelligence division – and highlights the hard work we have accomplished over the past two years. In this post, I wanted to provide a little more detail around the timelines leading up to this ranking, the products we have that address this topic, and some of our customers that are using the solution.

• Early 2012 - SAS purchases Assetlink and renames the solution as SAS Marketing Operations Management.
• Mid 2013 - SAS places as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management.
• Mid 2014 - SAS places higher into the leaders quadrant in the Gartner MRM Evaluation.

Below is the magic quadrant:

Marketing Resource Management is defined as the alignment of people, processes and technology to support marketing activities and operations as well as improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. SAS’s answer to the topic of marketing resource management is comprised of a few solutions, but the flagship product is SAS Marketing Operations Management. This solution is broken into five main areas:

Planning and Financial Management – this category includes calendar and planning functions, as well as offer, resource and capacity management.

Creative Production Management – this category includes marketing project planning and management of creative and workflow approvals.

Marketing Reporting and Analytics – this category includes prebuilt reports and customizable dashboards.

Marketing Fulfillment – this category focuses on creative development and production.

Marketing Asset Management – this area focuses on the management of digital assets, forum knowledge, and any claims against marketing.

As you can see, marketing resource management as a topic is a very broad reaching category – and organizations can use marketing resource management solutions to accomplish a number of goals - from streamlining workflows, to managing and versioning assets, to managing resources and other processes.

Let me provide a few examples of how we work with customers across several industries:

Frozen Food Division of Global Nutritional Company – This 18.6 billion dollar division saved over 300 million dollars yearly by streamlining marketing inefficiencies using SAS Marketing Operations Management. More can be read in this Forrester Total Economic Impact Study.

Global Pharmaceutical Company – This primarily US and UK based organization generated operational savings of over 360,000 dollars in just 2 years using SAS Marketing Operations Management.

Global Agribusiness - This organization was able to eliminate their design approval backlog and reduce total design time by 50%. In addition to this, they are realizing yearly savings of $200,000 dollars on production and distribution of identity manuals and yearly savings of $2 million dollars on streamlining design process of digital printing. The total cost per packaging label has been reduced by 65%.

So as you can see, big organizations are saving big money making sure that operational efficiencies exist in their marketing departments. In recent blog posts, we have discussed the theme of marketing accountability. We expect this theme will continue to resonate in 2014, as marketers are being required to be more and more accountable for the programs they are executing inside of the marketing department. If you have questions around how we can help out your marketing organization, please comment below or shoot me an email at jonathan.moran@sas.com.