Charlie Chase is considered an expert in sales forecasting, market response modeling, econometrics and supply chain management. Now he's sharing some of his expertise in his Business Knowledge Series (BKS) course, Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting. I had the chance to ask him some questions about his course and the
Another Valentine's Day has passed. I often wonder where the time goes. It seems like yesterday my daughter was buying those little cards and sharing cut out hearts with her peers. Now, she's 15 and this year she had fun in a different way and I was happy to be
Many larger SAS deployments have multiple instances of similar SAS-related servers. For example, a distributed SAS Enterprise BI environment may have several machines running instances of the object spawner or the OLAP server. Similarly, all of your distributed SAS Visual Analytics deployments have worker nodes that are typically dedicated Linux
When you have a long-running SAS/IML program, it is sometimes useful to be able to monitor the progress of the program. For example, suppose you need to computing statistics for 1,000 different data sets and each computation takes between 5 and 30 seconds. You might want to output a message
The Wall Street Journal recently published some graphs about seven infectious diseases, and I tried using SAS to improve the graphs ... it's a veritable infectious disease (graph) bake-off! Let's start with Measles ... here's a screen-capture of WSJ's measles graph: In general, their graph is eye-catching, and I learned a lot
When asked what his movement wanted around a century ago, the iconic American labor leader Samuel Gompers famously gave a one-word answer: "More." This annoyed his opponents at the negotiating table and many in the business community. He was not demanding a specific wage increase or fighting for a distinct cause like
To develop a custom task for use in SAS Enterprise Guide (or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office), you need a few things: A working knowledge of SAS and SAS Enterprise Guide Microsoft Visual Studio (the free Express edition will do, though the Professional edition is better) Some experience with C#
This isn't such a brilliant article because we learn something new from it -- we really don't. But it is amazing to find, from someone in 1957, such a clear discussion of forecasting issues that still plague us today. If you can get past some of the Mad Men era words and
Last week a user wanted to view the distribution of data using a Box Plot. The issue was the presence of a lot of "bad" data. I got to thinking of ways such data can be visualized. I also discussed the matter with our resident expert Rick Wicklin who pointed
If you are looking for a way to fund your data quality objectives, consider looking in the closets of the organization. For example, look for issues that cost the company money that could have been avoided by better availability of data, better quality of the data or reliability of the
Friends have to look out for each other. Sometimes this can be slightly embarrassing. At lunch you might need to tell a friend that he has some tomato sauce on his chin. Or that she has a little spinach stuck between her teeth. Or you might need to tell your
For hotel companies, it is challenging to find new ways to differentiate in an ever evolving marketplace. There is a lot of talk in our industry about the increasing numbers of third party channels and distributors to have entered the marketplace, and how that impacts the hotel company’s core business.
Have you ever created a SAS macro variable and at resolution time received a warning that it did not exist? Many times this warning is because your program referenced the macro variable outside the scope it was created in. Every macro variable created is stored in one of two symbol
Combining Statistical Analysis with Subjective Judgment (continued) After summarily dismissing regression analysis and correlation analysis as panaceas for the business forecasting problem, Lorie turns next to "salesmen's forecasts."* He first echoes the assumption that we still hear today: This technique of sales forecasting has much to commend it. It is based
Cupid is bearing down on me again, and I’m still only thinking about what gifts to give my wife and daughter for Valentine’s Day. At this point, I’m hoping for divine inspiration. Based on holiday shopping research we conducted in November, I’ve learned that the gifts women expect to receive
Nobody puts an arrow through a heart any better than Sam Cooke & Cupid ... but SAS/Graph comes close! If you've been following my blog, you know that my favorite of all the SAS Procedures are the traditional SAS/Graph Procs, such as GPlot and GMap. They're rock-solid reliable, and flexible
Love is in the air and things are starting to heat up for Valentine’s Day. OK—maybe not for Connecticut and the rest of the northeast buried in another foot of snow and more on the way! Perhaps some stories of love could help melt the ice away. They’re happening every
Look, I’ve been at this game a long time. I set Cleopatra and Marc Antony on a path to ruin. I set J-Lo and Marc Anthony on a path to eternal happiness … until they bought a stake in the Miami Dolphins. No one escapes that dumpster fire unscathed. My
*** We interrupt discussion of James H. Lorie's 1957 article with this important announcement *** Hot off the wire, here is editor Len Tashman's preview of the Winter 2015 issue of Foresight: Foresight kicks off its 10th year with the publication of a new survey of business forecasters: Improving Forecast Quality in
SAS Global Forum brings together the most die-hard SAS users, both veteran and novice, once a year. It’s one of those can’t-miss events, and each year it just gets better. 2015 will bring us all together in Dallas, Texas for several days of active learning and excitement from SAS users
In this blog series, I am exploring if it’s wise to crowdsource data improvement, and if the power of the crowd can enable organizations to incorporate better enterprise data quality practices. In Part 1, I provided a high-level definition of crowdsourcing and explained that while it can be applied to a wide range of projects
Have you ever sprinkled sugar over your salad? Probably not, but as it turns out food companies have already done it for you! Dressings can have up to a whopping 2 teaspoons of sugar in just 2 tablespoons- that’s 1/3 of your recommended sugar for the entire day. Wouldn’t you rather
The xkcd comic often makes me think and laugh. The comic features physics, math, and statistics among its topics. Many years ago, the comic showed a "binary heart": a grid of binary (0/1) numbers with the certain numbers colored red so that they formed a heart. Some years later, I
.@philsimon on the reliability of social numbers.
Brilliant, humorous, and obscure. Those words could describe two of my favorite comedians, Emo Philips* and the late Dennis Wolfberg. They could also describe, with the addition of "exceedingly" brilliant, "scathingly" humorous, and "apparently totally" obscure, a 1957 article, "Two Important Problems in Sales Forecasting" by James H. Lorie (The
We’re all about numbers here at SAS. So when the Global Certification program hit its 75,000th credential – we had to make it a big deal. We tracked down the 75,000th credential holder to Susan Langan, a research analyst in Maryland, and what’s even more special than Langan holding the
Once in a while, people run into an issue with the data that doesn't really need to be fixed right to ensure success of a specific project. So, the data issues are put into production and forgotten. Everyone always says, “We will go back and correct this later.” But that
The SAS DATA step supports multidimensional arrays. However, matrices in SAS/IML are like mathematical matrices: they are always two dimensional. In simulation studies you might need to generate and store thousands of matrices for a later statistical analysis of their properties. How can you accomplish that unless you can create
Suppose someone needs a kidney transplant and a family member is willing to donate one. If the donor and recipient are incompatible (because of blood types, tissue mismatch, and so on), the transplant cannot happen. Now suppose two donor-recipient pairs A and B are in this situation, but donor A
According to a 2012 report, it was estimated that over the next five years the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will issue more than $20 billion in potentially fraudulent tax refunds. Figures like this do little to boost taxpayers’ confidence in our nation’s tax system. And tax fraud is not
