Almost five years ago, Harvard Business Review published an article about the impact of big data and analytics on decision-making. The story starts by quoting an old adage: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
Fast forward to 2017. Those words may be more appropriate than ever — and Prognos knows it. The company became a SAS Managed Analytic Services Provider (MASP) and immediately began taking advantage of the broadest analytics platform available.
Prognos provides forecasting, pricing and customer insights that produce financially measurable results for some of the world’s largest Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods companies. The primary areas of focus at Prognos include lifecycle price optimization, merchandise analytics, demand forecasting and customer insight.
With an all-in-one solution that scales quickly and generates results for any business function, Prognos consistently demonstrates it has the ability to help clients deliver the right products to the right place — at the right time and price.
According to Product Manager Nicholas Wegman, Prognos handles the “heavy lifting” that many clients want to avoid in the pursuit of embracing an analytical approach to doing business. The powerful analytics technologies that are synonymous with the SAS-Intel partnership help Prognos ease this common client burden.
The company’s flagship service is Enterprise Demand Signal, a cloud-based forecasting solution that provides weekly, monthly and quarterly demand readouts for a variety of business functions. The service integrates SAS Analytics, ensuring clients consistently have an accurate understanding of what’s driving demand, and how those factors impact merchandising, operations and financial planning.
In effect, Enterprise Demand Signal saves clients from piling more work on the plates of their IT pros — or bringing data scientists on board to decipher volumes of data. One study finds the current crop of data scientists in the U.S. alone isn’t nearly enough to meet demand; by 2024, we could be short by 250,000 professionals capable of filling that skill set.
Prognos, as a SAS MASP, has identified this market demand — and then some.
“We are taking their data and translating that into meaningful results that they can incorporate into their business decision process,” Wegman says.
Because of the flexibility Prognos has as a SAS MASP, the company’s clients don’t deal with the time-intensive period of on-premise deployment and training. Instead, they get accelerated cloud-based analytics capabilities and solutions — minus the cost and complexities associated with implementing on-site software.
What this means is Prognos delivers meaningful results to clients in weeks, not months.
Word travels fast, too. Prognos continues to grow its client base and its reputation as a cloud-based analytics leader.
