In my 11 years at SAS, I’ve gotten to travel to New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco and other big-city destinations, but my trip to Midland, Michigan (pop. 41,863) ranks among my all-time favorite SAS trips.
What’s in Midland? The Dow Chemical Company – a $50 billion dollar global company that began in 1897 as a tiny little business in this tiny little town. And after visiting Midland, I understand why they’ve kept their headquarters there. The people in Michigan are nice, the countryside is beautiful, and Midland is the quintessential all-American company town.
The highlight of my trip was visiting the massive Dow Chemical campus for the sascom magazine cover shoot (behind-the-scenes action shot below). While there I interviewed Dow CIO Dave Kepler and participated in interviews with a VP and four Directors.
Every one of them talked about how advanced analytics helps make some of the biggest decisions at Dow. They’re looking at consumer sentiment and studying their competitors, global trends, order load, seasonality and other key performance indicators to find the real growth opportunities. As you’ll see from reading the sascom cover story, they’ve achieved enormous success, but they didn’t get there overnight – and they aren’t going to stop pushing.
One of the keys to Dow’s success is speed: Not only are they making better decisions than their competitors, they’re making them faster to get to market first. If you’re feeling a similar need for speed, read "The journey to high-performance analytics."
Also in the latest issue of sascom, read what the C-suite should know about analytics, learn how to become a super CIO, and if you need tips for getting IT and business to work together, see how they’re doing it at Absa Bank.
Check out the html or digital edition of the latest issue of sascom magazine, or subscribe to the print version here. Would love to hear your feedback, or ideas for upcoming issues.
