At Opening Session, Annette Harris, Vice President of SAS Technical Support told the audience that user feedback is one of the main ingredients for improving the decision-making power of SAS software.

“We value your feedback…we encourage it…and we use it….to make our software better and more responsive to our customers’ needs,” said Harris. “Your feedback and ideas keep us grounded in what’s important to you as SAS users.”

Harris thanked the users for contributing to SAS’ success, and then introduced the 2008 SAS User Feedback Award winner as an outstanding example of someone who is using SAS® Business Analytics to find innovative methods to anticipate problems and implement solutions.

Jaroslaw Maj, Deputy IT Director at PLAYMobile of Poland, worked with SAS Research and Development, Technical Support and Product Management to improve the user interface of SAS® Web Report Studio and underlying technologies.

PLAYMobile is the fourth largest mobile operator and the first multi-media phone operator in Poland. According to Harris, in the summer of 2007, PLAYMobile chose SAS as its strategic IT partner for services as well as the implementation of the SAS BI Platform and SAS Customer Intelligence solutions.
Since then, several major projects have been completed including a Customer Data Warehouse, Analytical Data Mart, Campaign Management, Customer Segmentation and Customer Contribution Margin.

Harris said, “These advanced business analytics solutions immediately provided PLAYMobile with an opportunity to analyze and understand customer behavior, profitability, possibility of cross-sell actions and other opportunities.”

Jaroslaw provided usage cases, further clarified business needs and helped test improvements. One result of his involvement will be seen in greatly improved Web Report Studio query performance in scenarios involving 3rd party RDBMS in SAS® BI Server.