Before a crowd of more than 3,200 SAS® Global Forum attendees at Opening Session, SAS executives honored three customers with the Enterprise Excellence Award for effectively using SAS software to address business challenges, empowering leaders to make confident, insightful decisions.

Wisconsin Department of Revenue
Carl Farrell, Senior Vice President of SAS Americas, congratulated Janna Baganz, who accepted the Enterprise Excellence Award for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. The agency implemented a department-wide data warehouse using SAS® Business Intelligence, providing readily available and easily accessible data to help users perform more efficiently. Transforming raw data into information for expanding users groups, the solution facilitates back-end data processing and end-user reporting. The enhanced information resource helps the entire organization comply with directives, initiatives and legislative mandates.

“Before we had the data warehouse, users had to go to five different locations,” Baganz said. “Now they go to one.” She shared an example of how automation has impacted the bottom line, citing a collections report which was previously accessed manually several times a day by team members. Automating the report has saved 1,700 staff hours and increased revenues by $4.2 million since the solution was implemented in July 2008.

FIDUCIA IT AG
EMEA and Asia Pacific Executive Vice President Mikael Hagström welcomed Lothar Schauer, Head of Corporate Control at Germany’s FIDUCIA IT AG to the stage. FIDUCIA IT AG used SAS® Financial Intelligence software to develop a new performance management system that includes process cost analysis, integrated company control, presentation of indicator systems and financial indicator consolidation and planning. The result is strategic corporate control, transparency across divisions and consistent, reliable company-wide information.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Hagström congratulated John Geurts, representing the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (the Group), via live Webcast from Australia. Commonwealth Bank of Australia has been a SAS customer for more than 20 years, and was recognized for using the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform as a basis for its Financial Crimes Platform (FCP). The FCP allows the Group to bring together data for the identification, analysis and prevention of fraud as well as monitoring transactions to detect money laundering and terrorist financing.

The successes of the Financial Crimes Platform saw the Group go on to adopt the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform to centralize its discovery functions into a single platform, centralizing its resources and data to allow greater and deeper insights. The Group now has extended the FCP to include SAS® Anti-Money Laundering, making it the first Australian financial services institution to incorporate anti-money laundering within a comprehensive financial crime detection and prevention platform as a fully integrated component, rather than install it as a stand-alone system.

“This is a mark of innovation,” Geurts said. “It shows that we are not just on track, but industry leading.”