SAS UK & Ireland recently ran a competition to find the region's 'top data scientist'; the competition challenge was to produce a forecast of energy demand for the UK in the year 2020 based on the data provided. Competition for this coveted award was fierce; with the winner claiming a trip to SAS
There are two ways you can react to a “Hey – that was my idea” situation. The first would be to throw a pity party and lament about how unfair life is – if only the car hadn’t broken down and I didn’t have grass to mow and laundry to
This post will violate the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule, because last week I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Analytics 2014 event there and want to share some of what I heard for those who couldn’t attend. I was joined by over 1,000
Recently, I was reading an online article about predictive modeling and "big data." Its premise was to determine whether the use of big data actually led to more accurate and meaningful predictive models and forecasts. After citing numerous external examples and internal tests that the authors had compiled, it stated
Because you are already halfway there and you should want the entire process to be data-driven, not just the historical reporting and analysis. You are making decisions and using data to support those decisions, but you are leaving value on the table if the analytics don't carry through to forecasting. In the
It is a mild summer evening in July at Lake Neusiedl here in Austria. The participants of the traditional YES Cup Regatta are sitting with beer and barbecue chops on the terrace of our clubhouse. The mood is relaxed, and everyone wants to tell their story after two eventful races.
My esteemed colleague and recently-published author Jared Dean shared some thoughts on how ensemble models help make better predictions. For predictive modeling, Jared explains the value of two main forms of ensembles --bagging and boosting. It should not be surprising that the idea of combining predictions from more than one
How much of your business performance (profit) is driven by external factors versus internal? A figure of 85% compared to 15% was mentioned at last month’s Manufacturing Analytics Summit, and although I could not find the study mentioned to confirm, it feels about right to me. Certainly more than half,
In 1990, the North Carolina General Assembly created the Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission to evaluate sentencing laws and policies and recommend any modifications necessary to achieve policy goals. As part of the mandate, the General Assembly required the Sentencing Commission to develop a correctional population simulation model. The model
For supply chain managers and analysts Getting Demand in Shape can mean collecting the most pertinent data to support specific business processes and activities. Identifying new or previously unused data sources can be especially important. My most recent article titled “Getting Demand in Shape” in the May / June issue of APICS magazine
Giovanni Monopoli is the Strategic Analysis and Financial Planning Manager within the Finance Department at QVC Italy. Next month, he’ll be presenting at the Analytics 2014 conference in Frankfurt, Germany about how the broadcast channel uses analytics – specifically SAS Forecast Studio. With live broadcasts 17 hours a day, QVC
Someone once boiled down econometrics for me by explaining -- it’s all about answering the “why.” It’s especially important for companies wanting to know the answers to important questions like… Why are customers buying this product? Why are customers not buying my product? If you’re ready to start investigating the
From Gartner to IDC to the trade press, the watchwords in the supply chain for rest of this decade appear to be “resiliency” and “responsiveness”. It’s not going to be about promotion-based pull-through, and it’s most definitely not going to be about channel incentive-based push-through. What it’s going to be
If the latest raft of retail trading updates are anything to go on, it’s pretty clear who the winners were this Christmas: the consumers. A period of heavy discounting – aimed at bolstering weak sales and protecting elusive customer loyalty – was good news for cash-conscious customers, but left many
This week's SAS tip is from Applied Data Mining for Forecasting Using SAS by Tim Rey, Arthur Kordon, and Chip Wells. Whether you're a forecasting practitioner, engineer, statistician, or economist, you'll appreciate the many real-world examples in the book. And hopefully this free excerpt. The following excerpt is from SAS Press
The farther you try to forecast into the future, the less certain you are -- how can you represent that graphically? One way is to draw a shaded/colored "confidence interval" around your forecast line, but this is something a lot of SAS users have trouble with. That's why I decided to create
Reacting to the demand in the rapidly changing environment of an emergency department can be a major challenge. Frequent mismatches between patient need and the health care professionals available to provide that care can result in significant human and financial costs. Analytics 2013 Orlando presenters, Kevin Armstrong of Vanderbilt University
Are you missing the “A” in your FP&A (financial planning and analysis)? Maybe missing some of the “P” as well? Are you and your department getting a bit tired of the “FR” gig you seem to have landed? I just got back from chairing last week’s IE Group Financial Innovation
While you might not think that businesses outside the trendy, youth-focused fashion and music markets would have much to learn from the practice of “coolhunting”, there are some key product life cycle principles common to both. Coolhunting is market research aimed at discovering, in their infancy, new trends in youth markets, catching
SAS Forecast Server (release 12.3) is now shipping, and includes the new SAS Time Series Studio GUI. Time Series Studio (TSS), was released as "experimental" last August in 12.1, and is now in production. TSS provides an additional interface in Forecast Server, for time series data mining, exploration, and data preparation.
Do we ever really get pricing right? Sometimes we do, and some of those times are actually on purpose, but it takes a lot of upstream activities to go right in order for pricing to be optimal as well. Too often pricing is that last variable at our disposal when
I worked at the General Dynamics (now Lockheed-Martin) F-16 jet fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas, during the mid-1980’s, where they subsequently manufactured the F-22 and now the F-35. My tenure there spanned the era of the $400 hammer and $700 toilet seat scandals in the military procurement world. While
A big part of "winning" these days (be it sports or a business) is performing analytics better than your competition. This is demonstrated in awe-inspiring fashion in the book (and movie) "Moneyball." And on that topic, I'd like to show you a few ways SAS can be used to analyze sports data
Back in 2012 I advocated man-dog love and introduced you to my foster dog Mikey. While an endearing little fellow, Mikey did have a bit of a fabric fetish, so his new family has neither curtains nor tablecloths. Mikey's fetish was discovered while still in foster, when he tore the skirt off
The war of business forecasting ideas is being waged in the trenches of the online discussion groups. Where else can great disagreement be exacerbated (and sometimes even resolved) by often civilized discussion, with participants from across the globe? One of the popular groups for business forecasting practitioners is Demand Planning, Sales Forecasting,
There are numerous algorithms used in forecasting, and each of those algorithms is optimized for a certain class of data. How does a business analyst know which forecasting algorithm to use? With the new version of SAS Visual Analytics, you don’t have to know – the product does all the
To read more ongoing tips and insights for small and midsize businesses, follow our SAS4SMB blog series or visit SAS for Small and MidSize Business. We all wish we could predict the future. After all, when a company knows its sales for next week, next month and next year, it
I have been privileged to have had the opportunity to contribute to the recently published, “Positioned – Strategic Workforce Planning that gets the Right Person in the Right Job”, co-edited by Rob Tripp, Workforce Planning Manager at Ford Motor Company. The list of contributors is a Who’s Who of strategic
The Lancaster Centre for Forecasting is led by two of my favorites in the forecasting world, Robert Fildes and Sven Crone. The Centre is home to cutting edge research and consulting, covering the range of forecasting models and methods, as well as real-world forecasting process. The Centre has announced a
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight The importance of trust in the dissemination of forecasts through an organization cannot be overstated. Lack of trust, due in no small measure to the biases arising from “silo mentalities” and misplaced incentives, can and too often does undermine the forecasting process. Foresight has
