SAS Makes Its Business-Intelligence Tools SmarterSAS Makes Its Business-Intelligence Tools Smarter

In these tight economic times, companies are trying to squeeze as much efficiency out of their supply chains as possible. SAS Institute Inc. is expanding its line of business-intelligence tools for supply-chain analysis with applications for gauging customer demand and monitoring production processes.

SAS Demand Intelligence helps managers spot customer-demand patterns and create forecasts that can be used to help develop production and pricing strategies. SAS Process Intelligence helps companies analyze manufacturing and engineering operations and improve product quality and yield. SAS already offers supplier-relationship management and value-chain analytics applications.

"This is not just a reporting tool," Meta Group analyst Dwight Klappich says. Most packaged supply-chain analytics software, as well as analytical capabilities built into supply-chain applications, provide relatively limited performance-measurement capabilities, he says. Users of the new SAS software can perform trend analysis using SAS's underlying statistical-analysis technology. "Smart people who can use (the statistical-analysis) tools are going to be able to do a lot with this data," he says.

SAS is also creating a supply-chain analytics consulting group to help customers deploy the applications and develop best practices in supply-chain analysis. The new Demand Intelligence and Process Intelligence applications are available now for custom installation through the consulting group and will be generally available as packages by year's end. Prices range from $200,000 to $700,000.