White Paper
Five Questions to Ask
Before You Use SAS for Your
Next Analytics Project
Introduction
Your company’s success depends on your ability to unlock and leverage the value of your organization’s data. To do that, you need powerful, sophisticated analytics that answer increasingly complex—and critical—business questions. Your data analysts are under constant pressure to quickly and accurately analyze data and provide insight into business decisions that impact your competitive position. More often than not, by the time they give you the insight you need, the market has changed and the business opportunity no longer exists.
The key to unlocking and leveraging the value of your data lies in choosing the right analytics approach, tools, and platform to support your business. Unfortunately, the most widely used analytic platform on the market today, SAS, presents significant challenges for companies that rely on it to make critical business decisions. Why? Because the SAS approach to analytics makes the data access process unbearably lengthy, includes tools that can only be used by highly specialized programming experts, and costs too much for most businesses to scale to analysts in line-of-business groups. With every aspect of your business dependent on decisions that require deep insight, you must find a more effective and efficient approach to analytics that enables your business to thrive and grow.
Whether you are familiar with SAS because it’s already in use in your company or even if you are not, here are five (5) critical questions to ask yourself before using SAS for your next analytics project.
Five Questions to Ask Before Using SAS for Your Next Project Question #1: Can I afford to wait for the data I want to analyze?
In any modern organization, mere hours and minutes can be critical in business decision-making; it’s rare indeed that you can wait days, weeks, or months for answers to pressing business questions—let alone for the data that informs those answers.
However, with SAS analytics, the waiting is the hardest—and the main—part. Because the SAS approach to analytics depends on the premise that the central IT organization owns most of the analytic process and will deliver the specific data to each line-of-business group, you must involve your often over-extended IT staff in the data collection process. What’s more, the data set you want to access, aggregate, and analyze must be gathered using complex tools designed for specially trained data integration experts. For analysts, the words “do-it-yourself” simply don’t exist in the SAS world—even for business-critical requests.
If you need to move more quickly than SAS analytics products allow, consider Alteryx Analytics instead.
With Alteryx, your data analysts—the people who actually know the business—can quickly and easily blend together data from virtually any data source, including SAS, into a format ready for analytics, delivering the most timely and accurate answers to your line-of-business executives. “Sophisticated analytics that
previously required a data scientist or statistical Ph.D. to write
hundreds of lines of code can now be done in a few mouse clicks and maybe a quick drag-and-drop using Alteryx.”
—Greg Bucko, manager of customer insights, Southern States Cooperative
Question #2: Can I iterate my analytics when my business question changes? How often do you receive the results of your business query only to go back to your data analyst and ask to change a variable or focus on a different outcome? How long does it usually take for a SAS programmer to make a requested change and for you to feel satisfied with the result? Analyzing data isn’t a static process. Sometimes, key questions and factors change during the analytics process, but that doesn’t mean you have more time to analyze the data and make a decision. In fact, you might even need to make a decision more quickly—before your competition takes advantage of that hot new business opportunity. Time- to-analysis matters.
Unfortunately for companies that use SAS analytics, changes in the analytic process quickly turn minutes into hours, days, weeks, or even months. Again you must involve your IT staff, get into the lengthy queue, and wait for a data scientist or SAS programmer to provide you with what you need. Changes in business requirements, including the data required for analysis, impact the entire analytics process, so by the time you get the updated answer to your business question, it’s no longer relevant.
If you need to iterate your analytics at any time during the analytic process, consider Alteryx Analytics instead.
With Alteryx, the analytic process resides in the line-of-business—not in IT— enabling changes, updates, and refreshes to be made immediately—and by the people who know the business, and the data best. Your line-of-business analysts can easily make changes to advanced predictive, spatial, and Big Data analytics with just a few clicks of the mouse, without having to involve expensive data scientists or learn complicated code. Your analytics can change as quickly as business factors or variables change—so you can swiftly take advantage of new and profitable business opportunities.
Question #3: Can my data analysts run their own predictive analysis? The real value in analytics today is not in reporting what happened in the past, but rather in predicting what will happen in the future based on that historical data. You know this and rely on predictive analytics to gain a competitive edge and aggressively take advantage of business opportunities that drive revenue and open new markets. And you must run these predictive analytics quickly to ensure the window of opportunity is still open.
If you use SAS, however, the window will likely shut before you get the answers you need to take advantage of the business opportunity. Why? Because, with SAS analytics, you not only must rely on IT to collect the data you want to analyze but also on expensive and scarce data scientists or statisticians in other groups to utilize and understand the complicated SAS programming language—or you must spend even more money hiring an expensive new employee. While you are waiting for someone else to run your predictive analytics, your window of opportunity quickly closes.
Alteryx Analytics provides access to
virtually any data source, including: • Legacy analytics tools, including
SAS and SPSS
• Data warehouses and databases, such as Oracle, SAP, and Teradata • ERP and cloud-based applications,
such as Salesforce.com and Marketo • Hadoop-based Big Data
• NoSQL Databases, such as MongoDB • Microsoft Excel spreadsheets • Flat files
• Spatial and location data files • Social media
If you need your data analysts to run their own predictive analytics, consider Alteryx Analytics instead.
With Alteryx, your data analysts can include predictive analytics in any analytic workflow. Alteryx simplifies the predictive process by eliminating sophisticated coding and delivering predictive analytics in an intuitive environment. Rather than forcing you to hire new data specialists to create complicated code, your line-of-business users can easily include predictive analytics using a drag-and-drop interface—in the same workflow as all your other analytics. No need to outsource, hire expensive specialists, or wait for others to code the analytics. It’s all at your fingertips with Alteryx.
Question #4: Does location matter in my business questions?
Every business transaction happens somewhere—and the context around that location matters. Did the customer purchase online or in a brick-and-mortar store? Which store did the customer visit? What are the demographics for the five-mile area around that store? Which competitors operate within that five- mile radius? With the rise of location-enabled devices, such as smartphones and tablets, consumer and business interactions increasingly include a location data point, making spatial analysis more critical than ever before—and meaning the difference between a successful and profitable new product launch and an industry product flop.
If you use SAS analytics products, such as Enterprise Guide or Enterprise Miner, including location-based and spatial analytics requires the purchase of expensive third-party spatial analytics products or even significant coding efforts. That’s money and time spent on product integration while business opportunities— and your competitors—pass you by.
If location matters in your analytics process, consider Alteryx Analytics instead.
With Alteryx, you can easily include powerful location-based analytics in every analytic application. Alteryx uniquely provides powerful geospatial and location intelligence tools as part of any analytic workflow, allowing “What took hours in SAS now takes
under 60 seconds with Alteryx .” —David Algranati,
SVP Product Innovation and Custom Research, Rentrak
Alteryx Analytics enables you to
include any or all of the following in your predictive analytics: • Geocoding of data • Drive-time analytics • Trade area creation
• Spatial and demographic analysis • Spatial and predictive analysis • Mapping
Alteryx delivers predictive
analytics in the form of a macro, eliminating the need for programming and making predictive
analytics accessible to all analysts, not just data scientists
Question #5: Can I quickly and easily deliver analytics to my business decision-makers?
Once your data analyst has worked with IT to collect the relevant data and then has collaborated with a data scientist to create the predictive analytics, that analytics needs to end up in the hands of your line-of-business executives— quickly—to run the analytic application and get the answer to the initial business question. Again, time and simplicity are keys to taking advantage of juicy
business opportunities.
This should be easy, right? Wrong. With SAS analytics, getting results and analytics into the hands of line-of-business executives often requires additional customization. Plus, integrating market-specific SAS applications into your overall SAS deployment requires additional requests of your overworked IT department. Delivering analytic applications that answer pressing business questions means jumping through more hoops—and wasting time that could be spent taking advantage of that profitable business opportunity.
If you need to get analytic insight into the hands of business decision-makers quickly, easily, and cost-effectively, consider Alteryx Analytics instead.
With Alteryx, you can make powerful analytics easily and quickly accessible to every business decision-maker. Designed to be used by line-of-business users rather than highly specialized data scientists or Ph.D.’s in statistical analysis, Alteryx puts powerful analytics in the hands of those employees who know your business best. The line-of-business owns the entire analytic process—from data collection and cleansing to inclusion of third-party location information, geocoding, and firmographic data to data visualization. Alteryx also enables your data analysts to share powerful analytic
applications or collections of applications with anyone in your organization via email, social media, or the cloud, utilizing the Alteryx Analytics Gallery. Just choose the analytic application or collection you want to share and select how you want to share it. No more complex coding or delays getting analytics into the hands of decision-makers. Alteryx makes it easy to point, click, and share even the most complex analytic applications via a public or private cloud.
What’s more, Alteryx gives you the ability to deliver output directly into visualization tools, such as Tableau or QlikView, empowering analysts and decision-makers with a visual representation of their data and enabling them to make more informed business decisions.
About Alteryx
Alteryx is the leader in data blending and advanced analytics software.
Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with
an intuitive workflow for data blending and advanced analytics that leads to deeper insights in hours, not the weeks typical of traditional approaches. Analysts love the Alteryx analytics platform because they can deliver deeper insights by seamlessly blending internal, third party, and cloud data, and then analyze it using spatial and predictive drag-and-drop tools. This is all done in a single workflow, with no programming required. Thousands of customers, including Experian, Kaiser, Ford, and McDonald’s, and 200,000 + users worldwide rely on Alteryx daily. Visit www.alteryx.com or call 1-888-836-4274.
Conclusion
Choosing the right analytics approach, tools, and platform is one of the most critical business decisions you will make this year. It can mean the difference between taking advantage of a profitable business opportunity and watching your primary competitor do so. And it can mean the difference between launching a new product to rave reviews and watching it languish in the marketplace. With every aspect of your business dependent on decisions that require deep insight, you need powerful, sophisticated analytics that answer the most complex business questions—quickly, affordably, and without requiring expensive data scientists or Ph.D.s.
Free yourself from the chains of the slow, difficult to use, and unaffordable SAS Institute’s analytic platform with Alteryx. Alteryx enables faster decision-making through rapid data blending, empowers business decision-makers with analytics designed for data analysts not IT specialists, and delivers affordable analytics that can scale across your entire organization. Take advantage of a more effective and efficient approach to analytics that enables your business to thrive and grow— and puts analytics in the hands of those who know your business best. Take advantage of Alteryx Analytics.
Data analysts can consolidate data and analytic workflows into standalone analytic applications for personal use in the Alteryx Analytics Gallery
