Twenty-four sessions, twenty-four speakers, twenty-four different topics over just two days, and I didn’t just sit through the convention as a participant, no, I moderated the entire two day event as its Chairman. The Financial Forecasting and Planning Summit, organized by the IE Group, and held at the DoubleTree Mission Valley in San Diego, February 25-26. Whew! That was a lot of work.

As Chair, you literally do not get a break. While the participants are grabbing a coffee and a snack, you, as moderator, are busy tracking down the next set of speakers, many of whom only showed up during the middle of the prior session, learning how to mispronounce their names, finding out that they’ve changed their presentation topic since the agenda went to press, scrapping the introduction you spent twenty minutes working on the prior evening and quickly rewriting a new intro based on that new topic, and otherwise dealing with the various changes and announcements that the organizers are throwing at you, some unavoidable (ill speakers) and some evidently just to make you jump (Agenda? Isn’t that a synonym for “rough guideline”?)

Twenty-four speakers over just two days, thirty minutes each, and not a minute extra. Give into one and you lose control of the entire meeting, so out of necessity you become the Timekeeper from Hell. By lunch time of Day 1 I had all the speakers completely paranoid; exactly where I wanted them.
Continue reading "Unique business models, but common problems"

When used in a text-based conditional highlighting rule, some special characters, such as > and <, might not display correctly. For example, if your conditional highlighting rule inserts the text string "Total

SAS/ACCESS Interface to HP Neoview (SAS 9.1.3) has been enhanced to include the BULKLOAD= option.

When attempting to update a SAS BI Dashboard indicator, you might receive the following error: ----------------------------------------------

SAS Enterprise Guide inserts quotation marks around formatted numeric values when the values are exported to a delimited text file. This behavior is a change from SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1, which did not insert the

Usually an 'out of memory' message means the SAS procedure needed more system memory, but there was not enough memory available to run the job. The amount of memory a SAS job can consume is limited by the MEM

Even if you do not have physical access to a table that is being used as a data source for an information map, you might still see results when opening the information map in SAS Enterprise Guide. Specifically, if server-

SAS Marketing Automation 5.1 is supported to work with Platform Suite for SAS (Platform LSF version 6.2). Support that enables SAS Marketing Automation 5.1 to work with Platform Suite for SAS (Platform LSF version 7) is

When adding reference lines on a line graph in SAS Web Report Studio, the reference line might not display as expected. This problem is most likely to occur if the data item that is assigned to Line Height has been f

SAS size="-1">® 9.2 provides a new feature called Security Subsets. This feature is enabled in your OLAP cube by building the cube with the SECURITY_SUBSET=YES option in your OLAP procedure code,

With SAS size="-1">® 9.2, the first location for an aggregation file or index is randomly selected from the INDEXPATH and DATAPATH options. This means that the distribution of the files wil

This note explains which operators work for filtered lookup fields in the Merchandise or Location Filter windows.

When executing a SAS Stored Process, the client user must have a login user account that uses the same Authentication Domain as the SAS Stored Process Server.As an example,if the SAS Stored Process Server has an Authentication Domain called UnixAut

The execution of a SAS Forecast Studio batch program might fail with a "WARNING: Truncated record" message. The warning occurs because the generated SAS program source line is greater than the system limit.

“It has just snowballed.’’

That’s how Greg Smith, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at Xavier University in Cincinnati, describes the business intelligence concentration his university started for Master of Business Administration students. In an 18-month time frame, the concentration grew from zero to 100 students – a full 10 percent of the school’s 1,000 part-time MBA students. The concentration includes a course in data mining and predictive modeling using SAS. The program has been so successful that the university is planning to offer an undergraduate degree in business analytics soon.

Smith credits the interest to a job market that wants employees with strong analytic skills. Research-driven companies like Kroger, dunnhumby, and Procter & Gamble make their home in Cincinnati. But Xavier’s BI concentration also draws in engineers, nurses and others who see the analytics component as critical to their education. While the university has sent out a press release about its offerings and has marketed the classes internally, it has primarily grown the program without mentions in paid advertisements.

According to Smith, it’s important to enhance analytics education for students who aren’t seeking math-dominant degrees. “There is a competing university in town that offers a master’s and PhD in the quantitative areas, but no one was doing this associated with an MBA,’’ Smith explains. While higher-level math classes are critical to creating forecasts, predictive modeling and mining can, and should, be done by students possessing more of a liberal arts background, Smith says.
Continue reading "Business analytics drives Xavier University’s MBA concentration, new undergraduate major"

The following errors can occur when you import Excel or Access files into SAS 9.2 or later: "Error: Connect: Class not registered" and "Error: Error in the Libname statement".

This SAS Note is updated regularly with the current list of appropriate hot fixes that must be applied for SAS IT Resource Management release 3.1.1 to function properly.

In the SAS ® Revenue Optimization Solutions (SAS ® Markdown Optimization, SAS ® Regular Price Optimization and SAS ® Promotion Optimization), the rebuilding of att

The SAS 9.2 installation screen titled "Specify SAS Installation Data File" might prompt with "C:\SAS Installation Data", even though this folder does not exist. This occurs if the original SID file is expired, and no new SID file

When installing SAS 9.2, the following message may appear in the sdw.log file: INFO: No VERSION Value in PRODUCT Data: \\sashq\root\dept\techsup\shipped\SAS92P_09w40 \produc