When a prompted report is saved, the last-selected prompt values are also saved. In some cases, one or more of those values might not be valid. For example, you select Tracker Shoes as the value for a Product

Beginning with release 5.2 of SAS Financial Management, Microsoft Office 2010 will be supported as a reporting interface. Please "http://www.sas.com/contact/intro.html">contact your local SAS office f

Cohesion (n): the act or state of sticking together tightly; molecular attraction by which the particles of a body are united throughout the mass.

Three is the number of years a snail can sleep. Three is the first odd prime number. Three is the third Fibonacci number that is unique. (I could do an entire blog on Fibonacci, but I’ll spare you the Dan Brown). The human ear has three semicircular canals and three ossicles. Most elbows consist of three bones, the only joint in the human body where three articulations are surrounded by one capsule.

Humans perceive white light as the mixture of the three additive primary hues: red, green and blue.
Continue reading "Einstein ... and the significance of the number 3"

It's webinar time again! This hour session is designed for business analysts, directors of analytics and BI, and business users on the topic of Centers of Excellence. This live "101" webinar will take place live on Aug. 18, and it's the fifth installment in the 2010 Applying Business Analytics Webinar Series.

Maximizing knowledge of your business intelligence and analytical resources is the most effective way to improve business performance and create a competitive advantage. Successful organizations do this by aligning their culture, technical capabilities and internal processes with their strategic and tactical business objectives and priorities.

Whether you are focusing on reporting and BI, data management or analytics, there is a role for a center of excellence in your organization. The webinar will demonstrate how centers of excellence can help you and your organization use existing resources to maximize business value.
Continue reading "Centers of Excellence 101: How to maximize knowledge from BI and analytical resources"

Continue reading "Fraud detection explained"

Once a cycle has been created in SAS Financial Management, it might be necessary to go back later and add additional time periods to the cycle. To do so, please follow these steps: Please note that the informati

There are three user roles that allow access to SAS Financial Management Studio Finance Adjuster Dimension Modeler Finance Process Administrator. The Finance Adjuster has read access to the

If trying to access a password protected SAS data set but the password is unknown, the customer must send a letter from their SAS site representative on their company letterhead stating they have authorization to use

When I first started in the telecom business I worked for a guy named Charlie Snell. Charlie left General Motors after more than 20 years because he was fed-up.  Charlie would regale us at lunch with tales of an environment that stifled any creativity and innovation. This was 25 years ago. I loved cars as much as the next guy, but after a few of Charlie’s stories I was glad to be working in telecom.

Charlie was managing a network upgrade project.  We were upgrading our data links from 9,600 bits per second to 56,000 bits per second. My job was to configure the equipment then travel to remote sites and make sure these high-speed connections were working. Some people in the company objected to this extravagance – claiming that no one would ever need that much bandwidth.

In the 25 years since I worked for Charlie, the telecom industry has changed the world. Billions of people who had never made a phone call now have access to a cell phone. Most people I know have a multi-megabit Internet connection that costs less per month than a tank of gas and a high-speed wireless router that costs about the same as a couple of car washes.  The Blackberry and iPhone I carry in my pocket have more computing power than the data center did when I worked for Charlie. In addition to being great phones, they give me anywhere anytime access the whole world of information and entertainment.

Compare that to the auto industry. The two biggest innovations in 25 years have been windshield wipers that pause, and cup holders.
Continue reading "Profits at GM prove that telecom guys are smarter than car guys"

When clicking on the Client Diagnostics tool to launch <diagnostics.exe>, it appears that nothing has happened on the system.

A new SAS Analytics Facebook page helps customers, prospects, partners and employees connect via a larger online community. As part of our efforts to reach out to customers and raise awareness about analytics, we created a SAS Analytics Facebook page, and it's ready for you to "like."




What's to "like"?
Whether you are at the listen, share or create stage in your own social media journey, the SAS Analytics Facebook page is a place for you to connect with those interested in analytics. We invite everyone to 'like' the page and start participating. You can ask a question, share news and information, and provide useful information for others through this new channel. Doing so makes the good things people are doing with analytics more visible, relevant and reliable.
Continue reading " Do you 'like' SAS Analytics? Show it now on Facebook"

What's going on? I am often asked this question about the insurance industry and even more so at this time of the year, as SAS prepares its sales forecasts and marketing budgets for next year and beyond. Of course I usually respond with the same answer: improving operational efficiency, reducing claims fraud, increasing customer retention, risk management and product pricing. With the conservative nature of insurance, realistically I could give the same top five issues for the next 10 years, if not longer.

However, if we peel back the covers there is a lot of changes going on in the insurance industry and the remainder of this article will briefly highlight some of the innovative initiatives that insurance organizations across the global are using today.
Continue reading "What’s going on? – Four initiatives changing the insurance industry"

By default the mail server in SAS Financial Management is set to mailhost.yourcompany.com and the admin error e-mail recipient is set to admin@yourcompany.com

Below is a list of default ports used by the SAS Financial Management solution in a Windows server installation. SAS Financial Management 4.x: Web Server 8080 BE

When you submit a SAS program that calls an FEA (Financial Engineering Associates) function, the SAS session might end shortly after the SAS program has finished running and the SAS log might not contain any related warn

This is accomplished via Microsoft Excel's Format > Style functionality.

When Platform LSF Process Manager (the job flow daemon [jfd]) does not start, check the following: Make sure that jfd is running. At a UNIX system prompt, type

Have you ever seen an image with two things that just don’t seem to go together? I had that experience last week on a train from London to Brussels. The woman next to me was reading a magazine and the image on the page just didn’t look right. I took me a while to convince myself that what I saw was real. Queen Elizabeth II was wearing a lab coat with a Research in Motion logo.

This was not one of those internet hoaxes that someone created using Photoshop. The Queen was really wearing a white lab coat with a nice big RIM emblazoned on it. On a recent state visit to Canada, Her Majesty paid a visit to Research in Motion. Of all the places in Canada, why did the Queen drop in on RIM, and allow herself to be photographed in a lab coat?

The Queen knows that we are in the midst of a technology revolution that is changing society, and RIM is only one of the smartphone leaders headquartered within the commonwealth. Now I don’t think RIM needs the Queen to help sell Blackberries, but it can’t hurt. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several people from RIM and these people are smart.

Smartphones' advances in screens, processors, memory, and data rates are beating Moore’s law and consumers are reaping the benefits. According to recent analysis by the Yankee Group, phones with an advanced Operating System were 12 percent of the market in 2007, but will be nearly 40 percent by 2014. Markets that grow this fast always have some challenges and for smartphone market, the challenge is network congestion. Wireless networks were built for voice calls and most cell sites are still connected to the core network by old style T1 or E1 lines. AT&T recently addressed the congestion issue with tiered price plans for data. But those price plans also are attracting new customers. But if your network is congested, is attracting new customers a good idea?
Continue reading "Smartphones are so cool even the Queen wants to get in on the action"

It is not possible to globally change the default layout and have it automatically applied to every new SAS® Financial Management Read-only report. However, you can modify the styles used by a specific SAS Financial M

When running SAS Web Report Studio in the Italian locale, if you enter a filter value that includes a period (the grouping separator) followed by two numbers (for example, 10.15), the result is an illegal number. Instead