Demand Soars for Business Forecasting

When the world's leading business forecasters gathered at the Forecasting Summit 2006 in Boston, some of the event's biggest buzz surrounded the strong cross-industry adoption of SAS Forecast Server. SAS dominates the business forecasting market, having more than 6,500 licenses with more than 4,000 unique customers globally for its forecasting solutions.  Many of these companies adopted SAS Forecast Server soon after its November 2005 introduction.

"SAS Forecast Server has been extremely popular because it's the only forecasting software that provides large-scale automation," says Mike Gilliland, Product Marketing Manager at SAS. "The automation allows analysts to focus efforts on high-value forecasts. With more attention on the most important business decisions, SAS Forecast Server customers can achieve a competitive advantage in customer service and resource management, while using less management time in the process."

Industry pundits have also taken note, awarding SAS Forecast Server accolades such as Product of the Year from Communications Solutions magazine and Trend-setting Product of the Year from KMWorld.

Delivering better forecasts
With new patent-pending functionality, SAS Forecast Server helps companies save money and time by improving the overall planning process by delivering better forecasts. This latest forecasting offering from SAS includes large-scale, automated forecasting and time series mining to uncover time-related patterns and trends. Its interactive user interface eases forecasting, putting sophisticated technology into the hands of even novice forecasters.

SAS® forecasting in action …
Waitrose, the food shops of the John Lewis Partnership in the United Kingdom, selected SAS forecasting software to better manage its supply chain (read more). SAS forecasting software, built on the SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform, will help Waitrose forecast demand for its products based not only on the history of each item, but also on any number of causal variables, events or holidays.

"SAS' event forecasting enables us to incorporate knowledge about our business into the forecasting process and enables us to forecast the demand for thousands of items quickly and accurately," says Rob Thompson, Head of Supply Chain at Waitrose. "We anticipate that the return on investment we will achieve on reduced wastage and increased revenues will be significant."

New adopters of SAS Forecast Server include:

• Capital Card Services
• Wells Fargo Bank
• RJ Reynolds
• DaimlerChrysler
• JC Penney
• Mark's Work Wearhouse
• AB Kvallstidningen Expressen
• Six Continents Hotels
• North-West University
• Time
• Tribune Co.
• UPC Broadband 
• Union Pacific Railroad

SAS Forecast Server is the only forecasting software that provides large-scale automation.