SAS® Platform delivers integrated user experience, improved  forecasts and SMB flexibility

Euramax and SUEZ among Dutch companies boosting productivity with SAS

Companies in a variety of industries and sizes have turned to analytics leader SAS to gain value from data with the SAS Platform and its SAS® Viya® products.

Recent adopters from the Netherlands include Euramax (supplier of premium coil-coated aluminum); Notilyze (specializing in data science for small and midsized businesses); NVM (an organization of real estate agents and appraisers); SciSports (sports analytics firm); and SUEZ (improving waste and raw material management).

Euramax unifies data, analytics and visualization with a consistent user experience

Euramax Coated Products supplies premium coil coated aluminum all over the world for applications in architectural products, transportation and corporate identity design. The leadership team at Euramax knows the company's success can depend on understanding and sometimes even redefining the future. That’s why the company is committed to business analytics and data exploration. SAS allows Euramax to gain more dynamic reporting and exploration capabilities and enhance mobility with the ability to carry data out into the field and share it with customers. With the newest upgrades to the SAS Platform, Euramax plans to take its data exploration to the next level.

“SAS is already helping us make better business decisions with SAS Visual Analytics, and these newest upgrades to the platform are going to give us even more insights,” said Peter Wijers, Business Support Manager at Euramax. “The ability to integrate more data sources and systems, apply advanced analytics to that data, and then visualize the data all in one interface with a consistent user experience will allow us to discover even more ways to excel our business.”

SUEZ uses machine learning to improve sales performance

SUEZ Recycling and Recovery specializes in waste and raw material management and is a driver of the raw materials revolution to help protect natural resources. From more than 40 branches across the Netherlands, SUEZ advises approximately 4.5 million households and 80,000 companies about their waste management. To serve customers more effectively in the digital landscape, SUEZ must monitor data about their customers in real time. SUEZ used the SAS Platform to create a tool to improve its sales process and performance.

Prior to SAS, the sales teams at SUEZ did not have a reliable view into data about their customers and prospects. Now, sales reps are provided with a tablet where they can access the most up-to-date customer profiles and receive customized recommendations about where to concentrate their sales efforts each day. Inside sales can also use the same data and forecasts tracked by outside sales to help make decisions about customers and prospects that they are speaking to over the phone. This creates a unified approach to sales across the organization, and ultimately helps improve customer relationships.

“SUEZ can pull all of our massive amounts of data into the SAS Platform, not just a sampling, and run the most sophisticated machine learning algorithms on it to create the more accurate forecasts for our sales team,” said Teddo van Mierle, Marketing Intelligence Expert at SUEZ. “One interface that can be used across the organization that creates a single version of the truth is improving the way we do business. Not only do we have the statistics in SAS, we now have the data collection, preparation and visualization all in one platform. Plus, we can deploy the models in a scalable, aligned and auditable way, and continuously feed the model new data to make it smarter and smarter over time. The better the forecasts, the better SUEZ is able to serve our customers.”

Notilyze helps SMBs embrace analytics

Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) can find it difficult to capitalize on the benefits of analytics. Dutch startup company Notilyze uses SAS to deliver data-science services on a pay-as-you-go subscription model. This model helps SMBs and entrepreneurs to capitalize on opportunities offered by the analytics-driven economy and Internet of Things without having to hire their own data scientists. Notilyze works exclusively with experienced data scientists so customers get answers to their questions and benefit from innovative insights and algorithms.

“SMBs are aware of the opportunities that come from using their data, but are at a loss to know where to start, and lack the knowledge and resources to do so. On top of that, the costs involved can be high,” says Colin Nugteren, Notilyze’s founder and CEO. “Together with SAS, we are offering these organizations a platform in a reliable cloud environment where their data is analyzed. The customer tells us the issues, and Notilyze data scientists select the necessary data and perform the analyses to deliver the answers. The customer can consult the results through dashboards and real-time web services, accessible wherever and whenever they like.”

An enhanced SAS Platform encompasses the entire analytics life cycle

The new, interactive visual interface to the SAS Platform is now available as of Dec. 12. New products as well as enhancements to existing products help users improve productivity by seamlessly transitioning through the stages of the analytics life cycle – from data to discovery to deployment.

• Data
  • New SAS Data Preparation provides self-service data wrangling, transformations, blending and cleansing of data, with automatically generated code fit for IT scheduling as data refreshes
• Discovery –
  • SAS taps into the latest deep learning algorithms and continues to invest heavily in embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into products, starting with SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning and SAS Visual Text Analytics  
  • New SAS Visual Text Analytics is a modern, flexible and end-to-end text analytics framework that combines text mining, contextual extraction, categorization, sentiment analysis and search. It automates feature extraction and business-rule generation using modern machine learning approaches.
  • SAS Visual Analytics adds new ways to visualize data relationships (e.g., D3 objects, Google charts), taps into the power of location analytics, includes enhanced calculations, links and parameters, and brings a unified user experience for self-service BI, discovery and analytics.

• Deployment -
  • SAS Model Manager for central management and monitoring of inventories of SAS and other models
  • SAS Decision Manager for automating tactical decisions based on models and associated business rules
  • This latest release includes new managed software as a service offerings on the SAS Cloud and continues to support public cloud deployments through Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and others.