Decision optimization made credible, integrated, user- friendly and data driven

Directorate of Economics and Statistics (DES) - Gujarat is the nodal statistical body of the Government of Gujarat, India. It collects Primary and Secondary data compiles and disseminate Official Statistics to various government departments for policy decisions for the state's socioeconomic development.

Government information management bodies are responsible to collect, manage, analyse and disseminate data for more than a million people that fall under their jurisdiction. Various Govt. bodies are involved in decisions on resource allocations, processes, scheduling, policies and a myriad of other complex issues. For rational decision, it is required that each of these factors has been fully analyzed and properly weighed.

For a long time, the Directorate of Economics and Statistics (DES) - Gujarat relied on limited IT infrastructures for data compilation, validation, analysis and report preparation. With the development of the portal Gujarat Integrated Statistical System(GISS), with SAS Integrated with it, DES-Gujarat is facilitated with a comprehensive, streamlined and easy-to-use environment to prepare visual analytics that helps various department/Government Offices in data-based decisions in a timely manner. The analysts are relatively freed from managing data, allowing greater focus on more creative projects that are crucial to make better policy decisions.

Data foundation that supports effective decisions:
The infrastructure to support efficient data collection, processing and management needed to be upgraded. Lack of standardization of data collection formats made it difficult to aggregate and make sense of data. Issues of privacy and data anonymization added to the concerns.

DES- Gujarat now uses SAS Enterprise Guide for data loading, preparation of data sets for reporting, adhoc analysis with the help of built in tasks and the freedom to customize data preparation and access. DES- Gujarat now has an integrated visual data development environment that enables data collection, processing and collaboration across systems and platforms, all with a single point of IT administration.

High speed, intelligent and automated data reporting and analysis:
To facilitate decision makers to understand the volume and complex data, DES- Gujarat chose to switch to interactive visual analytics tools from SAS. Key relationships, outliers, clusters, trends etc. are highlighted across numerous sectors and key indicators, thus empowering users with critical insights that lead to better reports and inspire intelligent decisions.

Data Reporting made better, faster and user-friendly:
Most of the reporting involved manual intervention. Reports and analysis that previously required a week for development, are now prepared within just a few days with a further scope for time reduction. A web base portal is now in place, containing data of all sectors with customised access for various authorities.

Increased efficiency and credibility with automation:
Data Collection & Dissemination was carried out through conventional methods. Hence there was a large scope for improvement in data preparation and presentation. DES- Gujarat needed a robust data collection, management and analysis system.

GISS with SAS was brought in to collate and manage data quickly and drive them analytically. The staff is now more productive as they can spend time on other critical processes and can churn out follow up requests much quickly. Similarly the reporting and dash boarding processes were also automated to reduce any chances of manual errors and save time. DES- Gujarat is now able to create a clean repository of data which has brought in reliability and substantial savings in the man hours spent on unnecessary and elaborate processes of data management, visualization and reporting.

Implementation Partner: PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited (Data & Analytics Practice)