Opportunities

What can SAS data management offerings do to help bring order to this chaos?

Software from SAS comes in offerings, which provide specific functions to help specific groups of users. These offerings generally include SAS/ACCESS interfaces that enable data architects and administrators to efficiently load data from a variety of sources including relational databases, personal computer files, and Hadoop.

The Data Management Advanced offering also includes integration and data quality tools such SAS Data Integration Studio and DataFlux Data Management Studio that aid administrators and architects in cleansing data and organizing it for better performance.

SAS data governance applications such as SAS Lineage and SAS Business Data Network helps business users and managers see and understand data more clearly.

A good way to understand how to use the SAS data management applications is to look at them as tools using the SAS Data Management methodology. This methodology divides your data management engagement into planning, action, and monitoring stages. The following stages are included:

The SAS Data Management methodology is a step-by-step process for performing data management tasks such as data quality, data integration, data migrations, and master data management. Within this methodology, the Plan stage contains Define and Discover phases. Similarly, the Act stage includes Design and Execute phases, and the Monitor stage contains Evaluate and Control phases.

Your organization benefits when it plans, takes action on, and monitors data management projects. This methodology helps you build the foundation to optimize revenue, control costs, and mitigate risks. Moreover, all of these stages interact. For example, you can revisit your initial plans and operational designs when you evaluate your progress in the Monitoring stage.

The remainder of this introduction shows how the Groceryrama and GreenVillage staff use the SAS data management applications to work together through a data management project.