Industry Focus Sessions
Industry Focus Sessions have been expanded this year to include three new topics: energy and utilities; government; and media, entertainment and travel. All focus sessions will examine SAS technologies and how they help achieve your goals. Each focus session includes a keynote presentation by a recognized industry expert followed by a thought leader from SAS who will discuss how SAS technologies address the issues, concepts and recommendations presented by the speaker. Each focus session will conclude with case studies in which organizations review their experiences implementing the proposed ideas and technologies.
These tailored presentations are designed to meet your unique needs in key industries:
- Communications
Breakthrough Business Intelligence: Case Studies in Taking Business Intelligence to the Next Level in the Telecommunications Industry
Rob Mattison, President, eXcellence in Telecommunication (XiT)
A global revolution is underway in how the telecommunications industry works. Radical business models, new products and services, and never-before-imagined partnerships are becoming the norm as consumers and businesses everywhere try to capitalize on the latest capabilities.
There is a massive amount of disruption ahead. There is boundless opportunity for those who can tackle the risks and push past the obstacles.
The unexpected popularity and success of Virtual Network Operators, the explosive push for Triple Play, the emergence of new technologies like WiMax, WiFi, IPTV, and operator attempts to consolidate infrastructure, business models and billing systems all conspire to make the carrier's job nearly impossible.
As business is changing faster and in more unanticipated directions than ever before, carriers are overwhelmed by the nature and amount of information needed to process how well their organizations are running. They are beginning to realize that having the right information – in the right place, at the right time – is more important to success than anything else. Most carriers are investing heavily in the development and exploitation of larger and more richly featured business intelligence capabilities.
In this presentation, Rob Mattison will provide an overview of this exciting trend in telecommunications. He will discuss how the playing field is being changed by: business intelligence competency centers, ETOM-based scorecards, convergent warehouses (data warehouses that combine and blend revenue assurance, network operations, customer relationship management, and marketing information) and the new generation of consumer behavior analytics.
Based upon dozens of real-world cases studies, Mattison will provide a practical overview of what the trends are, how they are being deployed and, most importantly, how carriers are using them to gain the edge in their marketplaces.
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- Education
Higher Education as a Performance-Driven Business
Jim Black, Ph.D., President and CEO, SEM WORKS
In Sun Tzu's The Art of War, there are many parallels to the business of higher education. Perhaps most pertinent to the attendees at this conference is the essence of war described in four dimensions:- Know yourself (Your institution's mission, vision, strategic directions, and clientele).
- Know your enemy (Your top competitors and aspirants).
- Know the ground (Your campus culture, limitations, barriers and opportunities for change, priorities, traditions, symbols and artifacts, structures, as well as politics).
- Know the weather (The external environmental factors that will impact your institution).
By knowing these dimensions and acting on this intelligence, your probability of success dramatically increases. This session will illustrate how to use tools such as benchmarking, environmental scanning, just-in-time customer feedback, scorecards, and dashboards to improve the execution of strategies "on the fly" in order to affect outcomes – student satisfaction and revenue generation in particular.
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- Energy and Utilities
Evolving Wholesale Energy Markets Demand New Technology Solutions
Patrick Reames, Vice President, Energy Trading and Risk Management, UtiliPoint International Inc.
Sponsored by: RiskAdvisoryVolatility in the wholesale energy markets offers huge opportunities and equally huge risks. The entrance of new players to the space, particularly hedge funds, creates new dynamics that have placed unprecedented demands on companies operating in the market. Intraday price movements and long term trends that are in many cases disconnected from market fundamentals create the need for trading systems that cannot only capture information in near real time, but can provide insight into the market through improved business intelligence and analytics. Traders in this environment must be agile and seek out, analyze, and quickly execute opportunities.
These new market dynamics come at a time when new legislative, regulatory, and market driven governance initiatives are forcing companies to re-examine their internal policies and procedures. Adequate controls need to be developed and maintained to monitor, and in many cases prevent, behaviors that could damage share-holder value.
This dichotomy of facilitating agile decision making and action versus the necessity for maintaining adequate control demands a new technology paradigm, moving from interfaced applications to a comprehensive solution based on new architectures, providing better integration, better connectivity, improved business process flow, and improved analytics and reporting capabilities.
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- Financial Services
Banking:
Overcoming Commoditization through Dynamic Relationship Pricing
Zohar Kritzer, Director, Solutions Architecture, Financial Services Division, AmdocsFinancial institutions face greater levels of competition, decreased margins and changes in consumer behavior. These dynamics are forcing banks to seek new ways to boost revenue using their legacy, commoditized products. This session will show how early adopters are mining new revenue — and sustainable competitive advantage — through relationship pricing and product bundling. Find out how to use pricing and bundling as powerful tools for driving customer value and retention while diminishing costs and speeding time to market.
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(Click on the title to expand the information)Insurance:
SOA in Insurance
Matthew Josefowicz, Group Manager, Insurance Practice, Celent
This session will present an overview of how insurers are using SOA and Web services to drive real business value in new business, underwriting, and claims. It will include adoption data and best practices from Celent research as well as several brief case studies.
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(Click on the title to expand the information)Risk:
Risk Management Best Practices for Small Business Lending
Jan Rowland, Vice President, D&B Global Analytics
The small business market presents a large, growing and untapped segment for financial services institutions. Eight out of 10 of these small enterprises require some form of credit to manage their business. It's likely that you either already transact with a number of start up or small businesses or that you will want to do business with this growing segment in the near future. However, if not pursued carefully this market can be fraught with risk. Will the small business pay you on time? Will you get paid at all? How much time and money can you afford to spend deciding if this small business is a high risk?
The application of best in class risk management strategies and techniques can help you increase profitability while effectively mitigating risk in your small business portfolio throughout the world. From account acquisition, portfolio management to collections these techniques share a common thread – the integration of your data with new sources of business information to accurately predict the future payment behavior of your customers. Applying advanced analytical techniques to a variety of data sources will allow you to anticipate potential changes to a small business' payment behavior before it occurs.
Risk management strategies designed specifically for small businesses such as small business scoring solutions, allow you to safely grow your small business customer base while proactively managing the health of your small business customer.
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- Government
The U.S. Coast Guard Integrated Deepwater System (IDS) Program
Gregory K. Cohen, Performance Measurement Lead, U.S. Coast Guard
The U.S. Coast Guard Integrated Deepwater System (IDS) Program is a critical multiyear, multibillion dollar program to modernize and replace the Coast Guard's aging ships and aircraft, and improve command, control, and logistics systems. It is the largest recapitalization effort in the history of the Coast Guard. The IDS program was developed to guarantee the nation's maritime homeland security with the capabilities to maximize the warning, detection, and response time available to Department of Homeland Security decision-makers and to provide the necessary capabilities to execute those decisions. It provides the capability and capacity for the Coast Guard to meet Maritime Homeland Security missions that could occur in ports, waterways, coastal areas, and extending seaward.
The IDS program implemented a Web-based performance management system that gathers, analyzes, reports, and shares program performance information across multiple channels. Personnel at all levels of the program use the performance management system to assist in performance-based program management, budget support, balanced scorecard measures, Web-based reporting, and analytics. The solution also provides acquisition executives and program managers with monthly user-defined reports specific to critical program areas. It also allows program analysts to perform statistical analysis and short-term reporting and analysis on any of the data in the system.
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- Life Sciences
Leveraging Technology to Promote a Culture of Patient Safety
George L. Higgins III, M.D., F.A.C.E.P., Chief Medical Officer and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Maine Medical CenterPatients and their families have every right to expect evidence-based, efficient, effective, compassionate and, most importantly, safe care during their hospitalization. Unfortunately, all too often they receive less.
The good news is that patients are now demanding to participate as true partners in their own care. They are motivated to become fully informed about their medical conditions, the therapeutic alternatives available to them, and the qualifications and demonstrated outcomes of their care providers. They want to help guide institutional decision making and establish cultures of safe patient- and family-centered care.
Technology can be used in innovative ways to promote safe practices and to transparently report meaningful outcomes. Using actual case studies from our own experience at Maine Medical Center in Portland, ME, the power of smart and user-friendly technology to drive safety and quality improvement will be demonstrated. The value of a comprehensive, electronic-balanced scorecard as the "single language" to promote safe practices throughout the institution will also be described.
Standards for Clinical Research from Protocol Through Submission: CDISC Business Case and Progress Report
Rebecca D. Kush, Ph.D., Founder and President, Clinical Data Interchange Standards ConsortiumWorking with Gartner and with support from The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA,) CDISC recently completed a business case for clinical research standards. The results stress the value and importance of implementing these in the start-up stage of a clinical study, in terms of cost and time savings, and also point to additional value of standards in clinical research in terms of data quality, team communication, real-time integration and a strategic link to healthcare information.
This session will provide specific information on this business case and describe 2007 initiatives toward realization of the CDISC mission to develop and support platform-independent data standards that enable information system interoperability to improve medical research and related areas of healthcare. These initiatives include the Clinical Data Acquisition Harmonization Standards (CDASH) project (an FDA Critical Path Opportunity), a demonstration of the use of electronic health records in clinical research, the Protocol Representation standard, and a World Health Organization (WHO) clinical trial registration and reporting project.
Achieving Interoperability between Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Systems
Landen Bain, President, Topsail Technologies Inc.Linking clinical research to healthcare is one of the FDA and industry's key initiatives and as such a strategic focus for CDISC. In an effort to support this initiative, CDISC has led the co-development of an integration profile with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). This profile, Retrieve Form for Data-capture (RFD), enables an external agency to surface data-capture forms within an Electronic Health Record (EHR). When applied to the clinical research realm, RFD offers an elegant, straightforward solution to the problem of capturing clinical research data inside of an EHR.
A handful of thought-leading pharmaceutical companies and technical implementers will pilot and grow the idea of using RFD to demonstrate the compelling possibilities that can occur when data sharing is facilitated between the worlds of EHR and clinical research. This CDISC-sponsored work will be shown as a part of the Interoperability Showcase at the HIMSS 2007 Annual Meeting in New Orleans in February. The demonstration will contain five unique scenarios which represent examples of the potentially advantageous applications of integrated data capture. Each of the five scenarios is being sponsored by a CDISC member company.
RFD has four 'actors', each of which plays a key role in generating a form, completing the form within the patient-care environment, receiving and managing data from the data capture step, and archiving the electronic source documents. The SAS Drug Development platform will participate in the demonstration, enacting both the form receiver and form archiver actors.
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- Manufacturing
Enterprise Intelligence: The Advantage of Brains in a Brawny World Market
Dann A. Maurno, Editor-in-Chief of The Manufacturer
To believe the consumer press, the United States is both losing its manufacturing jobs to overseas competitors, and buying its goods chiefly from those same competitors. But that is a simplistic and incorrect view. We will manufacture far fewer Christmas decorations and electric brooms, it is true, but hold our ground in NMRs, steam turbines and high-end lasers, to name a few. We do so because the United States has become the "brains" of global manufacturing, the innovator and the visionary. How secure is our global position as the nerve center of manufacturing, and how do we cultivate it? And how, for example, can those consumer-goods manufacturers use enterprise intelligence to win their tough global challenges?
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- Media, Entertainment and Travel
Customer Managed Relationships at Disney
Tom Boyles, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Managed Relationships, Disney Theme Parks and ResortsThe idea of creating lifelong relationships has never been more achievable than it is today. With the advances being made on the Internet, in data mining and modeling applications, and in data collection and database technology, the idea of "knowing" your customer over an entire lifetime is actually happening. It's also happening in a relative small number of companies.
This session focuses on what Disney is doing to separate from the pack by solving this relationship differentiating opportunity.
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- Retail
Customer Demand Forecasting Drives Merchandising Results
Rajeeve Kaul, Director of Product and Price Optimization, AutoZone
AutoZone, the number one auto parts retailer in the United States with nearly 4,000 stores, has developed innovative approaches to capturing and predicting customer demand. Learn how this leading retailer harnesses consumer and market data, via a sophisticated demand forecasting process.
This process allows AutoZone to shape and accurately fill customer demand via multiple fulfillment options for one of the most extensive product ranges found in retailing today. Hear how AutoZone plans to further synchronize its business around a comprehensive demand planning process via the use of SAS' latest integrated merchandise planning solution.
Drive Revenue and Brand Loyalty with Customer-Centric Focus
Charlie Bunce, moderator
Sponsored by: HPWhat does it take for a retailer to truly achieve customer centricity? Beyond the hype, how are leading retailers driving revenue, brand identity and loyalty across channels? How are retailers leveraging and mixing old and new channels? Few retailers can start with a clean sheet of paper – how can current capabilities be augmented with new processes and systems? What do today's educated consumers expect from relationships with retailers?
Hear a panel of leading retailers, representing multiple channels, discuss views on customer-centricity and how retailers are exploiting the latest technologies to deliver on its promise to drive revenue and shareholder value.
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