Driving profitable growth through activity-based management
SAS^® Activity-Based Management is an analytic application that models business processes to determine cost, profitability and drivers. With this solution, organizations can make informed decisions that streamline processes, deliver revenue growth and reduce costs across the organization. By providing process, cost and profitability insights, SAS Activity-Based Management reveals how unprofitable customers may be destroying up to 400 percent of your net profit – and helps you understand how to prevent this.

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Benefits

• See how cost accumulates. SAS Activity-Based Management reveals cost accumulation in a way that employees, not just finance experts, can understand and act on.
• Manage shared service cost allocations. Get a more accurate reflection of true cost and profit by managing how shared service costs get allocated to products, customers, channels and services.  Create more accurate budgets and workforce plans.
• Improve processes by identifying activities that don’t add value. Identify cost bottlenecks, rework and non-value-added activity.  Model and simulate how changes in “driver” volumes affect costs, profit and value.
• Learn how and why unexpected events impact budgets. Unanticipated events affect not only your budget, but also your resource plans and response time. Accurately, quantify the impact on cost and profit in detail – ahead of traditional financial reports.
• Evolve how you do business. By focusing on which products, customers, channels and services can be leveraged for maximum value, you can take your business to the next level.

Features

Cost and profitability measurement

• Dimensional profitability analysis allows you to calculate and report profitability contributions to business segments such as product, customer and organization.
• Capacity costing and modeling includes available vs. used or idle capacity, what-if analysis for resource planning, as well as activity-based budgeting.
• Account search helps you find dimension members within a deep hierarchy, or search accounts with no cost/assignment or attributes.
• Intramodular assignments assign costs in the same module and allow flexible cost pooling and flowing.
• Reciprocal cost assignments provide simultaneous two-way cost assignments between accounts and trace detailed cost flows.
• External and internal bills of cost can be linked directly to an account.

Modeling

• Client-server, Web-enabled, multiuser architecture with role-based security and support for multiple, concurrent modeling sessions.
• Model database independence and method independence, including top-down, quantity-based assignment or bottom-up, consumption rate modeling.
• User-defined dimensions with various periods and scenario combinations can be used for modeling, and are ready for dimensional views and analysis in OLAP.
• Intuitive workspace to manage models, reports and OLAP views.
• Visual print-and-click assignment creation and views.
• Wizards provide step-by-step guidance for building models.

Analysis and reporting

• Seamless data sharing with SAS Strategic Performance Management allows you to use scorecard metrics as drivers and measures, and to identify activity-based management measures and publish them as metric tables.
• Sixteen standard reporting templates available.
• Multidimensional, dynamic OLAP analysis can integrate with SAS .NET OLAP viewer and create OLAP cubes dynamically.
• Integration with SAS Business Intelligence allows Web-based and self-service reporting and analysis.
• Integration with SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office allows you to access the database through Microsoft Excel for reporting and analysis.

Data integration

• Data warehousing capability.
• Embedded data quality processes.
• The SAS services API allows you to import DBMS staging tables, automate model creation and maintenance, and import/export data to and from another DBMS.
• Ability to read from/write to nearly any data on any technology platform in batch and real time.