Automatically produces statistically based forecasts you can trust
SAS Forecast Server generates large quantities of high-quality forecasts quickly and automatically, allowing organizations to plan more effectively for the future. The unsurpassed scalability of SAS Forecast Server enables your business to operate more efficiently at all levels by quickly and automatically producing statistically based forecasts you can trust. SAS Forecast Server bundles the SAS High-Performance Forecasting engine with the SAS Forecast Studio GUI.

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Benefits

• Delivers forecasts in a quick and timely manner through a user-friendly graphical interface. SAS Forecast Server automatically produces high-quality forecasts with the ability to modify models interactively without programming. This makes large forecasting processes manageable and allows analysts to focus their time on the most important forecasts. Forecasting requires less manual input, which frees up time for analysis and reporting and improves accuracy.
• Provides forecasts that reflect the realities of the business, improving your ability to plan future events with confidence. Only SAS Forecast Server automatically selects the business drivers, holidays or events that aid in the forecasting process from any number of variables supplied to the system in the modeling process. As a result, forecasts better reflect the business. SAS Forecast Server automatically builds the most appropriate model for your data and delivers trustworthy forecasts.
• Improves forecasting performance across all products and locations, at any level of aggregation. A complete array of advanced forecasting methods can statistically estimate the impact of sales and marketing events. The Scenario Analyzer lets planners test “what-if” scenarios such as price changes or promotions, and determine their likely affect on future demand. Graphical displays provide a greater understanding of the effects of holidays, marketing events, sales promotions and unexpected events such as weather, improving the ability to forecast and plan future sales promotions and marketing activities.

Features

Easy-to-use GUI

• Automatic enterprise forecasting: set up the hierarchy, parameters and business rules through an interactive graphical interface.
• Project setup wizard: generate automatic forecasts in batch or through the interactive graphical interface.
• Hierarchical reconciliation: reconcile up and down the hierarchy, leveraging the strength of SAS Analytics.
• Fix exceptions automatically: generate exception reports based on sound statistical logic and business rules.
• User override facility: overrule models by manual override to statistical forecast values; override locking facility.
• Extensible reporting: publish results automatically via hard copy, company portal or Internet.
• The Scenario Analyzer lets planners test “what-if” scenarios such as changes to pricing or promotion, and determine their likely affect on future demand.

Large-scale automatic forecasting

• Choice of forecast automation level. Users can choose the level of automation for the forecasting process: Rediagnose and identify candidate models, re-estimate existing model parameters or generate forecasts using existing models and parameters.
• Facilitates ongoing and repeatable forecasting as part of a company’s overall planning process, surfacing more effective statistically based forecasting methods that can be operationalized throughout the forecasting process.
• Extensible model selection list: intermittent demand models, unobserved components models, ARIMAX models, dynamic regression, exponential smoothing models with optimized parameters, plus user-defined models.
• Client/server architecture makes SAS Forecast Server suitable for large-scale enterprise forecasting problems.

Easy manageability

• Access to the superior forecasting capabilities of SAS through SAS Forecast Studio, the user-friendly interactive graphical interface. No programming is required; users just point and click their way to powerful forecasting capabilities.
• Functionality to support forecasting as an ongoing and repeated process that fits into the organization’s planning workflow.
• An easy means to customize several aspects of the large-scale forecasting process, including exception rules, the model repository and events, giving users more flexibility and control over model selection, event identification and exception reporting.
• Events management console.
• Manual overrides console, including override locking.
• Automatic regressor and events selection.
• Automatic outlier detection.
• Code generation via GUI: code generation for batch processing.