Here is a real world example and success story. Our company, BGF Industries, is a manufacturer of technical woven & non-woven textiles. BGF has used SAS since 1982 for most of our statistical needs. Our use, however, was isolated to a few programmers on the PC. Our experience and exposure, however, made us well aware of the potential of SAS if distributed on an Enterprise scale.
In 2008 we launched a company-wide suite of applications developed with the Enterprise Guide UI and utilizing the graphing, statistical and reporting modules. This suite was named our Early Warning System (EWS) and is now available via the SAS Web Portal to everyone within our company. The EWS monitors thousands of process variables and tests daily. When any property begins to show a statically significant tread, it is surfaced and presented to managers and staff for immediate action.
Before this deployment, monitoring this vast number of variables was impossible. There simply were not enough people in our lean operation to find these problem areas. Before, our best efforts were confined to searching for answers to problems AFTER they occurred. Today, we are presented with a condensed list of the day’s issues, as they happen, giving our managers time to react BEFORE a real problem exists. Obviously being proactive reduces the cost of re-work, returns, and quality issues.
Through using the SAS tools, we are also able to extract value back out of the millions of dollars invested in data; data that was simply collected and statically stored before.
Lastly, our process engineers now develop their own applications using all the EG tools.
These applications, once deployed on the Portal, replace days/weeks of manual preparation of reports and are available on demand by our management. Time savings for our process team has been significant. I agree with the Howell in his post, in every aspect. The server based deployment, maps and EG has set both our data and our process team free.
If anything our team realizes we underutilize the SAS products. This is not because of any lack of ability within the SAS products themselves, but moreover, our lack of creativity in finding new ways to exploit the products depth.
I trust this will help shed some light on your discussion.
