SLASHING headcount and trimming budgets are what finance departments often recommend to help their companies steer through hard times. But the measures need not be so harsh if the departments leverage on existing data through the use of business analytics tools.

Cheah points out that business analytics solutions enable firms to prepare, prevent and perform.

According to SAS Malaysia’s performance management practice director Edward Cheah, such solutions help companies understand what drives cost and profit and creates value in a down economy.

“Most of the time, companies fail to realise that only 20 per cent of their customers contribute significantly to the bottom line,

60 per cent break even and the remaining 20 per cent losses. With business analytics, companies can analyse the real value of customers and begin to take suitable measures to ensure better profitability.”

Business analytics solutions, Cheah said, enable companies to prepare, prevent and perform.

“There is important data sitting in disparate systems such as customer relationship management, human resources and enterprise resource planning across the enterprise.

“SAS business analytics solutions, for example, can pull this data into a single source and clean and prepare the data for the next stage. This can prevent data errors and the possibilities of getting the wrong information and making wrong decisions,” he explained.

This way, the user organisation will know where to target in terms of strategy and action plan in a speedy and impactful manner, he said.

“What businesses get from this is a fact-based analysis from which they can work out their next move to weather the economic turmoil. Companies with large amount of data like those in the fast-moving consumer goods, retail and fashion industries will benefit from implementing business analytics solutions as they depend heavily on trends and predictions,” he pointed out.

Market analyst IDC recently ranked SAS as the leader in the business intelligence market in Malaysia with over 33 per cent market share for the first half of last year.

Cheah said with business intelligence tools finally entering the mass market, SAS Malaysia with its 22-year experience is positioning itself as the choice solution provider.

SAS Malaysia has been growing at 30 per cent annually for the past four years and is looking at double-digit growth for this year.