Singapore businesses embracing analytics tools

SINGAPORE: Businesses in Singapore are seeing the benefits of analytics to provide insights to business processes.

According to Gartner, more than 75 percent of companies globally are investing or planning to invest big data in the next two years. In 2015, SAS saw an increased adoption in analytics solutions across various industries – a clear indication that Singaporean businesses are also recognizing the value of analytics in driving business outcomes.

“We’ve seen an uptake in the adoption of analytics solutions by companies spanning across several verticals, including retail, transport and hospitality. We also see more non-technical employees embracing analytics, and this is largely driven by tools like SAS Visual Analytics, which has interactive, self-serving capabilities to allow anyone to explore and discover insights on their own,” said Francis Fong, Managing Director, SAS.

Regardless of the size of an organization, its data or the complexity of its services, businesses are now able to take charge of its data quickly and easily. SAS Visual Analytics, uses an interactive interface that works to identify relationships, explore options and uncover hidden opportunities, allowing businesses to make precise decisions faster than ever before.

Key customer wins in 2015:
•    Club 21: a global luxury retail company, was looking to get a more holistic understanding of customer spending and shopping behaviors online and offline. With SAS Visual Analytics, they were able to discover insights to move them closer to surfacing omnichannel shopping patterns and merchandising affinity trends. This led to the retail brand integrating their point-of-sale and membership data to gain a more holistic understanding of sales patterns and member performances and habits.

“The SAS VA tool is new to our organization.  Our goal is to use this tool to enable our teams to move beyond data collection to surface patterns and associations through visualization.  This tool allows our teams to extract insights faster and more strategically because we can finally see and understand data in a way that is custom to our businesses, marketing channels and customer segmentations.” Mei Lee, Senior Vice President, Digital, CRM & e-Commerce.

•    SMRT: is Singapore’s premier multi-modal land transport operator. Like other large organizations which have a range of business functions and, correspondingly, a number of business units, SMRT had the challenge of collecting data from disparate sources, and synthesizing and analysing it. In 2013, SMRT invested in an Information Fusion capability and SAS Visual Analytics provided the platform through which a strategic dashboard view was built, allowing, among other things, for individual business units and the Group as a whole to track, trend and analyse operational performance.

Henry Cheng, Head, Information Fusion Center, SMRT, said, “We required a tool that would allow us to have a single dashboard view across the entire Group to guide our decision making, and SAS Visual Analytics was able to provide that. The solution’s easy-to-use, self-service environment has allowed us to run data models across different business units to gain useful insights.”

•    Far East Hospitality: Singapore's largest hotels and serviced residences operator, tapped on SAS to help them consolidate and analyze information in a single source. The availability of decision trees and path analyses, in particular, helped Far East Hospitality develop a better data view and make more informed decisions, improving their tracking of flight details and finance data, and strengthening their risk management strategies. Taking into account the higher proportion of nontechnical experts compared to data experts in a typical organization, solutions like SAS Visual Analytics enabled employees to easily grasp the basics on data analytics, with its easy deployment and user friendly interface.

“There are many strategic and tactical components that goes into a price.  Like most hotels, we have many data variables in our decision making of the price.  It is difficult to pull all this data together, and statistically interpret which factors contribute to success.  We want to become more forward looking, and make this process more intentional and proactive by using tools that can help us visualize the data quickly, and streamline the data access and analysis. We chose SAS Visual Analytics as it fulfilled the requirements: the ability to quickly visually analyse our various data in one single platform, the ability to build analytical models, and the ability to share the analytics and reports in different formats and devices,” Malcolm Leong, Far East Hospitality Management.