Blogging about all things SAS

As part of one of our projects we have been rolling out the SAS Strategic Performance Management suite to a large number of users.

Our goal was to deliver scorecards to individual employees to assist with the performance management process.

Its been an interesting roll out so know I have some time I will post some of our experiences over the next few weeks so anybody else that is contemplating a similar rollout can leverage what we learnt.

Out of interest if there are any readers out there that are using SPM let me know.

We are rolling out SPM in anger and as we started approaching a large number of scorecards (> 1,000) we started to notice perfomrnace of the calc’s were not what we desired.

So our talented DI team on the project have created their own DI Studio code to do the rollups across the scorecard hierarchy.

One of the traps for young players was the fact that the linkid’s between scorecard/elements were not a simple parent.child relationship as we had expected.

But once we got the logic for the linkids from SAS Technical Support, we were away laughing (and calc’ing)

Its a pity we cant use the standard SPM calc’s for the rollups, but needs must.

So roll your own if you’ve gottem.

I was looking for the latest user guide for SPM 2.4 and clicked in the link here on the SAS Support site and got the message:

"SAS Software Documentation 

Documentation for this product is available for customers only. Please contact SAS for details about accessing this documentation.

See your product HELP system for additional information. "

Over on the SAS Support site.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/spm/

(thanks to the friendly Presales dudes for the pointer)

So ever wanted to know where the Period values iN SPM are actually stored?

Well as long as you aren’t trying to do some dodgy updates to the SPM schema, as you know that is against the rules…

The first trick is that Periods are stored in the SAS Solution Data Mart layer not in SPM itself.

They are stored as a master details record with:

• the master being in SASSDM.sas_member where INTERNAL_DIM_TYPE_ID = -9
• there are three children records in SASSDM.sas_member_property (joined on member_id) whihc cover:
  • Start Date
  • End Date
  • Period Type

Of course as I have said don’t touch these manually and you should really use the prebuilt SAS Time view to look at them

I have been spending a lot of time lately working with SAS Strategic Performance Management and the Batch Maintenance Facility (BMF).

The BMF enable you to automatically create SPM Scorecards by uploading .csv files and can automate the creation or amendment of SPM:

• Scorecards
• Elements (i.e metric, goals etc)
• Attributes (i.e Descriptions, Links etc)
• Cells (i.e Actuals, Targets etc)

Importantly BMF utilises the SPM API and loads via the webserver, rather than doing a direct SQL insert into the MySQl backend, like the old speedyloader routines did. This means it is also supported SAS technical support.
Also BMF allows you to create, edit and delete both scorecard structures as well as the scorecard data which means you can use it to prototype your SPM (which is what we are doing) and load data (which we may do, although we may use the standard SPM DI Studio jobs instead, I will post our decision and logic once we have evaluated both)

Its also pretty quick, we are loading 200 scorecards and 1400 elements in under a minute and this is on a windows platform, with limited RAM available.

Interesting enough deleting them via the SPM interface takes upto 10 minutes.

In the background are a couple of SAS Macro’s you will need to install and then call to do the load. There is also some pretty good documentation available to help you get started, but I can’t seem to find a copy on any public SAS website.

So you will have to ask your friendly SAS account manager for the doco if you want to have a go.

A SAS stored process is a SAS program that is hosted on a server and described by metadata. One of the major values of stored processes is that they can be consumed by most SAS reporting tools, including SAS Portal, Web Report Studio, Enterprise Guide and the Addin for Microsoft Access.

I have always been a big fan of using them as I believe they are great for creating predefined business rules which users can consume in their reports without having to define any code.

There is an interesting paper at SUGI 31 Making your own Balanced Scorecard using the SAS Information Delivery Portal that describes how a combination of Stored Processes and the SAS Portal can be used to present users with a Balanced Scorecard.

Now if it was me I would have used SAS Strategic Performance Management , but then I hate reinventing the wheel.

But I think the paper shows how with a combination of SAS Portal and Stored Processes, ”there ain’t much you can’t do.