SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

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.