How can a SAS-certified analytics professional help your business?

Over the last two decades, as digital technologies became more prominent, many organisations shifted their focus to optimising their service delivery methods and internal operations to reflect modern business requirements.

One of the primary ways businesses did this was through the adoption of advanced analytics tools. Although commercial entities integrated data analytics into their operations, the majority of organisational decision making was still dependent upon experience and intuition.

That said, the business world has come a long way since the early days of computerised data analytics. 

Today, data analytics has become an integral part of businesses across industries. Everything from a local supermarket to a multi-billion dollar megacorporation relies on data analytics to make business decisions.

Many tools have aided businesses to make this transition, but SAS has been the undisputed leader in business analytics. The flexibility and the sheer range of features delivered with a SAS deployment have made it the go-to choice for many businesses across industries.

While you can leverage many of the core functionalities of SAS with some literacy of the MS office suite—it even has a simple GUI interface to increase intuitiveness for regular users—to enjoy the full benefits of a SAS deployment, your business needs a professional who knows their way around the platform; a SAS-certified analytics professional to be exact.

In this post, let’s explore what value a SAS-certified analytics professional can add to your business. 

Optimise your deployment to produce better insights

As we mentioned earlier, the SAS analytics platform includes many features that enable data manipulation at a granular level. This can help you access very in-depth analytics insights about your business operations, allowing you to make informed decisions to improve your internal and external processes.

To access and leverage visual data presentation tools like data trees, heatmaps, cartograms and other data presentation methods, for example, you need a detailed knowledge of the granular data manipulation techniques; not everyone is privy to that level of expertise. 

A SAS-certified analytics professional, on the other hand, has the experience and training to perform very detailed analysis in a very short amount of time. This allows you to enjoy the benefits without having to worry about the specifics of how to produce the insights.

Perform more efficient data preparation for accurate insights

While a modern business collects more data than it did a decade ago, the collected data can include empty entries, duplicate entries, formatting issues, or other discrepancies; this can reduce the accuracy of the insights when fed into the analytics platform.

To get the most accurate results, therefore, you need good data preparation skills—like collecting, cleaning, reformatting, and organising data. This is easier said than done. 

The data preparation process can take up to 80% of the time spent on analytics. Many businesses don’t have the resources to allocate that amount of time and effort into the data preparation process.

A trained and certified SAS professional can help businesses streamline this process, as they have the knowledge and skills to leverage data preparation tools built into the SAS platform that reduce data preparation time significantly. 

Help maintain your deployment at an optimal level

Like any other software tool, the SAS analytics platform also requires regular updates to maintain analytics efficiency. 

That said, installing a SAS update or patch is markedly different from installing software updates to other apps on a computer or a phone. SAS updates require extensive knowledge of your specific deployment and expertise in navigating the update process using the command line interface.

In addition, the SAS platform requires general maintenance to fix discrepancies that can occur in the analytics algorithm during active use.

Leverage the expertise of a SAS-certified analytics professional to get the most out of your SAS deployment

Although SAS is a great analytical tool, you need considerable expertise to leverage the full range of features available within the platform. 

That’s where SAS professionals can help you—let them do the heavy lifting while you focus on making better decisions using insights produced by SAS.