Building on the Microsoft partnership, the Predict & Plan Consumer Demand offering is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
SAS has long been regarded as a specialist in retail demand planning and forecasting capabilities. The Forrester Wave: Retail Planning, Q1 2020 report said SAS ‘proved its ability to tackle hard optimisation issues by demonstrating above-par application architecture, assortment optimisation, and aggregate demand management. It has potential to improve customer segmentation and merchandise financial planning’.
The analyst firm also cited SAS as a ‘best fit for brands and retailers that need the security of a large vendor with a massive ecosystem of implementers, but that also have the ability to: 1) extend retail planning applications using a proven platform to deploy sophisticated applications, without disrupting on premise infrastructure’.
“Having a solid customer engagement strategy in place is now more reliant than ever on digital transformation,” said Andrew Fowkes, Global Retail Practice at SAS. “To support this SAS is making it easier for cloud-based analytics to be accessible for every employee at an organisation.”