Today we visited SAS, a computer programming industry that is the world’s leader in advanced analytics software. SAS employs more than 13,000 people in over 400 offices and 5 different countries, with the global headquarters in Cary, NC. The facility we visited encompasses 900 acres with 22 buildings, and it is still growing. SAS is a privately owned and operated company, so it does not have any shareholders to influence financial and managerial decisions. This is because shareholders only motive is profit, while the people at SAS put a lot of emphasis on the quality of their work environment and believe that whatever they invest in their employees they will get back in production.
It is hard to define an “average” customer of SAS, because they provide services to Kohls, the Federal Government, Ralph Lauren, the Coast Guard, and even Playboy. SAS, founded in 1976, has been an impressive company that continues to discover innovative, new ways of helping companies to gather, store, access, analyze and report on corporate data to aid in their decision making. Almost 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SAS. These companies expect a high level of customer service, which SAS supplies 24/7 at no extra cost. Their customers also value the innovation of SAS and use it to be able to stay ahead of the curve and make the right financial decisions to better their company’s future.
The SAS Institute’s plan for future success is to continue to provide excellent service to its customers, while making their product much more available. They have set up an add-in for Microsoft Office, allowing the customer to pull data from SAS and examine it on Microsoft Excel as a graph, table, or just convert the data however they wish. SAS is big on Big Data, and now they are able to easily, and cheaply store mass amounts of it. While they believe that the majority of the data that they collect is excess data, they are still able to examine what they have collected and use the data to help them make proper corporate decisions for their future. They also lease their product as opposed to selling it to their customer, because they are always looking for ways to improve it, and leasing it to their customers allows them to stay up to date on SAS’s newest technology. “We have values that we value, and we live by them.” They believe that a happy employee creates a happy customer and they do whatever they can to keep their employees happy. They have on-site services from child-care, a recreation and fitness center, Starbucks, health care/pharmacy, a massage/hair/nail salon, and even car detailing.
SAS’s results seem to speak for themselves, as the average industry in the United States has about a 15.5% percent employee turnover and SAS has a mere 4%, which is actually up from their previous numbers. SAS locations all over the world have been consistently rated among the top in terms of best places to work for and this year was voted the World’s Best Multinational Workplace by Great Place to Work®.
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