COMSYS Business Analytics

Our consultants are active in the industry. Our SAS professionals are frequently asked to present papers at conferences and meetings across the country. Click the links below to download our presentations and whitepapers.

• Clinical Programming at a Crossroads: Meeting Today's Challenges and Preparing for Tomorrow
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Consulting in the Clinical Programming world is more competitive than ever. The demand for a good programmer with clinical knowledge is always increasing. At times, it seems the ideal candidate for a position doesn't exist anywhere. What makes clinical programming so different, anyway? This paper will review how to recruit, identify and hire the best candidates for the position. Once they're in the fold, mentoring and training become the keys to long term retention. Personal growth and a sense of belonging ensure a happy consultant, and a happier client. Finally, there are times when you have to perform damage control with a particular consultant. A well designed and executed Action Plan can help strengthen your relationship with both the client and the consultant.

• Utilizing the SAS Business Intelligence Platform in a Clinical Trial Environment
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Clinical trial environments are rampant with similar tasks being performed over and over again on similar data. The past two decades have seen substantial standardization of data storage and reporting; and as a result the time is right to leverage business intelligence software to maximize the value of these vast warehouses of clinical data. The SAS Business Intelligence platform is a logical path to take because of the easy integration with existing SAS programs and data sources that are already proven and familiar. This will also allow non-traditional SAS users such as statisticians, study monitors, biologists and data managers to access the data without the use of traditional SAS code. It should be noted that the optimal SAS product for clinical trial projects is SAS Drug Development (SDD). This paper is intended to present an alternative to using only the traditional SAS modules in a clinical trial environment. This is especially useful for companies needing to perform ad-hoc analysis and reporting on their data outside of formal submissions such as validating results from a CRO.

• Best practices for implementing a BI strategy with SAS
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Implementing a Business Intelligence strategy can be a daunting and challenging task. SAS has introduced many concepts to us by bringing a comprehensive BI solution to the market. While some of those topics are not new, they can certainly make us think more than before, which is a very good thing. Many companies go ahead with the installation and configuration of the SAS BI platform with very little planning, only to ask themselves many questions afterwards, questions that should have been answered early on. This paper describes the best practices for all phases of a Business Intelligencestrategy implementation using the SAS platform. It will cover what needs to be considered during the planning phase such as architecture, security and optimization as well as introduce the different tools available for data collection and reporting and what it means in terms of changes to move from SAS Foundation to the SAS BI platform.

• Leveraging SAS® Portal: Developing an Executive Dashboard with Customizable Data Source
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: This paper will walk through the implementation of an Executive Dashboard as a Portlet Template (or Editable Portlet) that summarizes data and represents it with SAS Critical Success Factor graphs, using the SAS Java Connection Factory and the SAS Rangeview applet. Additionally, this Portlet illustrates the key benefit of SAS Editable Portlets by allowing the users to choose the data they want to diagram. They will be able to run stored processes and generate or modify the source data, all at the tips of their fingertips.

• PROC INFOMAPS-Let Your Design Document Build Your SAS® V9 Information Maps
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Creating information Maps can be a tedious and time consuming process and prone to many errors. Although SAS® Information Map Studio provides a simple GUI interface that allows developers to interactively create Information Maps, it may not be the best tool available. This paper will introduce the reader to information maps, SAS® Information Map Studio, and PROC INFOMAPS. The paper will also assume that the reader has some knowledge of the SAS® Business Intelligence products. By the end of the paper the reader will be able to understand and use the code provided to dynamically create information maps for use in their own SAS® Business Intelligence environment.

• Utilizing the SAS Business Intelligence Platform in a Clinical Trial Environment
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Clinical trial environments are rampant with similar tasks being performed over and over again on similar data. The past two decades have seen substantial standardization of data storage and reporting; and as a result the time is right to leverage business intelligence software to maximize the value of these vast warehouses of clinical data. The SAS Business Intelligence platform is a logical path to take because of the easy integration with existing SAS programs and data sources that are already proven and familiar. This will also allow non-traditional SAS users such as statisticians, study monitors, biologists and data managers to access the data without the use of traditional SAS code. It should be noted that the optimal SAS product for clinical trial projects is SAS Drug Development (SDD). This paper is intended to present an alternative to using only the traditional SAS modules in a clinical trial environment. This is especially useful for companies needing to perform ad-hoc analysis and reporting on their data outside of formal submissions such as validating results from a CRO.

• Revolutionary BI - A Vision for Business Intelligence
  Prepared by COMSYS
• Realizing Value Quickly from A Newly Installed SAS EBI Platform
  Prepared by COMSYS

• Using Metadata and Project Data for Data-Driven Programming
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Creating dynamic, data driven programs is a very powerful tool. Often we can use the metadata or the project data itself to help write our programs. This paper will introduce some of the concepts related to writing SAS® programs which will generate pieces of SAS code in a data driven manner.

• How to get SAS® data into PowerPoint™ using SAS9
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to describe three techniques of creating PowerPoint presentations from SAS. Two of these techniques are independent of SAS version. One of the methods is dependant on new features in SAS9. The paper will describe these techniques, and comment on the relative merits of each technique.

• Creating a Windows Service using SAS® 9 and VB.NET
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: This paper describes how to create a Windows service using SAS 9 and VB.NET. VB.NET is used as a wrapper to SAS. The VB.NET executable is registered with the Windows Services Manager. You are then able to call SAS programs from the service.

• Reporting SAS® License Usage through ITRM
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to describe a way of quantifying and reporting SAS product usage precisely. The paper will outline a method of capturing SAS session usage using the RTRACE configuration option. The data from RTRACE will be mapped to SAS products, and reports will be generated from SAS IT Resource Management (ITRM). The result will be a system for monitoring and analyzing SAS license usage from ITRM.

• WP BA SAS EntepriseGuide OLE Auto Using C#
  Prepared by COMSYS
• Proper Housekeeping - Developing the Perfect "Maid" to Clean Your SAS® Environment
  Prepared by COMSYS

• Making the Transition from College to Industry
  Prepared by COMSYS

ABSTRACT: Most people who end up as SAS® programmers do so coming from a statistics or computer science program. Many times neither does a good enough job at teaching the fundamentals of SAS programming. Computer science programs typically teach lower level languages such as C and statistics programs focus more on statistical theory and analysis. The introduction of SAS programming gets left up to industry. Over the past few years more and more colleges have been implementing SAS programming courses, which is helping tremendously.