Copyright © 2006, SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved. SAS Activity-Based Management Survey Kit...

Copyright © 2006 , SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

SAS Activity-Based Management Survey Kit (ASK):A new and easy approach for maintaining relevant model structure and up-to-date data.


Model Maintenance Challenges How to maintain accurate assignments/activities when mergers or other

organizational changes occur? Missing assignment paths can skew your profitability numbers!

How to ensure “human” data – such as “% of Time Spent” are up-to-date?

How to survey any additional follow-up questions? Perhaps your CFO is now interested in knowing how much portion of an Activity cost is “Insourced” (for internal employees) and how much is “Outsourced” (for external vendors).

How to track who has completed what surveys and how to audit any new assignments/activities before you update your Model?

Most importantly: How to quickly and easily do all the above?

SAS Answer: Just “ASK” ‘em.


Let’s look at a typical ABM Model like the ParcelExpress Sample Model.

Suppose you want to survey all 100 Beaverton employees for the “Operating Expenses” – you want to collect: A) The Resource Drivers (What are your Activities?)

B) The Activity Drivers (What are your CostObjects that your Activities are performed against?)


After you export your model,group the 100 Beaverton employees,

you simply assign the groupas the owner for the Resource Driver.

In ASK, you need to define owners only once.

ASK will remember the ownersfor the subsequent periods.

Starting with ASK 6.3.1, you don’thave to worry about assigning owners for

Activity Drivers – thanksto the “Intelligent Dashboard”

feature which you willsee in a moment.


John Baker (one of the Beaverton Group members)just logged in.

Notice the user dashboard is clean and unclutteredbecause you only had to assign 1 Resource DriverSurvey to John. He knows exactly where to begin.


John only does “Air Distribution”but due to recent changes

in aviation security regulation, he is required to “Inspect Packages”also. In fact that activity consumes as much as 40% of his time now.

Unfortunately, you never assigned“Inspect Packages” Activity in your

ABM Model for this resource.


That’s ok.

ASK provides an easy wayfor John to add the “Inspect Packages”

activity himself.


Now John can complete his survey (100%).


Notice relevant Activity Drivers(Air Distribution & Inspect Packages)are automatically assigned to John.

Without this “Intelligent Dashboard” featurepreviously you would have to “guess” what

relevant Activity Drivers are for John and manually assign all of those – resulting in a cluttered dashboard

that would only overwhelm your users.


As an Administrator you can track user status.

You want all status icons to be blue/completed before you update your Model.

Notice John Baker’s status icon is color-coded with orange.That is a cue for you that he has added new assignments/activities.

You should click on the icon to audit (approve/disapprove) them before you upload the staging tables back to update your ABM model.


Model Maintenance Challenges How to maintain accurate assignments/activities when mergers or other

organizational changes occur? Missing assignment paths can skew your profitability numbers!

How to ensure “human” data – such as “% of Time Spent” are up-to-date?

How to survey any additional follow-up questions? Perhaps your CFO is now interested in knowing how much portion of an Activity cost is “Insourced” (for internal employees) and how much is “Outsourced” (for external vendors).

How to track who has completed what surveys and how to audit any new assignments/activities before you update your Model?

Most importantly: How to quickly and easily do all the above?

SAS Answer: Just “ASK” ‘em. So far, we’ve briefly addressed most of the challenges.

The final frontier is to demonstrate ASK’s flexibility inasking “any” follow-up questions through the

“Group Attribute” survey feature (available only in ASK 6.3.1 or higher).


Suppose your CFO now needs to knowout of $9,214,221.36 “Inspect Packages” Beaverton Costs

(which happens to be the largest Activity Cost in this scenario) how much of that is “Insourced” (for internal employees) and

how much is “Outsourced” (for external vendors).

One alternative is to send 100 Excel Spreadsheetsand then consolidate (sum) all of them up, then manually

update the numeric attributes.

But there is a quicker and easier way: Just “ASK” ‘em.


First thing you do, create a new Attribute folder/center in ABM.Let’s call it “Activity Source”. Then add 2 numeric attributes (Insourced and Outsourced)

and attach them to the “Inspect Packages” activity.

Finally, export “ValueAttributeAssociation” and “ValueAttribute” tables.

ASK will take care of the rest.


Notice at the end of “Inspect Packages” Activity Driver survey, now eachBeaverton Group member would get 1 extra page of follow-up question.


Notice ASK automatically “pivots” the numeric attributes and group themas a single form – along with a Javascript calculator built-in.

Starting with ASK 6.3.1, you can now have the flexibility to collect and analyzepretty much “any” aspects of your activities quickly and easily using

this new “Group Attribute” feature.


In ABM you can then use simple Calculated Attributes (Insourced/Outsourced Cost)

to generate the OLAP Report for your CFO.


Additional “Technical” Benefits ASK is one of the easiest web-applications to setup and maintain from IT

standpoint. Just point the Setup Wizard to any .NET virtual directory/wwwroot subfolder. Since there are no DLL files to register/unregister, upgrading ASK is the equivalent of updating text files. No server uninstalls, server reboots or any extra client setups required. Any client machine (Windows or not) that has Firefox or Internet Explorer browser can use ASK.

ASK is also database independent – works with SAS Datasets, Oracle, SQL Server, MS Access or other OLEDB databases that you can export from ABM.

Since ASK is available only to subscribed SAS ABM customers, problems and enhancement requests can be submitted to SAS Technical Support just like any other ABM-related modules.


Additional PowerPoint Tutorials

Collecting Group Assignment Values

Leveraging Flexible Assignment Surveys

Collecting Numeric Attribute Values


Thank You

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