SAS Organization Case Study Help

Questions of case study:

What type of strategy (cost leadership/differentiation) does SAS take? Discuss in terms of personnel, resources and activities performed. Provide a thorough analysis to justify your answer.
What measures or key success factors would you consider important to evaluate the performance of SAS? Provide examples of at least three key success factors.
You are a consultant for SAS. Discuss the possible problems of profit planning at SAS, based on the current strategies. How could you address these problems by focusing on the interconnected strategic budgeting cycles? Provide a thorough analysis to justify your answer.
Suggest what is the type of corporate structure should be used in SAS? Explain why SAS should use this structure. (Hint: connect to its current strategy)
Where does the financial department fit within SAS’s structure as you describe above? In your response, explain what type of responsibility centre SAS’s financial department would be classified as? Provide two performance measures that can be used in the responsibility centre you identified.

Solution:

Answer no.1:

The strategy used by SAS is majorly differentiation however, there is an element of cost leadership as well. The strategy can be analyzed from three different perspectives as follows.

Personnel: SAS has given employees an opportunity to work on challenging and interesting projects. By removing many obstacles for personnel, the software developers can now develop cutting-edge software. This has created a differentiation for the products developed by SAS.

Resources: There are resources like data analytics software, data, and insights that must be made available across the organization, however considering the fact that each organization has different needs, so the basic infrastructure cannot suffice the technological requirements. The first approach is to set-up the infrastructure at the organization, however, it is costly. As an alternative, the use of cloud and IoT for SAS has resulted in reduced costs and also has eased the availability of solutions for different needs of different organizations.

Activities: The application of SAS has created a differentiation in several activities across the organization: For any business, there is a need to remove inefficiencies, for which it is a pre-requisite to identifying the inefficiencies. The inefficiencies are identified using analytics. The use of SAS has strengthened the analytics technology as it works with various interfaces, coding languages, and analytical tools, thereby making the entire analytics life-cycle more efficient. Also, the use of AI in SAS has resulted in increased capabilities for organizations thereby boosting productivity and unlocking new possibilities.

Thus, based on the above discussion it can be inferred that the main strategy used by SAS is differentiation, however, the focus on being cost-effective has resulted in a focus on cost-leadership strategy as well. The reason is that on one hand, each organization wants to achieve efficiencies and thereby lowering the costs of processing and storage, on the other hand, each organization has different needs.