Explorium vs. SAS Enterprise Miner

We need to constantly measures costs in our health business and we forecast pricing acoording to several values and conditions. Explorium works quite good analysing simple datasets, but when hierahies start to increase, meaning 6-10 olap variables, the system start to slow down quite a bit until was no longer to retrieve the info we required. This is why we test several tools, because even world-class solutions we purchase, don´t do the job we need. Explorium is a good tool, but complexity will be a minus in some scenarios.

Incentivized

SAS Enterprise Miner is world-class software for individuals interested in developing reproducible models in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps the most useful part of SAS Enterprise Miner is the ability to compare models with other models without writing code. The ensemble modeling capabilities is the easiest way to do ensemble modeling I have come across. SAS Enterprise Miner is well-suited for beginning to advanced analysts who know something about advanced analytics. The software is not well-suited for analysts or companies that have little interest in advanced modeling.

Incentivized

• Data ready for consumption.
• Good enough relationships between entities.
• Nice integration with other players. That's a good thing.

Incentivized

• Enterprise Miner is really visual and lets you do a whole lot without actually going into the detailed options. For decent results, you should really explore the different advanced options though.
• The recent versions of Miner allow users to use R code in Miner. You can then compare several models and approach to get the best performing model.
• The resulting data is really well displayed and easy to understand (ex: the lift graph, score ranking, etc.)
• Miner has the ability to integrate custom SAS code which allows the user to add functionalities that are specific to the project.

Incentivized

• relationships between entities could be better. Would be great to have scenarios.
• The data normalized needs improvement. Works pretty good, but it needs more refinement when using AND-OR Formulas that came from various datasets.

Incentivized

• SAS is not as user friendly as other stats software.

Incentivized

SAS' customer support used to be non-existent many years ago. Today, contacting SAS customer support is great. They are responsible, knowledgable, and seem to have an interest in getting the results right the first time. With that said, Enterprise Miner's online support is weak, probably because the user base is much smaller than other tools.

Incentivized

The simplicity of the tool is an advantage. The integrations as well work quite well. All these solutions have worked well until some point and what we have discovered over the years is that we need to combine various solutions. There is no such thing as one tool ruling them all. Explorium works quite well until we start testing more advanced relations, and here, the tool is promising but requires a little work.

Incentivized

SAS EM has a very great set of machine learning and predictive analytics toolsets, which helped our organization achieve its goals. We used other tools, but for us, SAS EM was the most intuitive and easy to learn the tool and it provides greater data exploration and data preparation capabilities compared to the other tools we used.

Incentivized

• Positive. The time save in analysis per hour of internal consulting was the best compared to our SAP and Cognos solutions.
• In term of objetives works as stated, but when using multi-conditions of dataset, start the issues.

Incentivized

• In our organization, users were using SAS already so the learning curve was really low. Within a few weeks after the implementation, the users were already delivering models developed with SAS Enterprise Miner. It is difficult to talk about ROI as models were already being developed before. It was mostly a change of technology and it was a smooth transition.
• Going with Enterprise Miner came with migration from desktop use of SAS to a server use of SAS. This created a new role of SAS administrator. This was obviously a cost but as the use of SAS increased greatly, it was expected.
• From a methodology standpoint, Enterprise Miner helped greatly in the documentation of the model development which was a requirement in a few groups such as the risk groups. Having a visual "GUI-like" approach to development, the flowchart or diagram of the project in Miner was able to give users a good understanding of the approach the analyst took to develop the model.

Incentivized