Business & Money Trail:

SAS POWERS WILLIAMS-SONOMA CRM

SAS, a market leader in business intelligence, announced that Williams-Sonoma Inc rolled out a new application this month that will form the building block for its future customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives.

Powered by SAS, this application will give Williams-Sonoma a significant edge over competitors in terms of ability to respond rapidly to changes in the market and to be more effective in allocating marketing resources.

Business drivers behind the application include rising postal costs and increasing pressure to find more efficient ways of marketing to customers without adding more resources. The need to keep up with emerging trends was also a significant factor.

"The emergence of the Internet as a new channel brought with it a whole new source of information, and we discovered that our existing data mining infrastructure wasn't flexible enough to meet the demands of our growing multi-channel business," said Maureen Holbrow Martin, director of database marketing at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. "Now we feel confident in our ability to adapt to new changes in the environment, and believe we will be more effective in determining how we allocate our marketing resources."

The application's first phase will use SAS Enterprise Miner to manage the modeling infrastructure that will drive more than 270 million catalogs in 2002. By using SAS to build 100 to 120 different models to match the right catalog to the right customer, Williams-Sonoma expects to see a considerable reduction in advertising costs. Phase Two of the project will incorporate email campaigns and increased personalization of catalog mailings.

Williams-Sonoma chose SAS to power the CRM application because of its strong analytic capabilities.

"We discovered that the in-depth statistical capabilities of SAS are stronger than those of some of the other players in the market," said Martin. "We were also familiar with the power of SAS, as we are already using SAS to generate business intelligence. So, based on our knowledge and trust in SAS, it was a pretty easy decision to choose SAS Enterprise Miner for our new application. We've projected some strong ROI as a result of this application and the next few months will be very exciting as we begin to see the fruits of our labor."

About Williams-Sonoma

Williams-Sonoma Inc is a national specialty retailer of high quality products for the home. These products are marketed through more than 420 retail stores, seven mail order catalogs (Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Bed + Bath, Pottery Barn Kids, Hold Everything, Chambers and West Elm), and eCommerce Web sites at www.williams-sonoma.com, potterybarn.com and potterybarnkids.com. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.

About SAS

SAS is a market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 38,000 sites -- including 99 of the top 100 businesses on the Fortune 500 -- to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know. Visit us at www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute Inc, Cary, Kris Balic, 919-531-0624, kris.balic@sas.com.