Cedric Liem

As a SAS Consultant, I offer independent SAS Consulting in the Toronto area. I’m a SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9 with 10 years of SAS experience including Base SAS 9.4, SAS/SQL, SAS EG 5.1, SAS Stored Processes, and SAS Macros.

My experience spans 3 of the 5 major Canadian banks, all located in the vibrant financial district of downtown Toronto. Areas of employment includes Risk Management, Risk Valuation, Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Finance Performance Measurement, Customer Information Management, and Private Investment Advice for high net-worth financial planning and wealth management.

What is SAS?

SAS is a powerful language and data management tool that, in addition to it’s powerful data management language, includes visual tools for ETL, statistics, data mining, OLAP cubes, social media, and a host of other modules that are also industry specific.

You don’t need an Oracle database expert or DB2 admin or Netezza professional or Microsoft Certified Professional in SQL Server to access your multiple databases. You can hire a SAS Consultant such as myself who has worked with all the forementioned databases to access your data with one tool. As an experienced consultant I can bring all your data together and deliver insightful information with documentation to maintain and manage your results.

SAS General Contracting Services

Here are some benefits and reasons for hiring me as your SAS Consultant:

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Receive top notch customer service throughout the contract.

BROAD EXPERIENCE

• Mainframe SAS
• UNIX SAS
• PC SAS
• Risk Management
• Anti-money laundering
• Finance
• 3 of the 5 top banks in Canada

DEVELOPMENT

I can provide development work from the ground up. Do you need to develop reports? Do you need an ETL process? Do you need to scrub data, prepare data for statisticians, analysis, or modeling? Throughout my 10 years of SAS programming and development work, I have completed projects that has covered all these things and more. SAS can be used to document code, perform regular expressions, and manipulate data in ways you may not have seen. Contact me to discuss your SAS development work.

STREAMLINE CODE

I can review your SAS code and help your department save money by streamlining code and processes.

Some accomplishments include:

• I’ve taken a 10 hour program and reduced it to under 10 minutes. On a monthly basis, the savings is tens of thousands of dollars for as long as the process runs.
• Just recently, I’ve streamlined a 2 week process to under 30 minutes.
• Cut the CPU time for one of the most CPU intensive programs in a department down by 50%

Let me streamline your code and have your results faster while saving money.

AUTOMATE PROCESSES

Do you have processes that require constant changing each month in order to run it? Has someone accidentally changed the date incorrectly and the process ran for the wrong month? I can automate the process so that changes are eliminated or reduced. Have people been informing you the process cannot be automated because it requires comments based on human judgement. Let me do a complimentary review.

MAINFRAME SAS

Are you having trouble finding a person who knows how to code SAS on the mainframe using JCL? I’ve been coding on the mainframe (z/OS) for 8 years. I know JCL, DFSORT, and several JCL and TSO utilities for efficient mainframe coding. Hire someone with proven mainframe experience.

LINUX SAS

SAS on Linux may require some knowledge of Linux utilities for automating and pre-processing of files. Similar to the way DFSORT may be used on the mainframe. Linux Mint Debian is my main OS at home for over 4 years. I’ve dabbled with Red Hat, Oracle, and Ubuntu Linux versions as well. Feel confident and comfortable I can work in your *NIX environment to get the job done.

INTEGRATE WITH EXCEL

Do you need your results in Excel? Is your current process cutting and pasting out of SAS and into Excel? SAS easily integrates with Excel. Your Excel results can be formatted and output into multiple worksheets. Let me automate that process to eliminate or minimize human errors during tedious manual processes.

SAS integrates with Access and other databases as well.

REPORTING

Many people don’t look to SAS for reporting. It’s hard to break out of a mental picture that everyone has about you. The same goes for “well-known” companies like SAS. Although, obviously, they’re not “well-known” enough. SAS can do reporting just as well and easily as Business Objects or other competitive reporting tools. It confounds me the number of departments I’ve seen use SAS for ETL and data manipulation and then use another tool to report on the data that is in SAS. Why take on another vendor? I would simplify the process and stick with one unless the second vendor’s product really adds more value than the first. Take a look at this video below on SAS Visual Analytics.

PUBLISH TO THE WEB

Do you need your results published on the web? SAS has a powerful language and tools to publish your results on the web in HTML5. You can enhance the look and style using CSS3. And you can add advanced functionality using Javascript. Produce responsive web pages and ensure your readers can read your results easily on their smartphone, tablet, or desktop.

Hire Cedric for Your SAS Consulting Contract

Hiring me as your SAS Consultant means you are hiring an independent contractor with excellent customer service and a background with banking and investment industry specific experience.

To complement my banking and technical background, my extra-curricular education also includes wealth and financial planning and I have attained former designations such as:

• Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FSCI)
• Canadian Investment Manager (CIM)
• Financial Management Advisor (FMA)
• Life and Health Insurance Sales Agent

Visit my Contact page and send me a note.

About SAS Software

SAS software is a powerful, integrated application used by governments and businesses around the world. Many SAS products are leaders in their respective field such as marketing analytics, business intelligence, and data integration, pharmaceuticals, and bioanalytics.

SAS began as a statistical analytical tool back in the 60’s. Today, it has morphed and stayed current by adding new platforms to it’s application suite. These platforms include social media analytics, business intelligence, data integration, marketing analytics, big data, and cloud just to name a few.

SAS has a programming language and visual tools. Users can choose to use either depending on their comfort level and product. You can extend the power of SAS using Java, HTML5, CSS3, and all the major flavours of SQL. Through various techniques you can also use SAS with PHP, Javascript, Linux and UNIX command line, Powershell, and many other languages to take advantage of capabilities and strengths of other products.

SAS is used widely throughout the workplace. It’s used to extract data, report on data, transform data, and manipulate and manage data for business purposes. It integrates easily with Excel and other products in the workplace that users may be more familiar with such as Access, SQL Server, Oracle, or DB2. It’s not limited to the forementioned applications and also integrates with Netezza, Teradata, and other databases so you can use one tool to manage multiple source systems.

For more information on SAS, visit their website where you can find all their products, industry solutions, case studies, white papers, code samples, documentation, and more.

I also maintain a SAS blog.

NOTE

Cedric Liem offers independent SAS Consulting and is not affiliated with SAS Institute. Cedric Liem specializes with SAS software. Hiring Cedric Liem does not imply you are hiring the services of SAS Institute. To hire a consultant from SAS Institute, you may contact SAS Consulting directly.

Digital Analytics (aka web analytics) is the companion to digital marketing. The two go hand in hand.

As with regular marketing, sales, or other business processes, understanding what works and what doesn’t is important alongside the execution of your process. And that’s where digital analytics comes in.

What is Digital Analytics?

For me, these new terms is really just a take on the traditional term, analytics. It’s just that you’re analyzing your digital processes and assets such website traffic, website conversions, social media traffic, and so on, with the intent to understand your visitor profile and then convert them either into customers or followers of yours.

If you are executing a campaign that is getting you lots of visitors and business, digital analytics doesn’t seem that important, until you start losing them.

So, while you’re serving your customers and trying to fulfill their needs with your product or service, understanding how you got them may not seem that important at the moment.

But, if you can, it’s good to try and track how and why you got them.

In one case, I thought one of my link building efforts was getting a client some really good traction. Instead, it was confounded with another issue where a website shut down it’s service and people were just looking for an alternative. Was it my link building or was it the fact that this competitor shut down?

Some web analytics and / or a short survey or questions during sign up could help solve that issue.

Sometimes to properly do web analytics, you may need to ask a few questions to confirm your hypothesis or observations. This could be done through email or during the sign-up process.

One of the easiest ways to carry out web analytics is to use Google analytics. Google analytics is free and powerful. Google has a suite of tools to help you understand your website and visitors and Google analytics is one of the most popular of it’s tools.

With good analytics, you can find out what kind of browsers people are using, what country they are coming from, the language they speak, gender, time of visiting, what pages they are visiting, and a whole lot more. The information can greatly help your business grow and target your audience.

If you want help with your analytics, contact me and we can discuss how I can help you understand your customers.

Contact Me