SAS Gives UUM the Right Solutions

UNIVERSITI Utara Malaysia (UUM) was formally incorporated in 1984 with the mission to provide academic excellence in the areas of business management education, IT and quality management.

Being the first university to be accorded MSC status outside the Multimedia Super Corridor, UUM plays a significant role in contributing to the social, economic and intellectual growth of the region.

UUM’s Dean of the Faculty of Quantitative Sciences, Dr Engku Muhammad Nazri Engku Abu Bakar, said that the university’s mission is to produce human resources with the competency and commitment towards developing the nation and to escalate the academic entity’s status as a centre of excellence for management.

As a means to this end, UUM particularly advocates the science and technique of data mining as a way for organisations in Malaysia to gain a competitive advantage.

“One of our biggest challenges is to convince private organisations to invest in data mining as many of them are hesitant in what is still deemed as a new concept,” said Dr Engku.

“In order to play our part to convince these companies on how the right data can be profitable to their businesses, we require the right tools to demonstrate the wealth of insights that can be obtained from the employment of data mining techniques.

“But at the same time, we need to provide sufficient training to our students, to equip them before they join the workforce as knowledge workers to spearhead the corporate world with good data mining practices,” he added.

With this objective in mind, UUM first embarked on its partnership with SAS – a world leading business intelligence software provider way back in 1989.

“SAS was chosen as it provided the necessary curriculum development and course consulting that was essential to UUM.

Besides providing one of the most complete solutions in the market, it was their customer service that bowled us over. The SAS education team plays a major role in providing UUM with indispensable assistance which was our core necessity”.

SAS software’s are used in many courses in UUM especially under the Faculty of Quantitative Sciences. In fact, UUM is the first Malaysian public institution to have a Data Mining subject known as “Knowledge Acquisition in Decision Making” currently taught to some 40 undergraduates each semester; with “Decision Support System” and “Statistics” subjects utilizing SAS software being taught to 200 students each semester.

Dr Engku added that the “Data Mining and Research Methodology” subject is currently being proposed, adding on to the three existing courses.

Undergraduates taking up the SAS data mining courses cover training that allows them to explore large quantities of data and discover relationships and patterns that lead to proactive decision making.

They are also taught to use the SAS Enterprise Miner that combines a rich suite of integrated data mining tools that empower users to exploit corporate data for strategic business advantages within a single environment.

The SAS analytical software has enriched the teaching process at UUM as lecturers are able to use suitable real-life datasets in their lectures while students are able to use them to build models and analyse information to create solutions for decision making.

It came as no surprise to UUM when it won the prestigious IPTA (Public Institutions of Higher Learning) Award in 2005 for its Automated Evaluation System (SAES) that leverages SAS BI technology in 2005. In addition, the SAES has also helped boost the university’s academic and student information system (ASIS).

The strong relationship with SAS also opened up opportunities for UUM to use the Enterprise Miner in its consultation works.

SAS has provided UUM researchers with opportunities to partner with SAS in many ways such as to solve questions and find solutions as well as partake in joint events and collaborations such as support for analytical seminars.

“As such, it is natural for us to hope to procure more consultation work in the future, especially for the application of data mining,” added Dr Engku.

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