CARY – As the Town of Cary began collecting data to improve its services for residents, it found an important partner within its own Town limits: SAS Institute.

Jennifer Robinson

For many years, SAS has helped federal and state governments harness the data they receive to improve services, said Jennifer Robinson, Town of Cary council member and Director of Local Government Solutions at SAS.

The company is also a member of the Smart Cities Council, which awarded the Town of Cary one of its 2018 Readiness Challenge Grants.

Learn more about the grant – What Cary is doing

“We look at the Smart City Council as an organization that helps communities by bringing resources to towns that want to use technology to improve their processes and resources,” said Robinson.

One area SAS is helping Cary use data to improve efficiencies is in water distribution and consumption. According to Robinson, Cary currently collects data at customers’ homes. When anomalies appear, the Town contacts residents to identify the cause of the increase in use.

However, Robinson points out, Cary can collect even more data to improve efficiency.

At the workshop, Cary tackled how it could use data from other points in the sewer system to detect leaks and lessen environmental impacts.

On its website, SAS boasts that it works with government agencies in all 50 states to ensure data is used to improve services. In addition to the Town of Cary, which started using SAS in 2007, customers include Wake County Emergency Management, Los Angeles County, Florida Department of Children and Families and Louisiana Workforce Commission. You can read the case studies online.

Here are four examples, including one from Wake County and the other from the State of North Carolina:

Wake County EMS

Heart attack victims in Wake County, NC, have a better chance at survival thanks to new, analytics-driven recommendations from the county’s Emergency Medical Services. Based on a data analysis project conducted by the SAS Advanced Analytics Lab for State and Local Government, Wake County EMS changed its recommendations for how long to conduct CPR on cardiac arrest patients, which has helped increase the survival rate 48 percent.

LA County

SAS and LA County together created the nation’s first fraud-detection system in local government that uses advanced analytics, predictive models and social network analysis to detect and prevent fraud in public assistance programs. The system fights fraud perpetrated by participants and child care providers in the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) Stage 1 Child Care Program.

Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS)

As the most comprehensive reporting package of value-added metrics available in the educational market, SAS EVAAS for K-12 provides valuable diagnostic information about past practices and reports on students’ predicted success probabilities at numerous academic milestones. By identifying at-risk students, educators can be proactive, making sound instructional choices and using their resources more strategically to ensure that every student has the chance to succeed.

North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services

The North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services’ Criminal Justice Law Enforcement Automated Data Services (CJLEADS) partnered with SAS to provide instant access to information about suspects and convicted criminals for law enforcement and court personnel. Using CJLEADS, the state’s Department of Insurance Criminal Investigations Division caught one of the state’s largest staged accident rings, saving countless work hours in the process.