CARY – Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Operating Officer and No. 2 to CEO Jim Goodnight at SAS, says the company is “fully operational” despite the many changes forced on the Cary-based software giant by the coronavirus pandemic.

Its employees have responded to an “all hands on deck” call, are working at home as instructed, and are supporting customers while at the same time applying knowledge and expertise to following the virus in order to better understand it through the firm’s primary strength: analyzing and crunching big data.

In an interview with WRAL anchor David Crabtree on Monday evening, Schabenberger talked at length about the many challenges SAS faces – and the changes the company has had to make.

  • Let’s first start with the data and your expertise. It’s what SAS is known for and finding answers. Looking at the analytics, is that one of the top priorities that SAS is working on right now with?

Thank you for having me on the program. They are absolutely. This is a very data rich problem, obviously. And we are working in multiple phases.

Step one is kind of situational awareness – understanding what is going on in the county, state and country, and comparing that to other places in the world. Where a pandemic has been or is moving through. So, we have COVID dashboards that we make available to give rich insights that easily consumable.

We update this daily available on SAS.com but the next step is really understanding where it’s heading, where are we going, and how to adjust resources around it. This is where we know analytics is used to predict the risk for the health system. We are working with epidemiological models.

You might hear the term SEIR model (susceptible, exposed, infected, and recovering). We’re working with our friends at Cleveland Clinic to build a library of these models and fit them to data and then make them available.

The next step, once we have these models in place, is really to answer the very important question about health resource optimization – where the ICU beds are needed, the personal protective equipment, the ventilators, the dialysis machines.

If you use an analogy from ice hockey, the first step to situational awareness is really understanding where the puck is. But what we’re getting to is understanding where the puck is going to be and skating there. With hockey, you don’t always know where it’s going.

  • Are you encouraged by what you’re seeing or are you stepping back and going, Oh my.

Somebody said today the number of people looking at exponential curves has grown exponentially. I think we’re all still seeing an incredible rise of the number of cases, and we need to be aware that the number of cases we’re aware of is probably an underestimate of the number of infections because of where we’re testing those with symptoms. But this is what these models can adjust for.  So, it’s really important to understand what is going and base it on sound scientific principles rather than just guess work.

I’ve seen a recent new model coming out of University of Washington. The number of deaths over the next four months in the US less is than what has been reported today. That will absolutely be good news. We need to have good date. Listen to the data.

You have to use good scientific methods in modeling to get a good handle on what is going to happen next. To understand where the next hotspot is going to be and where we need resources.

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  • You had a major event scheduled this week in Washington, the SAS Global Conference forum. You had to rework this. Totally. What will it look like now?

Well, we would have been on stage yesterday and tonight. But we called off the event very early on. We first planned for a virtual event, but we postponed that as well. The world’s attention is handling the [virus] crisis, and we have issued an all hands on deck call at SAS that has gone out to all our world worldwide employees too.

We told employees if you have skills and expertise in epidemiology, health statistics, public health, nursing, etc., then we want to use your skills and expertise right now and dedicate them to the fight against [coronavirus].  Our employees are raising [their] hands, obviously. This is where our focus is, and this is where we need to concentrate our effort.

  • Speaking of employee use, you’ve got thousands of workers in the Triangle around the world. SAS consistently ranking at the top of the best places to work. How are you handling the challenges and what could some other companies learn from SAS and how do you deal with all the remote working when you have such an active campus with so many [people]?

We’re now in week three of working from home. In the US we expected them to work from home as of March 16. It’s new territory for us. We’re learning a lot from a technical perspective. Our infrastructure is set up to support this.  We’re learning a lot about how to do virtual meetings, virtual customer support, even virtual happy hours after work.

There is a sense of loss of normalcy that we all are going through. A sense of loss of security and safety. And there’s heightened stress and anxiety in these times. So, we are trying to have programs in place to bring back a little bit of the sense of normalcy. Our healthcare center and our pharmacy on campus remain open to care for employees and their families.

Our work/life center is issuing tips and tricks for how to deal with anxiety and stress and isolation. The SAS daycare and preschool teachers have started social channels to keep engaged with the kids and the parents. They are reading to the kids online and the kids still can interact with each other.

Our RFC [recreation fitness center] does remote workouts and exercises.  Our productivity has not really dropped.  And, our logistics and supply chain are not disrupted at all. We’re fully operational. We are supporting our customers the way we have before, but it is adjusting to this loss of normalcy and this changing world that we really have to manage.

[Editor’s note: This transcript was edited slightly for clarity and brevity.]

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