While industry-specific solutions with comprehensive data models and intuitive interfaces are promising, the initial challenge with operational use of these solutions often lies in accessing and transforming source data to align with the target schema. This stage frequently consumes disproportionate amounts of time and resources. Teams typically rely on a mix of data integration tools and custom scripts, but this hybrid approach for data onboarding can introduce downstream complications. Of most concern is governance, such as tracking data lineage and schema evolution.
SAS Solution Factory
A proper understanding of the business problems and experience of the strategies for solving those problems are essential components of a successful solution. When it comes to implementation of SAS industry solutions across domains such as banking fraud, government compliance, insurance fraud, public security and procurement integrity, SAS Solution Factory has been developed as a low-code/no-code framework of tools and processes that enable deployment and configuration of SAS solutions. This framework is a direct result of the valuable experience gained by a global team of SAS solution delivery consultants as part of their engagement in multiple complex customer projects over several years. Rather than spending valuable time engineering systems from scratch, Solution Factory automates the creation of runtime code - from data ingestion to alert presentation in the user interface. It is comprised of three main functional components:
1. Source Data Loading
Data from external systems is ingested into the Visual Investigator database, making it searchable and visible in the UI.
2. Entity & Network Generation
Source entities are resolved into unified entities, creating relationships and networks that are persisted in Visual Investigator. This enables rich, connected views of data.
3. Scenarios, Models & Alerts
Using both raw and resolved data, the system executes decisioning models and scenarios. Alerts are generated based on entity-level scores and rule-based triggers.
These components can be mixed and matched to suit the needs of any domain.
Configuration Over Coding
The Solution Factory generates code that mirrors what an expert would write—making it transparent, extensible, and maintainable. A dedicated Solution Configuration UI allows users to import, edit, and export JSON artifacts for deployment. While still evolving, efforts are underway to integrate this UI into Viya for seamless deployment and compliance.
Real-World Impact
The Solution Factory has already proven its value in:
- Reducing implementation time
- Enhancing scalability
- Supporting continuous integration and testing
- Enabling domain experts to lead solution creation
By prioritizing configuration and empowering domain experts, Solution Factory accelerates innovation and reduces the burden on engineering teams. An exciting evolution of this approach (driven by field experience of SAS solution delivery teams) is the development of data mapper agent - a major innovation showcased at the SAS Innovate event earlier this year. The showcase presentation demonstrated how the data mapper agent could be used in a medical adherence risk modeling scenario. The agent automatically mapped patient data columns to the model’s requirements, enabling rapid deployment and immediate insights—without the need for extensive engineering work. As described in this blog post, the data mapper agent uses large language models to automate the mapping of columns between customer environments and AI models.
My next post will focus on how some SAS customers are bringing automation to their Data Quality and Governance initiatives for regulatory compliance.
