Company: Merck & Co., Inc
Company background: Pharmaceutical company which primarily uses SAS software for data analysis of various clinical trail.
Contact: Yogesh Pande
Title: Principal Scientist, Statistical Programming
Country: United States
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
There was a requirement to automate the document Analysis Results Metadata (ARM) by using SAS. The ARM does have a specific format that needs to be followed and the tool that was used to make the automation successful was SAS BASE software.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
The automation was solved by utilizing the BASE SAS and SAS macro techniques. The capability of SAS BASE and SAS Macros is outstanding.
What were the results or outcomes?
The macro that automated the ARM generation is been seen currently see and experienced as the most efficient macro to quickly (as compared to manual process) get the document in the format it is required.
Why is this approach innovative?
The ARM document initially was considered as a document that can only be created using manual work. This was time consuming and resulted into inconsistency within different groups that tried to manually create the document. These issues triggered the innovation idea to automate the ARM.
What advice would you give to new SAS users?
There were instances where I had to make number of .RTF files into SAS datasets this was done for extracting some key information from the RTF files. I had difficulties in importing .DOCX files. I would appreciate if .DOCX import to SAS dataset can be simplified. Thank you!
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