How American Express Saved $1M in CPU charges

There are many advantages of using code generators, for example, reducing the number of programming hours, thus allowing the SAS users to focus on analysis. Another example, in cases like this, is reducing the cost of CPU. This project was designed with interaction on multiple platforms: Unix, Windows, and Mainframe. It is difficult to synchronize the programs running on these different platforms. In order to achieve some harmony among the programs, CRT, Microsoft Access, and FTP scripts were incorporated in to the project. This paper will describe how to create a code generator and how to solve the problems related to the multiple platforms and multiple users. INTRODUCTION In 1997, the author was working as Senior Software Engineer for Fraud Prevention, analyzing large volumes of data from multiple sources and from multiple markets. All these analyses requests had something in common: all the layouts were predefined. Before start ing a detailed analysis the author had to do some summarization of his information usually by country, city or industry. Then the author had to create a dataset with the information that he needed, then several procedures had to be run in order to analyze his information. Next, the author researched and automated, as much as he could, the information extraction and analysis processes. The author created a graphical user interface and SAS code generator in Microsoft Access. To transmit the programs to the Unix box the author used FTP scripts, and to submit the programs from Unix to the mainframe the author used CRT scripts. ARCHITECTURE OF THE TOOL The graphical user interface was located on the user's PC, the SAS programs ran on the Unix Platform, and the data repository was located on the mainframe as flat files.