The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the official government taxation agency in the United States. Like financial services and credit card industries they have invested in tools to combat fraud, reduce risk and improve collections. To help control their national accounts receivable, the IRS installed KnowledgeSEEKER throughout their divisional offices to analyze divisional databases.

The cancer research team at the world renowned University of Rochester Cancer Center in Rochester, New York uses KnowledgeSEEKER extensively.

In one recent study on the effect of anxiety on chemotherapy-related nausea, KnowledgeSEEKER played a critical role. Subjects were divided into four groups, each given a varying amount of an anxiety-reducing drug, and the resulting levels of nausea recorded. When KnowledgeSEEKER was applied to the data, however, it became clear that the differences existed not between the pre-defined groups, but between subgroups whose personal levels of anxiety varied. This information indicated to the team that the intervention drugs that they had used were too weak and thus could not be recommended as a broad treatment for all cancer patients. The doctors also realized that they needed to develop an alternative form of intervention and identify subgroups on whom the treatment would be more effective.

KnowledgeSEEKER is used extensively by Hewlett Packard in their United States manufacturing plants as a process control tool both to analyze factors impacting product quality as well as to generate rules for production control systems.

One example of KnowledgeSEEKER in action was trouble-shooting quality assurance problems in the production process for the HP IIc color scanner. According to Quality Assurance Manager Rick Cole, "KnowledgeSEEKER quickly identified the critical factors, several of which had been completely unsuspected". This information allowed the engineers to quickly correct the problem. In another case KnowledgeSEEKER derived the rules necessary to identify situations where a manufacturing process was about to go out of control. This allowed intervening actions to be taken that prevented the problems from ever arising.

The Canadian Imperial Bank of commerce(CIBC), one of Canada's largest banks, has been successfully applying KnowledgeSEEKER to create models through data analysis and prediction to help solve problems involving both fraud detection and risk management. According to CIBC representative Jim Carswell, KnowledgeSEEKER was installed to analyze and to mine a database containing information on customers whose mortgage accounts had entered the early stages of delinquence (they were a few days late in paying their mortgage). The goal was for the team to be able to develop a profile of customers likely to become seriously delinquent in their mortgage payments.

The results of the study proved somewhat counter-intuitive. Intuitively, the CIBC team thought that people who were chronically late customers would be the most likely to become seriously delinquent. The correlation that KnowledgeSEEKER uncovered was that people who were ordinarily conscientious customers but had missed a payment were the group most likely to further delay payment. KnowledgeSEEKER determined that it was these people who were having the kind of real financial problems that would likely cause further payment problems. By using KnowledgeSEEKER, the productivity of the CIBC risk management team has increased significantly.

The Gallatin Division of R.R. Donnelly, the largest commercial printing company in North America, uses KnowledgeSEEKER to improve process control, cut costs and increase productivity.

Gallatin Engineer Bob Evans cited the problem of "web break" as one KnowledgeSEEKER success story. In the past, approximately five percent of paper rolls broke when being fed through the printer. This meant that the machines had to be shut off and the rolls re-inserted. Printing time was lost, materials were wasted, and costs were incurred. KnowledgeSEEKER identified the factors that best indicated the situations where web breaks would likely occur. Workers were therefore able to take preventative action. Mr. Evans states that KnowledgeSEEKER has allowed the plant to reduce operating expenses by a "substantial amount".

The Washington Post, one of the highest-circulated daily newspapers in the United States, uses KnowledgeSEEKER to improve their direct mail targeting and to conduct survey analysis. Marketing Manager Alec Dann explained that KnowledgeSEEKER was successfully used to select the census data used to build a model to predict home delivery penetration (the number of households in any given geographic region that were current subscribers to the Post). This model served as a guide for more effectively targeting later sales efforts.

The Post has also successfully used KnowledgeSEEKER in survey analysis to identify those factors that affected satisfaction levels among Post advertisers. Prior to using KnowledgeSEEKER, the Post had been spending large sums to hire an outside consultant who used complex multivariate techniques to perform the various analysis. "Easy-to-use" KnowledgeSEEKER replaced the need for consultants, thereby saving considerable expenditure. Furthermore, KnowledgeSEEKER greatly improved the focus of the Post marketing team so that critical issues were quickly identified, lost revenue was avoided and new revenue increased as current advertisers enhanced their advertising volume.

The Oxford Transplant Center in London, England is using KnowledgeSEEKER in its kidney transplant unit to analyze twenty years' worth of case history data, with over 5000 separate measurements for each patient, to discover the factors that affect transplant survival rates.

KnowledgeSEEKER has identified a previously unknown correlation between the time taken to perform a tranplant operation and survival rates at five years. Furthermore, KnowledgeSEEKER revealed that the length of time kidneys are chilled in ice prior to transplant has a direct influence on long-term survival rates, as does the length of time that the removed kidney sits still warm before being stored in ice. These discoveries pinpoint areas for future research and should ultimately lead to higher survival rates for transplant patients. Dr. Ken Welsh, transplant immunologist and project head, explains that "over the past years we have used either manual examination of data in spreadsheets or traditional reporting packages to extract results and then used a statistical package to analyze these. This approach can result in repetitive queries and analysis by different staff, and since reporting tools only give the information you ask for specifically, the biggest problem is that you need to ask the right question.

MGM Grand Inc. is operator of the MGM Grand, a popular hotel casino and theme park in Las Vegas. To improve customer satisfaction, the marketing department uses KnowledgeSEEKER to analyze information gathered from guest comment cards. Of special interest are the responses of those guests who answer the question "Would you return to MGM Grand Hotel?"

KnowledgeSEEKER indicated that of the numerous variables included in the analysis, it is the front desk and the room experience that are critical to customer satisfaction. Senior Database Marketing and Research Manager, Victor Matera explained that not only has KnowledgeSEEKER focused their efforts but that within six months of making changes to the targeted areas, the attrition rate has decreased by ten percent. Mr. Matea also stated that, "revenue will be positively affected because the likelyhood that these guests will return dramatically increases."

At Reader's Digest Canada, according to analyst George Erles, KnowledgeSEEKER has become "a standard in (our) repertoire of analytical tools" and is used throughout their international offices. KnowledgeSEEKER was able to offer the organization the best solution because its "statistical capabilities more than met our technical requirements, while its highly-interactive and flexible interface make it exceptionally easy to learn and use."

KnowledgeSEEKER has been used in several ways. First, it was used to help define some of the organizations' major market segments. This contributed both to decreasing costs and increasing revenue. Second, KnowledgeSEEKER is used to identify profitable subsets of markets , and to analyze the potential of new markets. Thirdly, KnowledgeSEEKER has proven itself invaluable "in exploring variable relationships such as interactions, grouping or splitting of variable ranges, determining hierarchies of discriminating variables and even in the creation of new variables.