New ARC 5.6 business intelligence to deliver Human Resources analytics for retailers

BANGALORE, India (31th October 2007 - Bangalore, India) Manthan Systems today announced the latest release of ARC 5.6 – its integrated business intelligence (BI) suite built exclusively for the retail industry. The new version comes with a complete set of analytics for the ‘Human Resources’ function in a retail enterprise. With this major extension of the existing data model, ARC customers will now be able to actively analyze the performance of their workforce and drive improvements in its human capital.

The HR analytics module in ARC 5.6 facilitates a host of analysis areas like recruitment analysis, head count trend analysis by demography, succession planning based on attrition, compensation analysis based on appraisal and payroll, absenteeism and training analysis to name a few. Retailers can now easily drive employee best practices and process benchmarks from top stores to the rest of the organization.

Manthan managing director and CEO, Atul Jalan said, “ARC 5.6 will provide a comprehensive & powerful analytics platform for the retail enterprise and will set the benchmark higher for retail BI solutions. This is a result of our continuing and tireless efforts to bring the best of BI to retailers by focusing exclusively on this industry’s needs. We have gone one step higher in our aim to transform retail organizations by empowering their ‘Analytical Quotient’.”

CTO and product head at Manthan, Vikas Gupta comments, “With ARC 5.6 we will provide greater width and depth in ARC’s retail data model to power new functional areas like Human Resources, and also provide more measures and complex KPIs in the existing functional areas like Merchandising, Customer, and Sales. The model also offers greater metrics coverage for retailers of fashion and apparel merchandise. These are significant wins in our mission to provide the most extensive enterprise retail data model in the BI industry today.”

Commenting on the improved analytic capabilities of ARC 5.6, Vikas says, “Our users have valued the rich and intuitive user experience of ARC, and with this new release we have packaged a host of new and powerful features like personalized interactive dashboards, new actionable utilities for analysis & monitoring like dynamic trending, on-the-fly traffic-light visual/conditional exceptions, and smart measure benchmarking. The new full-function metadata management capability will significantly improve BI customization & maintenance capability.”

The new product version is expected to further differentiate this retail specialist in the BI space. Anand Sri Ganesh, director of marketing at Manthan cites, “Today retailers are clearly favouring an industry-specific BI solution because of the greater business value it drives for BI users. Furthering our rapid growth over the last couple of years, ARC 5.6 will accelerate our traction in the retail BI market. We’re pleased to see our peerless industry focus driving cutting-edge innovations in retail analytics. In the coming years, we are uniquely positioned to capture a larger share of market from our generic BI competitors.”

About ARC: An Integrated Retail Business Intelligence Suite
ARC is a retail data warehouse and an integrated BI suite specifically architected for retail. Being a specialized product built exclusively for retail, ARC dramatically reduces the deployment lifecycle and the total cost of ownership by cutting down the time needed to customize a business intelligence platform to the retail industry’s specific needs. ARC’s retail data model variants enable various retail formats like fashion & apparel, food & grocery, specialty and mass merchandise. The comprehensive data model is flexible enough to accommodate changing business dynamics across all functions from store to supply chain. For more information about ARC, please visit www.arc-bi.com.

About Manthan Systems
Manthan Systems is a provider of specialized software solutions for the retail and consumer goods industries. Manthan helps retailers capture and process data that can be leveraged to improve planning, monitor results, analyze and anticipate changes, and mine opportunities. Manthan understands retail business practices and their technology underpinnings having worked with a wide range of retailers and consumer goods companies including Woolworths Germany, Haggen Supermarkets, Game Stores Group, Robinsons Retail Group, Castorama, Ecco Sko, McDonalds, Loblaws and Haggar Clothing Co. For more information about Manthan Systems, please visit www.manthansystems.com.