ARC: An out-of-the-box BI Solution for Retailers using IBM iSeries.

ARC is now available on the IBM mid-range servers. For retailers running on iSeries/AS400, Manthan Systems provides a quick path to implementing a robust retail-specific BI platform with ARC.

ARC – Integrated Retail BI Suite, is an advanced retail analytics, business reporting and performance measurement system designed to help retail decision makers improve their business performance. ARC seamlessly transforms transactional data into business intelligence, facilitating faster and better decisions and greater cohesion amongst all stakeholders.

ARC minimizes the effort and cost involved in gathering business insights by providing a full set of pre-built retail business and performance metrics including pre-defined reports, baseline analysis, key performance indicators and event-based alerts.

ARC enables high performance on the iSeries server through its ‘Single Level Storage’ architecture that reduces the DBA task of re-balancing indexes, moving data or indexes and data partitioning for performance. The scalability of ARC has been achieved through the iSeries platform.

Manthan Systems collaborated with IBM Innovation center for business partners to enable ARC on IBM mid-range servers. Manthan leveraged the resources at IBM Innovation center to port ARC on iSeries Power 5 with V5R4, DB2 400 & WebSphere 6.

Manthan Systems provides specialized software solutions for the retail and consumer goods industries. Manthan’s products and services enable operational and strategic decision-making for retailers, by leveraging on innovative business methods and models. Manthan’s mission is to create sustainable competitive advantage for global retailers and CPG majors by assuming their ‘Chief Analytics Officer’ role.

According to Vikas Kumar, ARC Product Head, “Apart from providing hardware and software, IBM experts helped us with porting datamodel to DB2 on iSeries, deciding indexing strategy and tuning database queries for improved performance. It was helpful for the ARC team working with the IBM Innovation Center as business partners as we could tap the excellent resources and expertise available.”