(Wayne, PA, July 1, 2002) - Business intelligence (BI) systems can enable organizations to optimize business processes and resources, uncover hidden opportunities and improve decision making and profitability. In most companies, responsibility for the selection and development of business intelligence applications falls to the IT department. Lack of flexibility in packaged applications, long internal development times and organizational demands for information can quickly overburden IT resources – so for many companies, the strategic gains promised by BI are never truly realized.

Recognizing that every lag in productivity affects ROI, arcplan’s flagship business intelligence platform, dynaSight, offers an alternative to the classic “build or buy” scenario. dynaSight’s rapid application development environment helps IT get critical data quickly to business users; and in turn, its highly intuitive interface enables users to easily obtain, analyze and act on information. Companies are then able to reap maximum value from enterprise IT investments such as ERP, SCM, and CRM.

Roland Hoelscher, arcplan Inc. CEO commented, “At arcplan’s inaugural customer summit this spring, we learned that customized applications will continue to play a pivotal role in our customers’ BI deployments. As their BI environments evolve, they’ll continue to demand ease and speed of development, and the ability to access multiple data sources.”

dynaSight’s object-oriented, drag and drop environment enables developers to rapidly create customized, flexible information systems from any relational or multi-dimensional data source. Its design tools require no programming, so maintenance is easy and applications can quickly be modified to keep up with organizational needs. At many dynaSight customer environments, business units control and own the BI applications, so that the people using the applications are the same people who create and maintain them. Hoelscher added, “This eliminates the need for organizations to dedicate resources tasked exclusively to set up and maintain a business intelligence platform. It also means that your business units will not have to push report additions and modifications through the IT department.”

Such effort saved can be invaluable, as one global pharmaceutical company learned; by implementing a web-based financial reporting system utilizing dynaSight as a front-end to SAP R/3, its IT and finance groups reduced report requisition, creation and delivery time by 90%.

Customer validation

As a BI solution that seamlessly bridges the concerns of IT and business users, dynaSight continues to gain acceptance by Global 1000 companies seeking validation of their most expensive and far-reaching IT deployments.

“Integration sounds like just another buzzword conjured up by techies to articulate their value proposition to the organization. Yet, the notion of integrating disparate data sources and web content into a cohesive web application, deployable across the enterprise, is a powerful phenomenon. In my experiences at IBM, arcplan’s dynaSight has proven successful in this task. dynaSight was able to dynamically interface with the five disparate data sources my organization required, provide an intuitive object oriented development environment and publish consolidated reports to the web. This is within a budget of thousands, not millions – and a time frame of months, not years. Most importantly it is a business application which can be designed, deployed, administered and utilized by any level in the organization,” said Marc Berson, IBM Finance Information Technology.

Financial analysts at Graham Packaging, a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of customized blow-molded plastic containers, found dynaSight's report creation and navigation to be considerably more intuitive to use with its multiple data sources (including SAP R/3, Hyperion Essbase and SQL Server) than the standard front-end offering. According to Jeff Rishel, Graham Packaging's director of IT, “In the time it took one analyst to create a single report in our old reporting system, we can create the query parameters in dynaSight for the entire scope of Graham's KPIs."

arcplan – Information systems for the enterprise

arcplan Information Services AG is an internationally successful software company. Our software to create individual company-wide information systems sets standards and is utilized worldwide by renowned companies. The company was founded in Germany in 1993. Nationwide development and distribution activities are coordinated from the headquarters near Düsseldorf, in collaboration with additional offices in Munich, Walldorf and Herten. In the U.S., the company group is represented by its subsidiary arcplan, Inc. in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Dallas. Furthermore, the company group is present through numerous distribution partnerships in more than 35 countries worldwide. The steadily growing network allows personal customer care directly on location. Expertise and consulting competency of arcplan partners are available at any time and in all-important economic regions. Growing revenues and continually increasing employee numbers prove the continuous development and success of the company.