Financial Analytics

Controlling finance in retail is a whole different ball game.

You need to know almost as much about retail, as you do about finance.

ARC Finance Analytics can help.

First, a few words about us.

We, are Manthan Systems. And we specialize in delivering cutting-edge, synergistic solutions that enable decision making for businesses like yours, across the retail and consumer products industries.

Products and services designed to help you achieve a significant business advantage, while equipping you with that vital technical edge.

You´ll find that we bring to the table an ideal blend of deep domain expertise across the retail analytics spectrum, and flawless, core technical expertise across platforms. And this, is how we deliver solutions that create real business value, for you.

What is ARC Finance Analytics?

In ARC Finance Analytics, you’ll find all the analytic capabilities and tools that your finance managers need to make effective decisions.

The finance function has long felt the need for an analytic product that connects

the financial performance of a retail organization,

with operational performance drivers. ARC Finance

Analytics bridges this important gap in your analytic capability, by offering a performance management platform that truly helps you control costs, improve productivity, maximize profitability and boost sales.

So how exactly does ARC enable decision making?

ARC helps finance managers: • Understand the interrelationships between financial and operational performance metrics, without having to depend on multiple systems for the necessary data and analytics • Plan, budget and course-correct financial plans, performance reporting, and performance forecasting, in line with actual operational performance • Proactively use financial performance indicators to prioritize or optimize operational goals and targets • Control cost overheads by having a closer analysis and monitoring of cost elements of operations What can ARC do?

Streamlining your financial performance With ARC’s comprehensive range of analytics, designed to streamline your financial performance, your finance controllers can: • Understand the cross linkage between operational metrics and financial objectives • Access a pre-built library of financial analyses, like profit and loss analysis, balance sheet analysis, liquidity analysis, leverage analysis, efficiency analysis, profitability analysis, valuation analysis, and many more analyses related to account receivables and payables • Review Plan vs. Achievement status for key metrics in any time period (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) • Set alerts for tracking metrics that move out-of-range of budgets, trends or plans • Identify and benchmark best performing departments and business units on

cost

control,

profit

maximization

for

other

department

to

emulate/achieve • Analyze the financial health of categories, departments, stores, store groups in actionable dashboards • Get guaranteed data quality enabled by ARC’s retail data integration processes, that automatically correct late polled data, and correct the changes/adjustments in source system data • Use ARC’s inbuilt Microsoft Excel interoperability to work with existing reporting practices You’ll find that ARC contains a wide range of financial measures and key performance indicators (KPIs) packaged in the following areas: Account Payables Account Receivables General Ledger Fixed Assets Cash Management Productivity Audit Compliance

Pre-configured analysis areas: • Profit and Loss analysis • Cash Flow and Liquidity analysis • Managing leverage and efficiency • Capital Expenditures • Inventory turnover • Credit analysis • Valuation analysis • Payables and Receivables • Shrinkage and Operational Loss • Vendor payments and rebate analysis • Transactional performance • Fixed Assets analysis • Operating profit analysis • Productivity – stores, transactions, employees • Periodical AP and AR analysis • Activity based costing • Hot stores, products • Financial Audits • Compliance analysis

These measures and KPIs are presented in role-based analysis contexts, for example: • Pre-built CFO’s Dashboard • Actionable analysis for monitoring financial health, finding hidden opportunities and managing growth • Pre-built business scenarios like identifying and benchmarking best performing departments and business units on cost control, profit maximization for other departments to emulate/achieve • Proactive monitoring of business events by setting alerts for tracking metrics that move out-of-range of budgets, trends or plans • In-depth investigation and root cause analysis, for example drilling across from location to transaction type (Debit, Straight, Deferred), transaction type to invoices, and from invoices to cardholder

Retailers across segments deploy ARC to maximize profits and leverage opportunities.

Food and Grocery

Fashion and Lifestyle

Mass Merchandise

Specialty

How does ARC create value, for my business?

ARC Finance Analytics defines the next generation in decision making technology for finance managers. With a pre-built approach, combined with best practice analytic capabilities, ARC truly delivers in the promise of business intelligence. Some of the unique benefits ARC provides are: Role-based Analytics You’ll find that ARC’s role-based analytic applications meet the complete spectrum of your decision making needs for merchandisers. And that it’s thoughtfully deigned to provide specific analytic configurations for all levels of decision makers like department heads, assortment planners, allocators, buyers, merchandising heads etc for their strategic, tactical and operational needs.

Faster time-to-benefits ARC’s pre-built philosophy allows BI owners to deliver the application in the hands of business users, in the shortest possible time – a critical determinant of BI success. Compared with a similar deployment of a traditional BI platform, ARC can be implemented in a fraction of the time (12-16 weeks).

Faster ROI. Lower TCO TIME AND EFFORT

20 months

16 months

12 months

Multi Vendor Management

Changes, new requirements, enhancements

Save costs in delivering changing needs and maintaining the system

Go-live User Testing Performance Tuning

Huge $$ savings in deployment costs

Systems Testing 8 months

Reports Development

Deliver BI and Analytics faster

ETL Development DW or Marts Development

New reports, customizations, functional extension, new data sources

Data Modeling

Go-Live

Deployment Planning

Front end customizations

4 months

1 month

ETL Development Requirement Gathering

Traditional BI

Requirements Gap & Source System Analysis

ARC Retail BI

“Not only does this retail decision-making solution give us immediate advantages with insights to improve our performance, but ARC Retail Business Intelligence also provides us a lasting competitive advantage by making it easy for everyone to use retail analytics in their roles and responsibilities. Our decision makers love ARC’s pre-packaged, role-based analytic applications.”

- Wendy Reeve, BI Director, Foodland

ARC’s ease of implementation results in time and cost benefits, for your business.

Left: A comparison of traditional BI vs. ARC implementation.

Self-Service BI Architecture Since ARC is designed to maximize usability for business users, this results in minimal dependency on administrators and tech-savvy power users. With superior data visualizations, smart utilities, and a highly intuitive user interface design, you’ll find ARC extremely user-friendly. In other words, ARC makes analysts of your business users.

Accelerates Analytic Maturity With a combination of unique characteristics like a highly attractive licensing model (that doesn’t penalize incremental use of the product), high usability, and high scalability, ARC enables faster adoption of analytic best practices across your organisation. This in turn, progressively improves your organization’s analytic maturity, a key strategic differentiator in smarter businesses.

“The office of finance’s analytic capabilities is deeply rooted in manual processes and ‘Excel Hell’, constraining the need to improve critical information requirements to run, grow and transform the business. Most enterprises are still organizationally, functionally and technically disaggregated, which make it harder to comply with enterprise governance requirements. If standard, repeatable analysis is required, then its time for financial analytics applications.”

(Source: John E. Van Decker, Research VP, Gartner)

Retail business intelligence / performance management maturity model Step 4: Orchestrating Step 3: Collaborating

Step 2: Anticipating

Enterprise Performance • Cross functional

Step 1: Reacting

Process Performance

• Cascading strategy

Point Performance

• Single/siloed process

• Departmental

• Cross departmental

• Project driven

• Consistent/automated

• Common processes and definitions

• Tool-based (including spreadsheets)

• Process efficiency

• Process modelling

• Process analysis and optimization

• Collaboration and workflow

• Quick implementation

Ex: Workforce performance budgeting and KPI tracking

• Limited scope Ex: Flash sales reports

• Role-based

• Deep but insular view of the enterprise Ex: Merchandise financial plans flowed to planners; assortments that meet plans flowed to buyers; buying plans executed, and shared with logistics team

Technical

Multiyear Effort

Inside Out

Focus

Pervasive Performance • Business value driven • Performance culture • Contextual push alerts • External measures and collaboration • Holistic modeling • Aligned incentives • Shared risk/reward • Comprehensive view of the enterprise Ex: New product design and introduction is planned and executed with suppliers and across all relevant functional processes

Culture/Philosopy Outside In

Source: Source: AMR AMR Research Research

Low Total Cost of Ownership ARC’s pre-built approach and a faster deployment save retailers significant time and money. You can save significant operating and maintenance costs with ARC’s low administration and affordable scalability.

A proven “Game Changer” in retail businesses Over 40 retail organizations around the world deploy ARC Merchandise Analytics to transform the way they operate, compete, and innovate. Analysts like Gartner and AMR Research recognize ARC as a leading player in the retail business intelligence space. So it’s no surprise, that ARC has won several industry awards with ground-breaking innovations that are bringing about transformational changes in retail merchandising today.

Moving decision-making from wishful thinking to wisdom.

Manthan Systems was featured in this AMR Research report on the leading vendors in retail business intelligence. The report defines Manthan Systems as a “Retail BI specialist aiming to take the guesswork and big decisions out of the equation by predicting much of what retailers need, based on their understanding of the retail business.”

(Source: Janet Suleski, AMR Research)

What is Analytic Maturity?

“ARC's pre-built enterprise connectivity with our key operational system - the JDA ERP platform‚ its data management scalability and its ability to be deployed rapidly have proved to be major advantages that align with our IT strategy goals."

- Thelma G. Roxas, VP & CIO, Robinsons

Technology Benefits • Delivers high performance on large data volumes • Single, unified architecture and user interface • Platform agnostic, yet proven to work successfully on all major platforms • Retail-centric algorithms and models • Multi-currency, multi-language and multiple retail format support • Designed to handle multiple and parallel hierarchies, and concurrent time calendars Cost of Ownership Benefits • The effort and cost involved with configuration and maintenance of ARC is 1/10th that of a generic BI solution • Rapid 12-16 week deployment lifecycle • The pre-built proposition of ARC radically alters traditional DW deployment lifecycle • Retailers no longer need to appoint multiple external vendors to manage the deployment lifecycle • Brings down the hardware and infrastructure requirements for solution deployment

“The retail-specific capabilities of ARC and its best practice approach gave us the ability to move much faster than we would have been able to do with more generic solutions. In our very dynamic business we need to be able to keep our finger on the pulse at all times and ARC will enable us to do just that.”

- Peter Crowne, Finance Director, GAME Group plc

The Manthan Advantage • Manthan’s core competency is in the understanding of retail and all associated technology and statistical sciences • Manthan facilitates customer success by adopting an end-to-end, full-lifecycle approach • Each of Manthan’s products and services caters to the entire spectrum of a retailer’s need for BI and PM

Why choose ARC?

Business Benefits • Entire organization onboard with BI quickly • Alignment with retail business processes and practices • Makes analysts out of business users • Improves margins, inventory efficiency, promotion effectiveness, and fewer markdowns • Unique pricing mechanism encourages higher BI adoption • Orchestrates performance management culture

What is ARC’s technology architecture?

Built for retail, ARC’s technologically superior engine understands and anticipates retail data structures, ensures rapid deployment (less than 4 months) and a high return on investment.

The ARC platform offers many ‘industry-first’ technologies, like a Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) model with in-memory cubing, aggregate-aware query mechanisms, n-hierarchy architecture, auto query generation, auto KPI rendering, and advanced visualization techniques and tools.

The ARC BI platform enables a variety of analytics capabilities like: • Information delivery of role-based analytics through intuitive dashboards, reports, and scorecards • Business activity monitoring through alerts, subscriptions, Q&A engine, • Wide range of built-in analysis capabilities like multi-dimensional OLAP, scorecarding, benchmarking, trending, comparative analysis and various other analysis methods • Pervasive access of the system through web-based and mobile-based user interfaces • Comprehensive, industrial strength security and administration capabilities • Collaborative decision making capabilities

ARC technology highlights.

• Out-of-box single platform for analytical and reporting solutions • Extensive pre-built retail metrics and reports • High performance, minimal maintenance • High degree of flexibility; ease of customization • Deployment in weeks, not months Optimized retail enterprise data warehouse model • Highly scalable standards-driven BI platform • Intuitive web-based front end for users and administrators • Unified dimension modeling architecture spanning ROLAP and MOLAP capabilities • Integrates seamlessly with diverse retail transaction systems – from home-grown applications to ERPs to spreadsheets • Platform and database agnostic construct

In short, the platform offers everything you need for retail business intelligence.

ARC is constructed as a scalable, layered architecture with a tiered business and analytics engine that enables easy customization. Componentized architecture permits plug-and-play deployment with prevalent ETL, data warehouse, OLAP or reporting tools. With pre-built integrators for leading ERP platforms like JDA and SAP, ARC leverages and extends the capabilities your existing technology investments.

ARC technology architecture

www.manthansystems.com