Arcplan Engage 1.0: Interactive Business Intelligence for Everyone

Online, September 21, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Business intelligence for all! arcplan, a global BI software innovator, is pleased to present arcplan Engage, a BI Search & Collaboration solution. This innovative software breaks down barriers that have made BI the realm of power users and aims to broaden BI's reach company-wide. arcplan Engage makes use of proven social media functionality, like rating, tagging, and commenting, and is so intuitive that anyone can use it right away without training. As a tool to support decision making, it aggregates standard dashboards and reports from arcplan and other BI systems, as well as unstructured data from portals like SharePoint, content management systems, and e-mail, making BI content searchable and accessible to regular business users.

Before today, only a select group of technical experts or managers had access to organizational BI systems. Thanks to arcplan Engage, any employee can now leverage BI information to make better business decisions. arcplan Engage lets users search through existing reports in a way that fully complies with the company's own security guidelines. This step allows them to avoid unnecessary duplication of analyses that already exist but may have previously been hard to find. If the user finds documents that are relevant to their needs, they can use arcplan Engage to call up the corresponding information. For example, the user can see who created the report and when, who commented on it, and what it has been rated by other users. It operates much like the Web 2.0 capabilities of Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and even online stores like Amazon.com, where consumers are used to rating products with stars and comments. The primary goal is to identify the best information in the organization, then leverage it to the company's advantage.

arcplan Engage also optimizes communication and cooperation with employees. For example, when users find helpful reports that they would like to personalize and use, the system lets them send a change request directly to the original author. arcplan reports also let you add notes and comments with graphics, which can be sent by e-mail to employees, facilitating discussion outside the normal circle of BI consumers.

arcplan Engage also boasts a personal bulletin board - the arcplan BI Wall - which is refreshed with current data each time a user launches the software. It effectively allows individual users to set up their own dashboards with drag-and-drop functionality - no programming required.

Hans Peter Wolff, CTO of arcplan, has this to say: "One of our long-standing clients, who implemented arcplan Engage as an early adopter, noticed an interesting effect. It initiated competition among the staff as to who could produce the most 'valuable' reports, whose reports spread quickest and furthest, and which reports received the most positive ratings.The client also loved the side-effect whereby our solution made it perfectly clear which reports had not been used for a long time and were taking up valuable IT resources." He added, "This is a great starting point for calculating the often elusive return on an investment."

arcplan Engage is fully integrated into the arcplan product suite, but is also able to incorporate BI solutions from other OEMs. This means that the software can be used throughout the company, regardless of whether various departments run BI systems from SAP, Microsoft, Oracle or other providers.

Wolff is keen to outline the benefits of arcplan Engage: "Because open Web standards let us integrate almost any content nowadays, businesses can basically find all the information they need using just our tool. Search results quality gets better as more employees use arcplan Engage and more data sources are integrated. Our goal is for users to launch arcplan Engage firs thing every morning, as automatically as their e-mail. We want it to become the repository of answers to all the organizational questions that arise over the course of a working day."