Dutch Retail Giant Ahold Selects arcplan Enterprise for Speed and Efficiency in Financial Reporting; Ahold to Implement arcplan Dashboards for Enterprise-Wide Financial Reporting for the Ahold Executive Board.

LANGENFELD, Germany -- arcplan, a leading vendor of process-centric business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Ahold, the Netherlands-based retail and food service giant, selected its flagship BI solution, arcplan Enterprise, to gather financial reporting information from Ahold's operating units and create consolidated reports for the Executive Board. The deal was clinched by arcplan's Dutch partner Partake Consulting, which undertook the integration and implementation work. The initial phase was completed and operational within little more than eight weeks due to arcplan's ability to integrate seamlessly with Ahold's existing systems.

First consolidated financial report rolled out in record time

Each business unit within Ahold compiles financial details for their operation at each reporting period and sends them to the head office in Amsterdam. Once these have been consolidated into a group report, business unit managers add comments and clarifications to the balance sheet and cashflow. The financial figures combined with the explanatory notes are then sent to the board.

To streamline this process, the company initiated a new project, dubbed 'Breezer', to modernize its management reporting by aligning the executive report's comments, explanations, and presentation much more closely with Ahold's key performance indicators (KPIs). Under the guidance of arcplan's partner Partake Consulting, Ahold implemented a new financial consolidation system, Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), and subsequently redesigned the executive report, integrating it with the arcplan solution. The first Executive Board report was presented to management little more than eight weeks later.

"A project like this has high visibility and we are really pleased to have been able to show such quick results. With one click we have the entire Executive Board report in a high-quality print format," said Steven van den Berg, Ahold's Director, A&R Reporting. "We will continue to develop the Breezer project along the same lines, leveraging the capabilities of arcplan Enterprise and HFM."

Next Steps

In the next phase of the Breezer initiative, Ahold and Partake Consulting will use the same arcplan and HFM system to provide interactive financial analysis. This analysis will enable corporate finance staff to drill down from the executive dashboard views into a more granular level of detail. This approach makes optimal use of the new executive report structure by using arcplan Enterprise's ability to combine intuitive dashboards with more powerful analytics in the same environment.

The Ahold implementation is one of many similar implementations in the market. Partake Consulting has also created and markets a dashboard offering, called CFO Cockpit, which was built with arcplan Enterprise. CFO Cockpit optimizes and delivers management information from existing financial consolidation systems.

As Steven van den Berg sums it up: "Creating our own specific business intelligence, that is tailored to our strategy, has never been so easy, and we're looking forward to expanding the current framework. We can also see interesting opportunities in the CFO Cockpit Community, created by arcplan and Partake Consulting and believe that the Community will provide us with some new ideas for the ongoing evolution of our Breezer project."

About arcplan

arcplan, a leading vendor of process-centric business intelligence (BI) software, enables companies to create BI analytics to improve business processes which span multiple IT systems. With arcplan, customers--such as DaimlerChrysler, CUNA Mutual, Office Depot and Bayer-rapidly develop customized and interactive BI applications for planning and budgeting, managing cross-function KPIs in dashboards and scorecards, and improving operations with production, HR and sales reporting. arcplan process-centric BI analytics are deployed without the cost and complexity of traditional solutions by leveraging existing data in real-time, without creating a redundant data store. arcplan is the leading BI vendor for both SAP and Hyperion installations. Founded in 1993, arcplan has more than 2,500 customers and 300,000 users worldwide. Headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany and Philadelphia, PA, arcplan delivers its solutions through a global direct sales force and a network of more than 130 partners in over 30 countries. For more information, visit www.arcplan.com.

Press Info

Contents:

--arcplan Enterprise has been selected by Netherlands-based retail group Ahold

--Tight integration with Hyperion Financial Management