arcplan

About arcplan

arcplan, established in Germany in 1993, developed business intelligence (BI), planning, and analytics software primarily for mid-sized to large multinational enterprises. The company was founded by physicists Udo Wollschläger and Frank Hagedorn, mathematician Dr. Hartmut Krins, and chemist Dr. Bernd Fröhlich. Their initial product, inSight, was notable for its integrated development environment that allowed users to create custom reports via drag-and-drop and was one of the first software programs to directly access SAP data for reporting and analysis.

The firm operated in the business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM) markets, serving industries such as manufacturing, banking, healthcare, and logistics. Its flagship product, arcplan Enterprise, was a platform for building custom BI solutions and analytic applications, enabling the integration of data from heterogeneous sources like SAP, Oracle, and IBM into a single report without extensive data manipulation. The software provided features for creating dashboards, scorecards, and financial reports, with capabilities for ad-hoc analysis, mobile access, and write-back functionality for planning and forecasting. Revenue was generated through software licensing and subscription models, with pricing varying by the number of users.

In March 2015, arcplan was acquired by Marlin Equity Partners and subsequently merged with Longview Solutions, a Canadian provider of CPM and tax software. This merger was intended to create an integrated product suite combining Longview's CPM solutions with arcplan's analytics and data visualization capabilities. The combined entity aimed to offer a single-source platform for financial planning, consolidation, tax reporting, and analytics. Later, in February 2020, Longview, including the arcplan technology, was acquired by insightsoftware, a global provider of ERP and EPM reporting solutions. This acquisition was part of insightsoftware's strategy to expand its portfolio for the Office of the CFO, adding capabilities in tax reporting, financial consolidation, and enterprise-scale planning.