macs
macs Software is a German vendor founded in 1999 and headquartered in Zimmern ob Rottweil, Germany. The group of companies also has offices in Cape Town, South Africa and Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
macs Software is a single-product company with 30-40 employees. Its software, also known as macs, is a planning and performance management platform for fully integrated, detailed business planning. The vendor has a somewhat different outlook to its competitors, focusing on integrated corporate planning scenarios including the cross-linking of driver-based sub-budgets for sales/revenues/conditions, procurement, capacity and overhead costs. Initially this results in a transparent profit and loss statement and planning based on multi-step contribution margin accounting, which is transferred to an integrated financial plan (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow) that can be consolidated if required in a group environment. The transfer of bills of materials and work plans from ERP systems for procurement and capacity planning is a particular strength of macs, helping to improve the accuracy of planning results. macs supports all kinds of planning approaches (including top-down, bottom-up and combinations of both).
The relational data model – including the business logic in macs’ planning approach – is largely predefined but can be customized. To round out the portfolio, complementary BI and analytics functionality is available including formatted standard reporting with an integrated report generator for grid-based reports, pivot-table-based OLAP analysis with drill-down functionality and a dashboard generator. Preconfigured statistical models can be trained with the macs database and used for forecasting. An AI Studio with integration of structural models has been launched and implemented by a few customers recently.
macs targets small and mid-sized manufacturing companies with more than 100 employees. The product is aimed at power users in business departments. However, tasks such as integrating data with the vendor’s rather technical SQL-based ETL tool typically require IT support, particularly in the implementation phase. Trained business users can later take on responsibility for the administration and further development of macs applications. Around 250 companies currently use the product, mainly in the DACH region but also internationally. Across its entire customer base, macs is used by an average of 10-20 users per installation, but it also supports installations with significantly larger numbers of users.
Besides providing software, macs Software consultants also possess strong business know-how, supporting customers by advising them how best to implement the software according to their particular business needs. For both implementation and support, macs offers remote or in-person consultations.
User & Use Cases
71 percent of macs users are planning users – slightly above the survey average of 69 percent – reflecting the fact that macs is essentially a planning and CPM platform. This is also born out in its typical use cases. Customers leverage macs mainly for operational planning (83 percent) but also financial planning (46 percent). Here, planning takes place at different aggregation levels. macs is used for budgeting (79 percent), forecasting (51 percent) and strategic planning (45 percent). Besides planning, customers mainly use it for standard/enterprise reporting (79 percent), ad hoc query (71 percent) and dashboards/BI applications (53 percent). Many respondents also plan to use it for strategic planning (45 percent), financial planning (43 percent), forecasting (35 percent) and analysis (35 percent) in the future.
macs targets small and mid-sized companies across all industries. 78 percent of our sample of macs customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 14 users (including 10 using planning functionality), but the mean of 26 users (18 for planning) indicates there are also some larger implementations.
Current vs. planned use (planning use cases)
N=40
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=39
Total number of users per company
N=40
Planning users per company
N=40
Percentage of employees using macs
N=40
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=40
Company size (number of employees)
N=40
Versions used
N=27
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