macs complete
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 small vendor with 35 employees.
macs Software is a single-product company offering macs, 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 for individual requirements. 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 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 300 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, yet 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
67 percent of macs users are planning users – slightly above the survey average of 64 percent – reflecting the fact that macs is essentially a planning and CPM platform. This is also reflected in its customers’ typical use cases. In terms of planning, it is mainly used for operational planning (86 percent) but also financial planning (56 percent). Here, planning takes place at different aggregation levels. macs is also particularly used for budgeting (83 percent). Besides planning, customers mainly use the product for ad hoc query (89 percent) and standard/enterprise reporting (69 percent). Many also plan to use it for strategic planning (50 percent), dashboards/scorecards (48 percent) and forecasting (46 percent) in the future.
macs targets mid-sized companies across all industries. 89 percent of our sample of macs customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 15 users (including 10 using planning functionality), but the mean of 31 users (19 for planning) indicates there are also some larger implementations.
Current vs. planned use (planning use cases)
N=37
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=37
Percentage of employees using macs complete
N=37
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=37
Total number of users per company
N=37
Planning users per company
N=37
Company size (number of employees)
N=37
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