Released on: October 29, 2007, 5:50 am

Press Release Author: Manthan Software Services Pvt Ltd.

Industry: Retail

Press Release Summary: New ARC 5.6 business intelligence to deliver Human Resources
analytics for retailers

Press Release Body: BANGALORE, India (27th October 2007 - Bangalore, India) Manthan
Systems today announced the latest release of ARC 5.6 - its integrated business
intelligence (BI) suite built exclusively for the retail industry. The new version
comes with a complete set of analytics for the 'Human Resources' function in a
retail enterprise. With this major extension of the existing data model, ARC
customers will now be able to actively analyze the performance of their workforce
and drive improvements in its human capital.

The HR analytics module in ARC 5.6 facilitates a host of analysis areas like
recruitment analysis, head count trend analysis by demography, succession planning
based on attrition, compensation analysis based on appraisal and payroll,
absenteeism and training analysis to name a few. Retailers can now easily drive
employee best practices and process benchmarks from top stores to the rest of the
organization.

Manthan managing director and CEO, Atul Jalan said, "ARC 5.6 will provide a
comprehensive & powerful analytics platform for the retail enterprise and will set
the benchmark higher for retail BI solutions. This is a result of our continuing
and tireless efforts to bring the best of BI to retailers by focusing exclusively
on this industry's needs. We have gone one step higher in our aim to transform
retail organizations by empowering their 'Analytical Quotient'."

CTO and product head at Manthan, Vikas Gupta comments, "With ARC 5.6 we will provide
greater width and depth in ARC's retail data model to power new functional areas
like Human Resources, and also provide more measures and complex KPIs in the
existing functional areas like Merchandising, Customer, and Sales. The model also
offers greater metrics coverage for retailers of fashion and apparel merchandise.
These are significant wins in our mission to provide the most extensive enterprise
retail data model in the BI industry today."

Commenting on the improved analytic capabilities of ARC 5.6, Vikas says, "Our users
have valued the rich and intuitive user experience of ARC, and with this new release
we have packaged a host of new and powerful features like personalized interactive
dashboards, new actionable utilities for analysis & monitoring like dynamic
trending, on-the-fly traffic-light visual/conditional exceptions, and smart measure
benchmarking. The new full-function metadata management capability will
significantly improve BI customization & maintenance capability."

The new product version is expected to further differentiate this retail specialist
in the BI space. Anand Sri Ganesh, director of marketing at Manthan cites, "Today
retailers are clearly favouring an industry-specific BI solution because of the
greater business value it drives for BI users. Furthering our rapid growth over the
last couple of years, ARC 5.6 will accelerate our traction in the retail BI market.
We're pleased to see our peerless industry focus driving cutting-edge innovations in
retail analytics. In the coming years, we are uniquely positioned to capture a
larger share of market from our generic BI competitors."

About ARC: An Integrated Retail Business Intelligence Suite
ARC is a retail data warehouse and an integrated BI suite specifically architected
for retail. Being a specialized product built exclusively for retail, ARC
dramatically reduces the deployment lifecycle and the total cost of ownership by
cutting down the time needed to customize a business intelligence platform to the
retail industry's specific needs. ARC's retail data model variants enable various
retail formats like fashion & apparel, food & grocery, specialty and mass
merchandise. The comprehensive data model is flexible enough to accommodate changing
business dynamics across all functions from store to supply chain. For more
information about ARC, please visit www.arc-bi.com.

About Manthan Systems
Manthan Systems is a provider of specialized software solutions for the retail and
consumer goods industries. Manthan helps retailers capture and process data that can
be leveraged to improve planning, monitor results, analyze and anticipate changes,
and mine opportunities. Manthan understands retail business practices and their
technology underpinnings having worked with a wide range of retailers and consumer
goods companies including Woolworths Germany, Haggen Supermarkets, Game Stores
Group, Robinsons Retail Group, Castorama, Ecco Sko, McDonalds, Loblaws and Haggar
Clothing Co. For more information about Manthan Systems, please visit
www.manthansystems.com.


Web Site: http://www.arc-bi.com

Contact Details: Priya Vishwakarma
Manthan Software Services Pvt. Ltd
No. 40/4, Lavelle Road
Bangalore - 560001
India
Phone: +91 80 2299 0585
Fax: +91 80 2299 05856
priya.vishwakarma@manthansystems.com