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, United States.
macs Software is a single-product company with 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).
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.
The relational data model – including the business logic in macs’ planning approach – is largely predefined but can be customized. Technologically, the majority of customers use Microsoft SQL Server as a database, but SAP HANA is also supported.
macs targets small and mid-sized manufacturing companies with more than 200 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 30-50 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.
