This recipe for success has been at the center from the very beginning and remains our motto to this day. What began in 1996 as a one-person company is today the software partner of leading FMCG companies.
In 1996, the newly graduated Frank Arbeiter founded ARBIS GmbH. Alongside his studies, he had already built up the first successful client projects in software development.
From the very beginning, the focus was not on technology but on the customer. This recipe for success still shapes ARBIS today.
ARBIS has never grown in leaps, but always together with its customers' requirements.
With early customers such as University Hospital Bonn and Henkel, this approach proved itself in demanding enterprise projects. We soon recognized the advantages of specializing in FMCG groups. We became active across many parts of these organizations, building knowledge and understanding of processes and interdependencies “from the ground up.” Our cross-departmental perspective allows us to support our customers with advisory expertise alongside project delivery. We continuously expand this expertise. We stay close to customers and prospects at industry events. We’re already thinking today about the solutions tomorrow’s requirements will demand.
The home office became office space in Bonn, and later larger locations, eventually leading to today’s headquarters in Sankt Augustin. The company grew continuously, together with its customers. Still, we managed to preserve our startup feeling, because flexibility and speed matter to us.
As Windows and graphical interfaces changed everyday work, ARBIS consistently evolved its existing applications. Usability and acceptance moved further into focus.
As modern networks expanded, information became available company-wide. ARBIS developed solutions that efficiently connected departments while meeting IT requirements. International rollouts were part of everyday project work early on. Today we’re experiencing a revolution driven by AI, which is becoming an indispensable part of software development.
Increasingly complex business processes demanded high-performance software. Projects such as analyzing around one billion retail data points in near real-time, or developing sales-steering systems, demonstrate the power of our solutions. Today we work with a codebase of roughly one million lines of source code. Every day, we process gigabytes of data and make it available to our users.
The PC was the standard from the beginning and remains the most-used platform today. As smartphones emerged, work became more independent, and ARBIS provided software solutions for this too — initially for Windows Phone, later also for Android.
With the availability of powerful development tools, ARBIS moved all applications to a modern, web-based architecture. Today, our software solutions run flexibly on the same codebase across smartphone, tablet, and notebook, each with an optimized frontend.
In just a few years, we’ve experienced a revolution driven by AI. The first AI tools were met with healthy skepticism by our developers. Today they’re an indispensable part of everyday work, helping us build software faster, better, and more reliably. Even in our own solutions, we started working early on with AI models for demand forecasting and data clustering.
Cloud, modern security standards, and AI now form the foundation of our solutions. At the same time, the same standard still applies as it did in 1996: software must support people in their work, safeguard investments for the long term, and grow together with customers’ requirements.
Long-standing customers share their experience working with ARBIS and their joint projects.
