Guide well-informed business decisions at the forefront of strategy and operations.

Guide:

Controllers play an active and supportive role in decision-making processes. They do not simply provide information but take clear positions, openly offer recommendations, and actively initiate decision -making processes. In doing so, controllers share responsibility for the company’s success and the achievement of its goals. It is crucial to maintain a balance between involvement and independence. Controllers can only credibly fulfill their active role if they act independently and neutrally, prioritizing the well-being of the entire company over the individual interests of decision-makers.

Well-informed decisions:

Controllers ensure a comprehensive and holistic information base, striving to make decisions based on this foundation rather than on emotions or biases.

At the forefront of strategy and operations:

Controllers should expand their expertise beyond operational decision-making and actively secure a key role in shaping strategic discuss.

Drive enduring value creation and secure a competitive edge through responsible and sustainable practices such as environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and robust governance.

Enduring value creation:

Controlling’s core objective is to secure the company’s long-term competitiveness and long-term value creation. This is accomplished by developing and sustaining the performance potential necessary for future success, while also striving for success in the present.

Responsible and sustainable practices such as environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and robust governance:

– Performance and value creation must consider all stakeholders, not just profit or shareholder value. Financial success is crucial for survival, but how it’s achieved matters: it must respect environmental and social responsibilities.

– Controllers must balance economic success with ecological and social impacts. Sustainability should be embedded in all controlling processes, expanding financial perspectives to include environmental and social factors, while aligning governance and management control requirements.

Guarantee transparency in both financial and nonfinancial business results, processes, and strategy implementation, thereby contributing to the achievement of organizational performance goals.

Transparency:

Providing management with comprehensive information remains a core task of controllers. They create strategy, performance and business process transparency through routine reporting, ad -hoc reports and personal conversations. Controllers ensure that leaders are better and more quickly informed, maintain an overview, and can act swiftly and purposefully even in complex situations.

Comprehensive:

The comprehensive overview includes both internal and external, financial and non-financial, operational and strategic information, as well as opportunities and risks. It is crucial to be able to consider both current events and long-term developments. Equally important is the ability to identify underlying causes and clearly illustrate cause-and-effect relationships.

Organizational performance goals:

Organizational performance goals are the specific targets a company sets to achieve success across various areas, including financial results, operational efficiency, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) compliance, and overall business growth. These goals ensure the company is meeting its strategic objectives while maintaining long-term sustainability and stakeholder satisfaction.

Weigh opportunities against risks, short-term gains against long-term viability, agility against reliability, and financial discipline against operational flexibility.

Weighing opportunities against risks:

Controllers need to evaluate potential business opportunities while considering the associated risks. This involves conducting thorough risk assessments and ensuring that opportunities are pursued only when the potential rewards justify the risks involved. It’s about finding the right balance between being opportunistic and being cautious.

Short-term against long-term:

The striving for short-term performance must not be at the expense of long-term success and, conversely, the desired long-term success must not serve as an excuse for current performance deficits.

Agility vs. reliability:

In a dynamic business environment, the ability to adapt quickly is critical. However, this must be balanced with reliability – the ability to consistently deliver results and maintain operational standards. Controllers must guide the organization in staying flexible enough to respond to changes while ensuring that this agility doesn’t undermine the reliability and consistency of the business operations.

Financial discipline vs. operational flexibility:

Financial discipline involves strict control over budgets, costs, and investments to ensure financial stability. On the other hand, operational flexibility allows the organization to pivot and adapt to new opportunities or challenges. Controllers need to strike a balance between maintaining tight financial controls and allowing enough flexibility for the organization to remain responsive and innovative.

Align the objectives, interests and needs of relevant stakeholders into a cohesive whole.

Align objectives, interests and needs:

Controllers work to harmonize the goals of internal stakeholders with external ones, ensuring that internal decisions support the strategy of the organization and satisfy external expectations.

Relevant stakeholders:

Controllers ensure that all relevant stakeholders, like finance, operations, and marketing, are included in the decision-making process. This helps balance differing priorities, such as cost control versus innovation. By fostering crossfunctional dialog and continuous feedback, controllers promote decisions that are well rounded, inclusive, and adaptable to changing demands, leading to more effective implementation and overall success.

Cohesive whole:

A cohesive whole means that the diverse objectives, interests, and needs of all stakeholders are combined into a unified, consistent approach that guides the organization’s decisions and actions. The aim is to ensure that all parts of the organization are aligned and working together towards common objectives, rather than pursuing conflicting goals.

Elevate business insights through increased data quality and the effective use of cutting-edge technologies.

Elevate business insights:

Controllers should leverage data and analytical technologies to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of business decisions, allowing them to focus more on business partnering while minimizing time spent on transactional tasks.

Data quality:

Controllers must ensure that organizational data is of high quality (i.e. accurate, relevant, and up -to-date) to reduce the risk of errors and improve the reliability of insights provided for management. To do so, controllers need to continuously explain the importance of high-quality data entries across the organization, as frequently, data entry operators are not the users and beneficiaries of data application.

Cutting-edge technologies:

By adopting cutting-edge technologies, tools and instruments (e.g. in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics), controllers can process large volumes of data more efficiently and uncover deeper insights that might not become apparent through traditional methods.

Enhance management and control systems in a holistic way with innovative ideas to meet evolving requirements.

Innovative ideas:

Fostering the development and implementation of innovative ideas is essential for continuous improvement and requires an open, learning-oriented culture. Controllers should encourage the exploration of new ideas and approaches that can further drive organizational performance. Thereby, the organization can remain efficient and effective in an ever-changing business environment.

Evolving requirements:

Adaptability is key for developing and maintaining a competitive edge, a system must be flexible enough to respond to various challenges, whether they are technology, regulatory, culture or market-driven. Hence, controllers must develop system flexibility to allow their organization to swiftly adapt and remain compliant, ensuring sustained success.

Holistic way:

Holistic improvement goes beyond mere technological upgrades, emphasizing the importance of personnel development, refining decision-making frameworks, and improving communication channels. By working on these personnel and structural resources, the organization becomes more resilient on all hierarchical levels and better equipped to navigate future challenges.

Cultivate organizational learning and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Cultivating Organizational Learning:

This involves establishing processes and systems that encourage controllers to acquire new skills, share knowledge, and learn from both successes and failures. By embedding learning into daily activities, the controlling organization becomes more adaptive and capable of evolving with industry changes.

Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement:

Controllers should encourage a mindset of ongoing enhancement, where employees are motivated to constantly seek better ways of doing things. This can be achieved through regular training, feedback loops, and rewarding innovation. A culture of learning and improvement empowers controllers to take initiative and contribute to an organization’s growth. When individuals are supported in their professional development, they are more likely to bring new ideas and improvements to their work.

Ensure effectiveness and efficiency by embracing the comprehensive spectrum of activities of the IGC Controlling Process Model.

IGC Controlling process model:

The effective and efficient delivery of controlling support needs an optimized process structure, for which the IGC Controlling Process Model offers a comprehensive framework, which can be adapted to the current needs of the organization. A structured process model helps in explaining the spectrum of activities to internal employees and other functions, and thus contributes to a goal-oriented execution of services.

Effectiveness and efficiency:

A structured approach for the definition, analysis, optimization and delivery of controlling processes helps in securing the internal effectivity and effectiveness of the controlling organization. Transparent controlling processes support the systematic optimization of inter faces to other organizational units as well as the benchmarking within and across the organization.

Embracing the comprehensive spectrum of activities:

Embracing the comprehensive spectrum of activities, controllers are tasked with aligning a process framework for their own or ganization. They ensure a systematic approach without getting lost in individual processes or details. This framework must be continuously dev eloped, for example, in the direction of sustainability, ensuring the organization remains adaptable and forward-thinking. It’s essential to recognize that not every controller needs to take on every task within the process model. It’s more about distinguishing between different roles and responsibilities.

The aim of controlling is to permanently increase the value of the company and not to maximize earnings in the short term. The aim is to find a balance between building and maintaining success potential as a source of future profits and the ongoing realization of profits. We also see value enhancement in the context of all stakeholders.

Our controlling philosophy pursues a holistic approach to the targeted increase in value. The WEG symbol (growth-development-profit) provides orientation. We not only look at costs, but above all at the market. It is important to keep an eye on the budget as well as the competition.

In the ICV’s understanding, controlling must not stop at the financial symptoms, but must also consider the causes of developments, most of which are not financial. Effective controlling therefore extends not only to targets and key figures, but also to the processes and measures that precede them.

In our understanding, controlling as a management process of target setting, planning and steering is not aimed at avoiding deviations or entrepreneurial flexibility and agility. Rather, it is about consciously dealing with the future of the company, recognizing opportunities at an early stage and building up competitive advantages. The target-oriented controlling instruments allow managers to be better and faster informed. This enables them to analyze increasingly complex conditions with greater care, make more targeted plans and take action more quickly.

Controlling instruments should be as lean, simple and comprehensible as possible. Employees and managers must understand the key figures and tools used and be able to derive measures independently. The focus of controlling must be on specific actions and not on the system itself. It is about the effective cooperation of people and not about the fashionable grouping of figures.

In our controlling approach, we see the controller or the controller function in an active, proactive role. Controllers are the positive trouble spot and tirelessly point out economic development and improvement opportunities. On the one hand, this requires an in-depth understanding of the market and business processes along the value chain from the customer to the point of sale. Controllers therefore share responsibility for the success of the company and the achievement of targets.

Controllers ensure transparency of strategy, results, finances and processes. They therefore enable managers to manage the company without any surprises. Controlling in the sense of the ICV limits you to recognizing, but also to acting in accordance with this knowledge.
It is crucial for the effectiveness of the controller’s work not to be content with producing the figures, but to focus more on their use as a partner to management.

The controller must see the people behind the figures. To be effective, he must be a communicator and networker. In addition to open access to Maserer Global, this requires intercultural understanding and a willingness to operate internationally.

The controller is committed to the good of the company and not to particular interests. They must be apolitical in their work. Only this neutrality allows him to fulfill his shared responsibility for the achievement of objectives. Credibility through an honest, open attitude on the part of the controller, which is oriented towards the values of the company, wins out over adaptation to the mainstream or significant individual interests.

We see controllers as the commercial conscience of the company. Controllers must show backbone, resist temptation and take on the role of “spoilsport” in a positive way. However, controllers must not cement themselves in this role. They must take into account what they have learned, be open to new experiences and have an appetite for new things.