DuMont Media Group pro­fes­sion­al­ises in­vest­ment man­age­ment

Kölner Stadt-An­zei­ger, Ber­liner Zeitung, Mit­teldeutsche Zeitung, EXPRESS or Ham­burger Mor­gen­post are news­pa­per titles with a long tra­di­tion and a firm place in the German media land­scape. They belong to the DuMont Media Group, which, in ad­di­tion to the re­gion­al media busi­ness, also relies on the two pillars of busi­ness in­form­a­tion and digital busi­ness. The group also in­cludes ad­vert­ising journ­als, the DuMont Book Pub­lish­ing House and local radio and TV sta­tions. Since the be­gin­ning of the year, DuMont has held a 75 per cent share in Facelift, the leading European social media mar­ket­ing cloud service. Through the venture fund Cap­nam­ic, the group also has stakes in young, fast-growing com­pan­ies.

Tra­di­tion and mod­ern­ity: ‘Per­spect­ive Growth’ masters di­git­al­isa­tion
The roots of the Cologne media company go back to the 17th century. Its success over such a long period is due not least to its con­stant ad­apt­a­tion to the chan­ging busi­ness en­vir­on­ment. The group is tack­ling the current chal­lenges of the di­git­al­ised media world with the stra­tegic pro­gramme ‘Per­spect­ive Growth’, which was launched at the end of 2014. The core busi­ness remains un­af­fected: quality journ­al­ism in all media chan­nels for a diverse read­er­ship and user base.

Syn­er­gies from 320 in­di­vidu­al com­pan­ies
The DuMont Media Group is one of the largest media com­pan­ies in Germany. Around 3,500 em­ploy­ees gen­er­ate a turnover of 592 million euros per year. The holding company, which op­er­ates under the legal name of DuMont Medi­en­gruppe GmbH & Co. KG, is or­gan­ised into around 280 in­di­vidu­al com­pan­ies. These include radio and TV sta­tions, print­ing plants, ed­it­or­i­al offices, as well as service com­pan­ies such as MZ Lo­gistik in Halle. The group struc­ture is there­fore complex, which is jus­ti­fied for busi­ness reasons, but has also some­times grown his­tor­ic­ally.

In­form­a­tion needed, ‘and in the shortest pos­sible time’
‘The com­plex­ity of the DuMont Group and its in­vest­ments was not an issue for a long time,’ says Stephan Jordans, Head of Taxes at DuMont. ‘But with the stra­tegic pro­gramme “Per­spect­ive Growth”, the situ­ation has changed fun­da­ment­ally.’ The re­ori­ent­a­tion in­volved many or­gan­isa­tion­al changes, and im­ple­ment­a­tion re­quired ex­tens­ive de­tailed know­ledge of the in­vest­ments. ‘We needed more and more in-depth in­form­a­tion about the in­di­vidu­al in­vest­ments than before: art­icles of as­so­ci­ation, annual fin­an­cial state­ments, com­mer­cial re­gister ex­tracts, sales figures and the context. And all in the shortest pos­sible time,’ recalls Jordans.

Com­plex­ity re­quires in­vest­ment man­age­ment soft­ware
All the ne­ces­sary in­form­a­tion was avail­able, but not at the push of a button. One chal­lenge is that DuMont is active at dif­fer­ent loc­a­tions. In ad­di­tion, the rel­ev­ant doc­u­ments and data are dis­trib­uted across three di­vi­sions: Legal, Finance and Ac­count­ing, and Taxes.

In ad­di­tion, the in­di­vidu­al di­vi­sions usually only have the rel­ev­ant in­form­a­tion – the legal de­part­ment, for example, has the art­icles of as­so­ci­ation, but the tax returns from pre­vi­ous years are held by the Taxes di­vi­sion. Is all the data com­plete? Which data is up to date? ‘In 2014, the man­age­ment board and staff de­part­ments real­ised that they needed a tool that could provide all the basic in­form­a­tion on DuMont’s in­vest­ments at the push of a button. This is the only way to get a com­plete picture of the group and im­ple­ment our strategy,’ says Stephan Jordans, de­scrib­ing the initial situ­ation for the project launched in 2016 with the aim of in­tro­du­cing a pro­fes­sion­al solu­tion for in­vest­ment man­age­ment to cent­rally manage data and doc­u­ments from all de­part­ments and for all legal en­tit­ies.

Bridge to three islands found
A suit­able tech­nic­al solu­tion had to be found that would ‘bundle the in­form­a­tion from the three de­part­ments of Legal, Finance and Ac­count­ing, and Taxes in order to merge the three islands onto a central plat­form,’ adds Ant­onius Solbach, from the Board Pro­jects Di­vi­sion of the DuMont Media Group. In mid-2015, the heads of the spe­cial­ist de­part­ments and the IT de­part­ment met. To­geth­er, the team added the central re­quire­ment and also spe­cified that the solu­tion should auto­mat­ic­ally display the group struc­ture as an or­gan­isa­tion­al graph, manage mandate holders and be easy to cus­tom­ise. After in­tens­ive vendor mon­it­or­ing, the project team, to­geth­er with the man­aging dir­ect­or of Media and Man­age­ment Ser­vices, Dietmar Wallner, decided on the otris cor­por­ate product. The solu­tion from the Dortmund soft­ware company per­fectly met the for­mu­lated re­quire­ments. Further ad­vant­ages were the flex­ib­il­ity of the in­vest­ment man­age­ment suite and the very good price-per­form­ance ratio. At the same time, the co­oper­a­tion with otris soft­ware AG is ap­pre­ci­ated in Cologne. DuMont has been using the con­tract man­age­ment solu­tion otris con­tract for quite some time and is very sat­is­fied.

Minimal need for cus­tom­isa­tion thanks to a prac­tic­al product stand­ard
After the goals, re­quire­ments and tech­nic­al basis have been cla­ri­fied, it is time for im­ple­ment­a­tion. A mul­ti­tude of ques­tions need to be answered. To do this, DuMont is setting up a weekly work­shop with a team from otris, which will later be ex­ten­ded to a monthly work­shop. This is where tech­nic­al re­quire­ments and im­ple­ment­a­tion come to­geth­er. In prin­ciple, DuMont de­lib­er­ately looked for a solu­tion that offered ex­tens­ive stand­ard func­tions. Apart from a few minor details, otris cor­por­ate also covers all the re­quire­ments, with only three ex­ten­sions added by the team with little effort: a special con­fig­ur­a­tion of the Excel export, a weekly change report and ex­ten­ded fin­an­cial key figures. The option to export in­vest­ment data and in­form­a­tion via Excel is an im­port­ant func­tion for DuMont because it makes data quality man­age­ment much easier and in­creases user flex­ib­il­ity. Master data for each in­vest­ment can be con­veni­ently checked for com­plete­ness in Excel and then used for further eval­u­ations. The second ad­just­ment provides for a change report that sup­plies se­lec­ted re­cip­i­ents with news about the in­vest­ments on a weekly basis. This ensures that all de­cision-makers are in­formed without being flooded with details. Finally, the im­ple­ment­a­tion team ex­pan­ded the master data man­age­ment to include fin­an­cial key figures. The ad­vant­age: otris cor­por­ate users can see the fin­an­cial di­men­sion of the in­vest­ments without ad­di­tion­al re­search.

Fine-tuning in the work­shops
At the same time, the work­shops are cla­ri­fy­ing further tech­nic­al and or­gan­isa­tion­al ques­tions – e.g. the content and formats of the so-called import folders that the team fills with data and doc­u­ments. These are then auto­mat­ic­ally read in via mass import. The project team took a prag­mat­ic ap­proach to the scope of the import: ‘From a due date in 2014, our data and doc­u­ment fac­sim­iles are com­plete. For the time before that, we only im­por­ted data and doc­u­ments that were dir­ectly rel­ev­ant to the present. An extract from the com­mer­cial re­gister from 1975 is not usually one of them,’ ex­plains Stephan Jordans. After the initial import, otris cor­por­ate went live. The in­vest­ment man­age­ment solu­tion had thus become the central point for the further main­ten­ance and storage of master data. Whether art­icles of as­so­ci­ation, loan and credit agree­ments, or annual fin­an­cial state­ments – all doc­u­ments re­lat­ing to the groups’ in­vest­ments can now be found in otris cor­por­ate in an audit-proof manner. Since the three di­vi­sions of Legal, Finance and Ac­count­ing, and Taxes are primar­ily re­spons­ible for dealing with changes in in­vest­ments, all three di­vi­sions main­tain the in­form­a­tion plat­form. Changes are entered where they arise or become known. Each di­vi­sion has at least one re­spons­ible and spe­cially trained em­ploy­ee for this purpose. In ad­di­tion, more than 40 em­ploy­ees have been trained to work with otris cor­por­ate by the time it goes live in mid-2016. This also in­cludes the sec­ret­ari­at of the board of dir­ect­ors, in order to answer any ques­tions the man­age­ment may have dir­ectly.

Central ref­er­ence work
“Thanks to our new central ref­er­ence work, col­leagues no longer even have to go to the spe­cial­ist de­part­ments, but have the in­form­a­tion they need im­me­di­ately at hand. With otris cor­por­ate, we are def­in­itely saving time and gaining trans­par­ency,’ says Ant­onius Solbach, sum­mar­ising the project. Au­thor­isa­tion concept has been de­signed as openly as pos­sible to provide broad access. Around 40 users reg­u­larly use the tool. Core user groups are in the areas of finance, law, Taxes, and con­trolling. In ad­di­tion, aud­it­ors also receive tem­por­ary access. ‘While our aud­it­ors used to have to go to a lot of trouble to gather in­form­a­tion about in­vest­ments, today they can simply enter a search query in our In­vest­ment man­age­ment soft­ware,’ says Stephan Jordans, pleased. In­vest­ments can also be auto­mat­ic­ally visu­al­ised in an or­gan­isa­tion­al graph. This graph­ic­al rep­res­ent­a­tion offers great ad­vant­ages when there are 280 in­vest­ments. However, Jordans still sees room for im­prove­ment here, because the overall present­a­tion cur­rently re­sembles an air­craft carrier.

‘Manage all im­port­ant in­form­a­tion in one system’
Nev­er­the­less, DuMont is sat­is­fied. Stephan Jordans takes stock: ‘With otris cor­por­ate, we have all the rel­ev­ant in­form­a­tion about our legal units and com­pan­ies in one place, audit-proof and avail­able at the push of a button – from the art­icles of as­so­ci­ation to the com­mer­cial re­gister extract to the annual fin­an­cial state­ments. This gain in in­form­a­tion and trans­par­ency is a quantum leap com­pared to the past. At DuMont, we have suc­ceeded in man­aging all im­port­ant in­form­a­tion in one system. We also save a lot of time, which makes our work easier, ac­cel­er­ates de­cision-making pro­cesses and makes the DuMont Media Group fit for the future and for growth pro­spects.’