Motivation and Research topic

In summer 2014, the University of Applied Sciences Mainz launched a new specialization area for Master Students called “Corporate Controlling”. Based on this course, the students should be prepared to work in the controlling department of larger, possibly multinational corporations. Though the education was well received by both, students and practitioners, the borders of the concepts had to be defined more clearly. This was the starting point of the project described here. As a start, some features of typical corporate controlling tasks were defined, such as “specific to a multi-business company”, “controlling  related by nature of decision”, “long term oriented”, “strategic in nature”, “substantial financial impact”, “concerning different legal entities” etc. Based on this it became clear that the challenge of Corporate Controlling is that its typical tasks are highly complex, but would not have to be performed on very regular or frequent basis. The hypothesis was that specializing in Corporate Controlling tasks, professionals could establish and implement standards that could be beneficial to the whole organization. Please see the download section for more details.