Investment management at SPIE – growth needs an overview

Investment management at SPIE Germany & Central Europe requires an overview: 57 subsidiaries and minority interests are integrated into the Group (as of 07/2020). And new companies are being added all the time. Before the introduction of the special software otris corporate, the legal department used various Office programmes to map the corporate structure, contractual relationships and appointments to committees. The associated corporate documents (e.g. excerpts from the commercial register, minutes of meetings, control agreements) were stored on another system.

According to Tanja Nieswandt (legal officer at SPIE), the administration of the shareholdings had worked in this way, but “with each new company we added, we became more aware that we needed a system that simplified the overview and processing of transactions and thus relieved the team”.

Requirements and selection
One of the most important requirements for the new solution: all data and documents should be on one central system, uniformly structured and easily searchable. The holistic approach should improve the transparency of all corporate and commercial law documents as well as visualise the interconnections of the participation structure. Another goal: uncomplicated cooperation between relevant central departments as well as auditors. After a market research, selection process and test phase, the decision was made in favour of otris corporate. “There were several reasons why we chose otris corporate. Among other things, we liked the fact that it is so easy to use that all authorised employees can use the system,” explains Tanja Nieswandt. In addition, the software standard already covers many basic requirements – the customising effort was therefore manageable.

Implementation and use
After adapting to the company-specific structures and processes, otris-Consulting installed the solution in the SPIE IT environment. The differentiated authorisation concept now makes it possible to achieve what was not possible with the predecessor system developed in-house: a larger group of users can be included without individual employees gaining access to information that is not intended for them.

The special software means time savings in searching, managing and filing documents. The central approach simplifies the maintenance of data: the single storage location prevents questions about up-to-dateness that inevitably arise when different versions of a document are stored in different places in the company. Another benefit is the uncomplicated creation of reports.

“With otris corporate, it has become easier to research data and combine it into structured overviews. The improvement in reporting efficiency was very important for us,” explains Tanja Nieswandt.

Outlook
At present, one employee is responsible for entering all relevant corporate documents into the system. New user accounts are gradually being set up. In the medium term, at least one user per central department should have read access to the data and documents relevant to him. In the long term, the integration of the French parent company is planned in order to further simplify the complex reporting tasks. Tanja Nieswandt is optimistic about the future: “otris corporate offers a variety of possibilities that will also help us to become more efficient in future tasks”.