You are Nora Vogt, Head of Controlling at Hellwig Antriebstechnik in Bielefeld. The chief operating officer wants €24 million to automate an assembly line, the new CFO wants to know whether the number is real, and the supervisory board votes in nine working days.
The situation
It is Thursday, 12 March 2026. Hellwig is a family-owned Mittelstand maker of electric drive systems: three plants, 2,300 people, €540 million of revenue in 2025 and a 7.8% EBIT margin, a little over €42 million. This morning the new CFO handed you the chief operating officer's dossier in person: a robotic assembly cell and a fleet of automated guided vehicles for the Plant 2 line, for €24 million, with a 3.1-year payback and a net present value of +€5.2 million.
The instruction was short: find out whether the number is real. After a run of recent overruns, the CFO said, sign-offs of this size look like a formality, and this proposal will show whether they still are not. The founding family built your department so that management's numbers would pass an independent check — the Wirtschaftlichkeitsnachweis — before reaching the board.
A first read already shows you four things. The dossier assumes volume will grow 6% a year; the order book and the last five years say 1.5%, with 3% as an upside case. The €7.6 million of annual savings comes from the robot vendor's sales materials; an internal discount would bring it to about €4.9 million, and an independent estimate would cost €40,000 and three of the nine days. The dossier counts full savings from month one, while comparable installations take 9 to 14 months to reach them. And it cites the €1.4 million already spent on a feasibility study and a pilot cell as a reason to go ahead.
You have up to €120,000 to commission outside checks. Three days before the vote you will sit across from the COO. And if the project does worse than promised, the hit would land in the same period in which Hellwig's lenders test its leverage against a ceiling of 3.0 times net debt to EBITDA.