The Controller's Seat — A Controlling Opinion at Hellweg Antriebstechnik

A four-round, advanced management-accounting and control simulation set inside Hellweg Antriebstechnik AG, a Dortmund-headquartered SDAX maker of industrial drive systems (€1.9bn group revenue, 9.2% EBIT margin). You are the divisional controller of the €640m Mobility Drives division, the group's electrification growth engine. Its board-favoured president, Stefan Reuter, has submitted a heroic three-year plan to double revenue to €1.3bn and lift margin to 14% — but 62% of that growth rides on two unsigned EV-platform contracts, in a division whose forecasts have averaged ±22% error, and the plan asks the supervisory board to release €180m of capital up front. The CFO, burned once before by a division that hit every slide and missed reality by 30%, has ordered an independent controlling opinion in three weeks. Over four rounds you (1) diagnose the revenue bridge, separating committed from speculative growth and benchmarking the optimism against the ±22% record and the sandbagged versus stretched bottom-up budgets; (2) design a balanced KPI architecture of leading and lagging indicators with owners, cadence and Simons-style diagnostic-plus-interactive use; (3) set budget targets through a top-down, bottom-up or negotiated counter-flow philosophy, with a contingency buffer for the unsigned contracts and an honest handling of sandbagging; and (4) calibrate the controller's stance from scorekeeper to business partner to watchdog, recast the plan into a milestone-gated capital release, and deliver a defensible approve / approve-with-gates / reshape opinion to the board with the president in the room. The scoring rewards genuine debiasing, leading indicators, counter-flow targets, business-partner calibration and real-options gating, and punishes the five classic errors — rubber-stamping optimism, lagging-only KPIs, anchoring on sandbagged budgets, an over-adversarial stance that loses the seat at the table, and analysis with no decision. Final KPIs track Control Quality, Plan Credibility, Controller Influence and Capital Exposed (€m released up front against the €180m request).