The Franz Cornelsen Educational Group, with its headquarters in Berlin, is one of the largest publishing companies and most important educational service providers in Germany. The organization has a worldwide staff of 3000 employees and an annual turnover of EUR 450 M; its structure is divided into five company departments with numerous subsidiary companies that create and distribute educational multimedia products, ranging from school education to professional advanced training. "All in all there are more than 30 independent units of which 15 are currently our customers," Daniel Gross, Head of Accounting at Franz Cornelsen Corporate Services in Berlin, explained. The central IT service provider of the group with approximately 100 employees was outsourced in 2010 as a shared service center (SCC) and now bundles all IT activities.

The fact that by no means all subsidiary companies acquire their hard-, software and datacenter services from them has to do with historic development, company headquarters that are located in foreign countries and its educational provider status. "The goal, however, is the continued standardization and consolidation of the IT landscape within the Franz Cornelsen Educational Group, which had previously been much more fragmented," emphasized Gross.

The offered IT services include e.g. workplace computers, phones, network connections, operating systems, office applications, SAP applications and the supervision of web portals. It also includes hosting and the further development of numerous internal programs, e.g. in the publishing- and printing sector as well as web applications.

Before the SCC was established, accrued IT costs were billed as lump sum charges to the cost centers within the context of direct costing according to a specific key. Each month the centers received an email that contained an overview in the form of a manually created Excel- od Word file, which most often listed 10 to 12 items. The project expenditure for individual subsidiary companies or departments was recorded on an hourly basis with a time-recording system and then tranferred to the invoice.

"If we want to control the costs, we must first of all know what they are," said Daniel Gross, boiling the fundamental problem down to its essence. As the founding of the independent shared service center also brought with it a balance sheet obligation and as auditors were pushing for more transparency, it became clear that the work could not continue as before. The previously calculated lump sums were no longer a suitable basis for business. In the context of a preliminary study, the IT services provided to the companies of the group were precisely defined and priced. The catalog contained almost 60 products and services, which also included quantities (unit prices). Personnel costs, applications, dedicated lines, maintenance costs etc. were als listed together with these new services.

Standard platform or independently developed application?

The extensive requirement specifications also stated the formulation of requirements for a preliminary automated solution for service billing. The only remaining open question was whether one should make relatively high expenditures to further expand the already existing self-programmed application for IT service billing or instead rely on a standard platform? After examining several offers on the market, Franz Cornelsen Corporate Services choose the IT finance management solution netinsight by nicetec, a company that hat already issued over 200,000 licenses in Germany and is one of the most successful standard platforms for IT controlling, IT service billing and financial management of shared service centers. The strength of the medium-sized software company from Bissendorf: It combines business knowledge with sophisticated technological know-how..

"Our goal was to introduce an automated system to calculate service prices for shared services via interfaces by supplying plan costs and -quantities and a system that provides plan prices per IT service as a result," said the controller of the requirement specifications in a summarizing statement. Management of customer relations and various billing models per customer or service (SLA- and contract management) had to be covered as well. The responsible parties at the cost centers should always be able to keep an overview through integrated reporting by email, and the employees should be able to order, change or cancel services independently via a web portal. This e-procurement also contained the depiction of workflows and notifications as in the context of release processes. The transfer of billing data to the accounting system IFS Applications via an interface that was to be created was also part of the requirements. The solution was to offer the greatest possible investment security and flexibly adapt to new developments.