Guaranteed total return with Projektron BCS in the portfolio
Success story from IDS GmbH – Analysis and Reporting Services
IDS GmbH - Analysis and Reporting Services is an internationally operating service provider for the operational investment controlling of asset managers and institutional investors. Projektron BCS offers IDS a flexible solution to support project and client contact management as well as invoicing.
About IDS GmbH - Analysis and Reporting Services (IDS)
IDS GmbH - Analysis and Reporting Services (IDS) unlocks the value of data for the global investment industry: We validate, refine, structure and package data from various sources and make it available for business-critical processes along all investment strategies and products quickly, worldwide and at any time. With IDS, fund companies, insurance companies, banks and pension funds can access a flexibly scalable data platform as well as all the necessary analyses and reports in the desired format. Our customers focus on their investment goals and we provide them with the data and information they need to achieve them - more than 300 employees from 30 nations are committed to this claim every day with full innovative strength and service quality. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Allianz SE, IDS has stood for stability, reliability and certified security in the handling of its customers' data since 2001.
Secure investment decisions are based on valuable data: highly valid, perfectly aggregated, itemised, intelligently linked. - This is what IDS stands for.
Our services include data management, data analysis, data reporting, product regulation and investor regulation.
Strong growth brought challenges
The increasing demand for qualified investment reporting has led to strong growth at IDS, particularly in recent years. For example, the number of employees almost doubled between 2008 and 2024. The number of projects running simultaneously also almost doubled during this period. In addition to global customer support from its two locations in Munich and Frankfurt, IDS has also established an on-site service in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Hong Kong.
Even at the beginning of our strong growth phase, it was clear that this pleasing development was also associated with challenges in day-to-day project business. For this reason, a central Project Management Office (PMO) was established in 2008 and project management standards (templates, processes) and a training programme for prospective project managers were introduced.
Since then, the PMO has also acted as an internal consulting unit to provide project managers with advice and support before and during the realisation of their projects. There is also a project manager forum that supports the transfer of knowledge between project managers within the company.
In 2008, we made a conscious decision not to introduce a project management tool. Firstly, we wanted to create a stable foundation by establishing solid processes and sound project management knowledge and not slow down the positive change process by introducing too much change in too short a time. In addition to the flourishing day-to-day business and the newly acquired knowledge, our organisation also had to integrate a large number of new employees into the daily workflows.
In 2010, however, the complexity and size of our project landscape had reached a level that made it necessary to introduce standardised and simple project management software with effort recording.
Microsoft Excel solutions or similar had been created in various areas of the company. However, these internal departmental solutions lacked cross-team and cross-project integration. At that time, it sometimes happened that a separate MS Excel timesheet had to be completed for each project in which our employees were involved. The time was ripe for the PMO to find a standardised solution for project management at IDS.
The tool search and evaluation
The PMO began the search for a suitable solution in a structured process. In addition to purchasing software, we also considered the further development of an existing in-house solution. Based on the rough user requirements, a market analysis was carried out and a "long list" drawn up.
We shortened this list in several stages by including increasingly specific requirements. Six products were finally evaluated in detail. The evaluation was based on a question and evaluation catalogue with over 100 questions in 10 categories as well as on test versions and discussions with active users from other companies. In the end, Projektron BCS clearly prevailed over its competitors.
The implementation project and the further roll-out
When introducing Projektron BCS, we opted for a step-by-step approach: after the technical implementation and initial configuration, during which we were supported by a Projektron consultant, we initially only entered one major project in BCS. Over the following months, all projects were successively entered in BCS and after about a year, an entire business unit switched from its existing solution to Projektron BCS.
A company-wide activity structure tree was therefore developed, customised configurations and further developments were made and exports and reports were programmed to provide optimum support for project controlling and reporting for this division's customer.
At the same time, the various analyses in Projektron BCS facilitate the work of our project and team leaders in their management tasks. The administrator training offered by Projektron showed us how we can customise and extend BCS ourselves using XML, the Webconfig editor or the user interface. This made it relatively easy to configure a whole range of IDS-specific data attributes and to customise the GUI and the rights system to our needs and user roles.
Our users now only see what they should and are allowed to see, and their interface is not cluttered with menus and objects that they don't need. Projektron BCS has so far proved to be very stable in operation, fast and is now perceived by our employees as "intuitive to use".
New fields of application: Contact management and invoicing
Another criterion in favour of Projektron BCS was its versatility in the various company functions. Although our primary objective was to have software with all the essential project management functionalities, including accurate and efficient time recording, we considered the broad concept of BCS to be a major advantage during the evaluation. With the integrated system from BCS, it is possible to cover the entire process chain from initial customer contact to acquisition, the project and its transition to ongoing operations.
This advantage and the user-friendliness led to Projektron BCS being evaluated for customer contact management. Once again, Projektron BCS prevailed over well-known manufacturers of customer relationship management products due to its functionality, flexibility and excellent price-performance ratio.
We are currently implementing the BCS customer contact management component at IDS. The ability to define our own data fields and transfer our customer data to BCS via CSV import has again proved to be very helpful. We also tested a prototype to see whether BCS could also be used for invoicing.
Once again, Projektron BCS prevailed over another tool from a renowned manufacturer. What spoke in favour of Projektron BCS was the customisability of the interface and wizards as well as the possibility of distributing individual process steps to different people by assigning specific rights.
We also liked the flexibility of being able to define manual invoice items in addition to the functions and processes defined in Projektron BCS for calculating items. The integration with the other modules and the fact that the software was already in use in-house also spoke in favour of BCS. Finally, BCS also enabled us to fulfil the corporate design requirements: In future, our invoices will be issued in CD-compliant PDF or other formats. The invoicing module was introduced at the beginning of 2013.
Summary and outlook
We regularly take part in the product presentations of the new Projektron BCS versions to keep ourselves up to date. We are constantly discovering new functions and further application possibilities for BCS in our company.
After the last updates with merged views, we were able to further optimise our work with BCS and thus adapt our BCS to the current internal requirements of our colleagues.
The decision in favour of Projektron BCS has proved to be absolutely right for us. BCS is very flexible, expandable, easy for users to operate, has a sophisticated rights and roles concept and has a large and very well thought-out range of functions. In addition, the support and training provided by Projektron is excellent.
