Budgeting and planning activities within companies are often time-consuming and quickly outdated in their significance. Methods like driver-based planning or even Beyond Budgeting represent attempts to increase efficiency, but the approach remains old-fashioned. However, the developments in the field of AI/ML are now opening up completely new possibilities. In the near future, it will be possible to calculate and compare a wide variety of planning scenarios within minutes.

In the period from 2001 to 2006, the Retail division of Swiss Post transformed itself from a public service company into a business driven sales organization. Crucial drivers of change were, on the one hand, the adaptation of the steering systems up to the final implementation of a "Beyond Budgeting" philosophy and, on the other hand, a humanistic attitude of management and finance department against all employees. The success was amazing: The division succeeded in increasing the sales of new retail products from 0 to over 400 million CHF, optimizing the bottom line by more than 100 million CHF or more than 5 percentage points and becoming the first state-owned company in Switzerland to win the EFQM- Award for Business Excellence.

Today's controller is confronted with two developments: on one hand, increasing usage of mobile applications for all employees, steady growth of IT-supported operational resource planning systems and the hype towards Big Data result in an increasing volume of direct business information. On the other hand, more and more detailed accounting standards and higher requirements for compliance and governance enforce heavier control activities.