After nearly 50 years they unveiled their latest Annual Report as a fully responsive digital report. It now boasts animated visualizations of the companies’ vertical transportation products, dynamic KPI’s and integrated video clips. Creating a state-of-the-art user experience. Take a look yourself.
The change of regulations and rising stakeholders’ information needs throughout these past 50 years have undoubtably affected the way annual reports are being published today. As a partner for more than 10 years we have been able to accompany Schindler through the various steps of digitalizing their corporate reporting process. “Seeing the evolution of the process itself including its outcome from print only, to PDF, to finally an all-encompassing digital and searchable annual report is extremely satisfying and makes me very proud “ says Daniel Hitz, a member of our Project Management Team leading this years’ Schindler Project at MDD.
We talked with Schindlers Head Investor Relations to find out how employees reacted to the new format of the report. We also wanted to take a look back on what the process of publishing an annual report looked like before starting to use a digital platform. What was the breaking point to start a digital transformation and how has the process has changed?
- What was the feedback of the employees that were involved with report creation and how did employees overall react to the “new look”?
We get a lot of positive feedback on our new digital report. Particularly the state-of-the-art look and feel including the animations are appreciated.
- Why did you decide to use a digital platform for your annual report creation and what has changed since?
The digital platform substantially simplified our processes and accelerated realization time. Maintaining content centrally allows us to use it simultaneously in different formats targeting various stakeholder groups at the same time.
- What advice would you give to those that have not chosen to simplify/digitalize their reporting process?
There are obviously different approaches to digitalizing your reporting. We decided to pragmatically start the journey and found with MDD and its partners an optimal setup to achieve our goals.
A study by the Vienna University of Economics shows that only about a third of all readers of digital annual reports are private and institutional investors. Surprisingly, companies’ employees, students and job applicants take up the next big chunk of the pie with a whopping 29.5%. This also shows us that the largest part of the readership is within late Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z. With the latter two groups preferring virtual or online communication it is absolutely vital to generate digital and machine readable corporate reports.
Companies are being faced with the constant evolution of regulations, the rising demand for more information from stakeholders and the ever changing internal responsibilities and are therefore pushed to find a simple, cost-effective and efficient solution to be able to cater to such a wide scope of demands.
Are you looking to change the way people read your corporate report? Talk to us today and we’ll show you what you can do.
