The Cream of the BPM Crop

Meet the winners of the ninth annual Business Finance Vision Awards for Excellence in Business Performance Management.

Companies have made great progress in improving their business performance management (BPM) systems and methodologies over the past year. They've sharpened their metrics and enhanced their ability to tie those measures to their strategic plans. And they've leveraged BPM tools to develop a performance-based culture; increasingly, forward-looking BPM practitioners are using this technology to tie employees' compensation to their performance. The winners of this year's Business Finance Vision Awards, sponsored by IBM, exemplify all of those advances.

A strong grasp of the need to place their BPM initiative firmly in the context of critical corporate goals sets the winners apart, says Vision Awards judge John Pancoast, a Westport, Conn.-based partner with finance and HR strategy advisory firm Experient Consulting. "These winning companies are more sophisticated; they have stronger linkages between their metrics and corporate objectives," he reports. "There's more thoughtfulness about what type of BPM technology will really help them, as opposed to just going out and buying the latest whizbang BPM software and then trying to make it fit their culture."

Vision Awards judge Mark A. Krueger, managing director of the finance practice at The Hackett Group, an Atlanta-based business process advisory firm, notes that this year's entrants make more extensive use of the Balanced Scorecard than those of previous years did. "There's also more linkage of BPM to incentive compensation, and they're more advanced in the areas of defining and standardizing their data," he observes.

In picking the standouts, Vision Awards judge John Morrow, vice president, the new finance, at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) in New York City, looked for companies that demonstrate BPM best practices. "That criterion includes integration of systems, getting the performance information online to make it easy for the decision-maker to access, updating the information frequently and incorporating nonfinancial metrics into the performance data," he reports.

Here's how our three winners impressed the judges and earned their award.