Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ) announced that Catholic Healthcare West, North Fork Bank, and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been named the winners of the 2007 EPM Customer Excellence Awards. The EPM Customer Excellence Awards recognize the outstanding achievements of these companies in using Business Objects enterprise performance management solutions to improve their organization’s performance. The awards were formally presented at Business Objects Insight for Performance Management, the company’s user conference for finance and business professionals taking place this week in Orlando, Florida.
“This year’s winners are representative of the leading organizations that are using our enterprise performance management solutions to address their most challenging organizational issues,†said Mark Doll, senior vice president and general manager of EPM and global services at Business Objects. “I am pleased to recognize these organizations, and congratulate them on their innovative use of planning, budgeting, forecasting, and profitability solutions to improve their organization’s performance.â€
Following is a brief description of this year’s award categories and the winners:
Enterprise Wide Deployment – Catholic Healthcare West
With 41 hospitals and medical centers across California, Arizona, and Nevada, Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) is the eighth-largest hospital system in the United States. Even in the midst of rapid growth, CHW hasn’t lost sight of its core values of dignity, collaboration, justice, stewardship, and excellence. However, due to revenue constraints, staffing shortages, and pressure to keep healthcare affordable, CHW must constantly find new ways to increase its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. By implementing Business Objects solutions, CHW sought to streamline and standardize its budgeting process, distribute budgets efficiently, enhance communication throughout all levels of the organization, and improve the reliability of budget information.
Business Innovation – North Fork Bank
North Fork Bank needed a solution that would improve data integrity and calculation accuracy, consolidate and streamline the incentive management process, and be able to handle both financial and non-financial data critical to its incentive program. Using BusinessObjectsâ„¢ Incentive Compensation Management, North Fork Bank has gained the ability to conduct advanced modeling and analyses, while reducing the overall processing time for its program. In addition, since the solution is automated, North Fork Bank has improved data integrity and calculation accuracy.
Financial Performance – The Carlyle Group
The Carlyle Group is a private global investment firm that manages 48 investment funds across buyouts, venture and growth capital, real estate, and leveraged finance. Before Business Objects their budgeting process was manually intensive and the quarterly forecasting process took one week. The Carlyle group deployed the full Business Objects portfolio of solutions including data integration, the BI platform, and BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, as well as BusinessObjects Planning, Forecasting, Payroll Planning, and Budgeting. As a result The Carlyle Group has established a planning process with department heads collaboratively building the budget, and reduced their forecast process from one week to just two days with BusinessObjects Forecasting. In addition, they now have better insight into fund performance by using Dashboard Manager to provide a consolidated view of data to fund managers, finance, and HR. The Carlyle Group also uses Payroll Planning in its HR department to better manage cost projections.
Business Process – The Securities and Exchange Commission
Prior to implementing Business Objects, the budget formulation and execution processes at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were cumbersome and involved numerous spreadsheets that each required manual entry and maintenance. The SEC found it difficult to make adjustments, since a minor change cascaded throughout all of the budget materials. After implementing the Business Objects EPM solutions, the SEC now has the ability to maintain version control and transparency of change with confidence that they are posted automatically on all related exhibits. SEC now leverages a single application and consolidated data set to facilitate and produce various federally mandated reporting requirements in a timely and accurate fashion.
Business Objects is the world’s leading business intelligence (BI) software company, with more than 42,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Business Objects helps organizations of all sizes create a trusted foundation for decision making, gain better insight into their business, and optimize performance. The company’s innovative business intelligence suite, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry’s most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes the award-winning Crystal line of reporting and data visualization software. Business Objects has also built the industry’s strongest and most diverse partner community, and offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.