During the Best Finance Team of the Year 2009 gala-event on February 11th 2010 in Brussels, the Echo Group was awarded the "Best Practise in Corporate Performance Management" award for its IBM Cognos 8 based CPM project, in which it was supported by element61.
The awards are an initiative of CFO Magazine / Financial Media, the leading CFO & financial professionals community in Belgium and a professional jury reviews all the cases to select a final winner.
Starting out as a family business more than 50 years ago, the Echo Group is currently Europe's second largest producer of pre-stressed & re-inforced floor elements used in private housing, utility construction and apartment buildings. The entire group, consisting of 10 production sites throughout Belgium (its home base), the Netherlands, Germany & Luxembourg produces a total capacity of over 4 million square meters per year. More than 700 employees realize a yearly turnover of more than 120 million Euros per year. The company also was selected as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Company of the Year 2009-award and was awarded the Benelux BeyeNETWORK Vision Award for Business Impact in the category "Performance Management” eerder dit jaar.
The Echo Group presented and end-to-end Performance Management architecture implementation including Business Intelligence, CPM (consolidation and planning & budgeting) and an enterprise-wide data warehouse, realized in less then 8 months and currenty delivering scorecards, reporting & analysis and planning & budgeting functionality to management and knowledge workers of the whole group. It is replacing an estimated 400.000 spreadsheets on which management had to rely earlier on.
element61 assisted the Echo Group in defining and executing the program. The project started with a 3-days management workshop on defining a vision, strategy and roadmap for Performance management, leading to a project go-ahead. In a coaching and mixed team-model, element61 assisted in designing the architecture, selecting the technology, defining the BICC/PMCC processes, project managing the implementation and delivering senior implementation skills in IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, IBM Cognos Planning and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
"The whole element61 team wants to congratulate the Echo Group once more with this new award", comments Stijn Vermeulen, Managing Director of element61. "Following the recognition of this successful project by the Belgian Business Intelligence Professionals community, this new award from the leading CFO & financial professionals community is even more gratifying as it show the increasing understanding of the Office of Finance of the importance of BI and Performance Management for succesfull company management and strategy implementation. Under the leadership of their CFO, Kurt Vandebergh, the management and Finance & ICT teams of this 100% family owned and successful Belgian SME has proven that companies, independent of their size, can benefit from the promise of Business Intelligence & Performance Management if they have the right vision and conviction. Additionally, the Echo Group has shown that with the necessary dedication and management support, a complete Performance Management architecture can be set up and successfully deployed to the users in just about 8 months".
A detailed case study on the Business Intelligence & Performance Management project at the Echo Group can be found here.
The Echo Group presented and end-to-end Performance Management architecture implementation including Business Intelligence, CPM (consolidation and planning & budgeting) and an enterprise-wide data warehouse, realized in less then 8 months and currenty delivering scorecards, reporting & analysis and planning & budgeting functionality to management and knowledge workers of the whole group. It is replacing an estimated 400.000 spreadsheets on which management had to rely earlier on.
element61 assisted the Echo Group in defining and executing the program. The project started with a 3-days management workshop on defining a vision, strategy and roadmap for Performance management, leading to a project go-ahead. In a coaching and mixed team-model, element61 assisted in designing the architecture, selecting the technology, defining the BICC/PMCC processes, project managing the implementation and delivering senior implementation skills in IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, IBM Cognos Planning and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
"The whole element61 team wants to congratulate the Echo Group once more with this new award", comments Stijn Vermeulen, Managing Director of element61. "Following the recognition of this successful project by the Belgian Business Intelligence Professionals community, this new award from the leading CFO & financial professionals community is even more gratifying as it show the increasing understanding of the Office of Finance of the importance of BI and Performance Management for succesfull company management and strategy implementation. Under the leadership of their CFO, Kurt Vandebergh, the management and Finance & ICT teams of this 100% family owned and successful Belgian SME has proven that companies, independent of their size, can benefit from the promise of Business Intelligence & Performance Management if they have the right vision and conviction. Additionally, the Echo Group has shown that with the necessary dedication and management support, a complete Performance Management architecture can be set up and successfully deployed to the users in just about 8 months".
A detailed case study on the Business Intelligence & Performance Management project at the Echo Group can be found here.