Echo Group wins 2009 Business Intelligence award for successful Performance Management project

During a gala-event on September 16th 2009 in Brussels, the Echo Group was awarded the Benelux BeyeNETWORK Vision Award for Business Impact in the category "Performance Management”.
 
The awards and competition are an initiative of BI Community.org and BeyeNETWORK. BI-community is a network of Business Intelligence professionals and The BeyeNETWORK is an online network of sites that provide free resources for business intelligence professionals. The competition was organized for a first time this year and the winners were selected from over 30 submitted cases. A jury of representatives from business, industry and the scientific community reviewed the submissions and selected the Echo Performance Management project as overall winner in the category "Performance Management”.

Echo Group wins 2009 Business Intelligence award for successful Performance Management project

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 75 million Euros per year. The company also has been selected as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Company of the Year 2009-award.
 
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.
 
element61 assisted the Echo Group end-to-end 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 with this well-deserved reward", comments Stijn Vermeulen, Managing Director of element61. "Under the leadership of their CFO, Kurt Vandebergh, the management and team 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".