Penton’s Business Finance Magazine and SAS Announce Winners of 2008 Vision Awards

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Penton Media’s Business Finance^® magazine and SAS announce the winners of the 2008 Vision Awards, recognizing excellence in business performance management. The winners are the Presbyterian Healthcare Services (Albuquerque, NM), Seattle City Light; and South Dakota Department of Transportation (Pierre, SD). This year’s winners will be honored at the Business Performance Management Summit, October 27-28 at the Hilton Rye Town in Rye Brook, NY.

Now in their 12th year, the Vision Awards are the only awards developed specifically to recognize business performance management (BPM), which includes strategic planning, business planning and budgeting, performance measurement and business and financial reporting. In addition to having demonstrated excellence in these processes, the award winners have established organizational cultures that support and reinforce best practices in business performance management.

“This year’s Vision Award winners have taken time-consuming, manual processes and transformed them, not only cutting costs but also facilitating better decision-making,” said Matt Weiner, group publisher for Business Finance. “Presbyterian Healthcare Services, Seattle City Light and the South Dakota Department of Transportation have used performance management to align their strategic and operational plans by measuring, monitoring and optimizing key business drivers. They represent classic cases of how, when done right, performance management can create tangible value and competitive advantage for organizations.”

This year’s winners distinguished themselves by meeting day-to-day execution challenges.

“One common theme among this year’s Vision Award winners is the focus on strategic alignment and the benefits that arise from the ability to drive day-to-day execution in conformance with strategy,” says Leo Sadovy in Performance Management Marketing at SAS. “The other common theme exhibited by this year’s winners is the equal weight given to both financial and non-financial measures, such as customer service. Tracking and reporting non-financial data such that it also accords with a ‘single version of the truth’ comparable to financial reporting is a major challenge that these Vision Award recipients met. We’re proud to be a sponsor of this event that recognizes organizations for providing their clients with the benefits of continued performance improvement.”

The Vision Awards finalists, by annual revenue category, were:

Greater than $5 Billion:

Presbyterian Health Services (Winner)

Home Depot

SunTrust

$501 Million to $5 Billion

Seattle City Light (Winner)

Autoliv

Moet Hennessy

Less than $500 Million

South Dakota Dept. of Transportation (Winner)

B-Line LLC

In addition to providing a forum for the Vision Award winners and their case studies, the BPM Summit will bring together leading performance management practitioners to help participating executives and their organizations achieve maximum value from BPM systems and processes. Sponsored by SAS and other leading BPM vendors and consultancies, the BPM Summit agenda and registration information are available at http://www.bpmmag.net/summit.

About Business Finance Magazine

Penton’s Business Finance is a business magazine that reveals and examines best practices for finance executives — CEOs, CFOs, COOs, treasurers, finance directors, etc. Its purpose is to help them do their jobs and make better purchasing decisions. Editorially, Business Finance emphasizes content that anticipates important trends and quantifies their potential impact to its subscribers. Major areas of coverage include performance management, corporate finance, treasury and cash management and technology management. For more information or to subscribe to Business Finance, visit http://www.bfmag.com/subscribe.

Penton Media, Inc. is the largest independent business-to-business media company in the U.S., serving more than six million business professionals every month. The company’s market-leading brands are focused on 30 industries and include 113 trade magazines, 145 Web sites, 150 industry trade shows and conferences, and more than 500 information data products. Headquartered in New York City, the privately held company is owned by MidOcean Partners and U.S. Equity Partners II, an investment fund sponsored by Wasserstein & Co., LP, and its coinvestors. For additional information on the company and its businesses, visit www.penton.com.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. With innovative business applications supported by an enterprise intelligence platform, SAS helps customers at 44,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW^®. www.sas.com.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.