Honoring excellence: improving businesses improve Indiana. Winners of this year's BKD Indiana Excellence Awards.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Health Care Excel in Indianapolis

IMPROVING BUSINESSES improve Indiana.

That's the philosophy driving the BKD Indiana Excellence Awards, given in October to companies and organizations from across the state. The awards recognize business excellence, rewarding organizations that demonstrate a commitment to business excellence through the improvement of a product, service or business practice. The awards honor winners for doing better, no matter what their starting point, and they recognize the fact that improvements at a business or organization can have a positive impact not just on the winner but on the surrounding community as well.

The awards program is presented by Indiana Business magazine and title sponsor BKD LLP, an accounting and advisory firm with 27 offices within 11 states, including Indiana offices in Bloomington, Fort Wayne, Evansville, Indianapolis and Merrillville.

The program has a nine-year history, but 2004 was the first year under its new name, the BKD Indiana Excellence Awards. Previously known as the BKD Indiana Quality Improvement Awards, the new name reflects the program's broader reach, honoring business improvements of any type.

Industry-specific judges picked finalists in each of the six categories below. Gold, Silver and Bronze awards were presented in each category, and the overall 2004 BKD Indiana Excellence Award was given to one of the Gold winners.

For more information about the BKD Indiana Excellence Awards, visit indianabusiness.com/ excellence. To learn more about this year's winners, read on....

NOT-FOR-PROFIT & GOVERNMENT

The acronym FFA originally stood for "Future Farmers of America," but the agricultural-education group now known as the National FFA Organization in Indianapolis was anything but futuristic when it came to keeping track of its membership. That was before the group embarked on an excellence project that earned this year's Gold Award in the not-for-profit and government category as well as the overall BKD Indiana Excellence Award for 2004.

"We're a federation of 50 state associations along with Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands," says Doug Loudenslager, COO of the National FFA Organization, which brought its national operations center to Indiana in 1998. "Each has local high schools and in some cases middle schools that have chapters of students. That student membership had been a processing challenge."

The old method of building the national database of members started at the local level, where chapter advisors would fill out a multi-copy form for each member. That would be sent to the state association, which would pass along a copy to the national organization. Once the nearly half a million forms reached the Indianapolis office, staff members would type the membership information into a central database.

The massive project required "borrowing" staffers from other departments for lengthy periods of time during the annual membership crunch. And because membership changes a lot from year to year as seniors graduate and freshmen enter, the process had to be repeated from scratch every year.

Something had to be done, so the organization gathered a team of staff members and others to design a new system. "The team began to lay out a model of how a system could be put in place that would basically automate the process at the point of entry," Loudenslager says. Technicians from PeopleSoft helped the FFA team come up with the system and the software needed to make it work.

Under the new system, local advisers are sent a spreadsheet each year listing the previous year's membership. The advisor then deletes names of students who have moved on, and adds information for new members. The national organization can then import information directly from the spreadsheets and save the trouble of keying in data. Future improvements may include a Web-based interface and links to the registration system for the national FFA convention, to be held in Indianapolis in 2006.

The project has created efficiencies that are expected to save the national group $2.2 million over 10 years, and it frees up those formerly "borrowed" staffers who each spent as many as 40 hours typing in membership info each year. The new system is more accurate, Loudenslager adds, and allows members to start receiving FFA publications more quickly. "As much as the financial savings are important to our organization, I value the higher level of service that we're able to provide local...