A celebration of innovation

The goal of the Huntington Innovation Award is to recognize the best of the best, and to showcase the ideas, accomplishments and creativity of the most innovative, progressive and forward-thinking individuals and organizations in the financial operations world.

Ordinarily we recognize a couple of companies for their unique achievements – but this was most certainly not an ordinary year. In 2012, we recognized nine organizations and seven solution partners. The winners were large and small, represent multiple industries, and hailed from all across America. What each of these companies had in common is a commitment to innovation – an ability to craft a solution, and most importantly, the know-how to get it done. The winners implemented innovation and delivered results – that's hard work and that's why Huntington was proud to sponsor these companies and recognize their success.

Here are the six companies that clearly represented the innovation executed class. 

• Dean Foods
• Force Protection
• JC Penney
• Lennox Industries
• Macy's
• Moen

Innovation never happens in a vacuum. Therefore, we recognized the following companies that provided support and solutions for these six winning companies. We encourage you to visit our Partners web page to learn more about their solutions.

• Hyland Software
• Lavante
• Perceptive Software
• Sungard

The two companies that were selected as runners-up for the 2012 Huntington Innovation Award were KLN Family Brands and Tim Hortons.

KLN Family Brands was formed in 1964 in the heart of corn and potato country in Perham, Minnesota.  This family-owned company began by producing pet foods and has grown into four manufacturers, producing items from licorice, to pretzels and corn chips, and beer chips. The successful implementation of a solution from AnyDoc has reduced overtime costs, increased invoice cycle time, and is effortlessly capturing critical data on 30,000 invoices annually.  We congratulate KLN Family Brands.

Tim Hortons is an iconic brand that launched its signature coffees and visible presence in more than 3,500 restaurants in Canada. Now recognized here in the US and across the globe, the company set a goal of streamlining and automating the accounts payable process and also integrating seamlessly with procurement, finance and treasury. Working with Dolphin, they created a dynamic e-invoicing and optical character recognition solution, which, now fully implemented, makes their AP operation as good as their coffee.  Congratulations to Tim Hortons.

And now for our winner - The Walt Disney Company.  It is safe to say this company touches you every day and is perhaps the most recognized multimedia conglomerate in the world. In fact, The Walt Disney Company is so big that its AP department processes nearly 6 million invoices annually. Over the past eight years, the organization has achieved a remarkable 92% electronic transactions rate.  Impressive, but the other 8% still left more than 500,000 invoices to be keyed and manually matched. Using Brainware's Distiller Application to complement its existing platform, The Walt Disney Company built a comprehensive invoice payment strategy that innovates at their astonishing scale levels.  Innovation is hard work.  Innovation at scale is, well, magical. Congratulations to this year's winner of the Huntington Innovation Award is The Walt Disney Company.

We will open the submission process for the 2013 Innovation Award in December 2012 and will look forward to receiving your submission for review and consideration.