Answerthink Introduces Breakthrough Business Process Intelligence Approach and Tools

Integrates Proven Best Practices from The Hackett Group into Enterprise Software Implementations for Enhanced Business Performance

MIAMI, Jan. 13, 2003 -- Answerthink, Inc. (Nasdaq: ANSR) announced today the introduction of a new Business Process Intelligence approach and tools designed to dramatically enhance business performance and return on investment (ROI) from enterprise-wide technology solutions such as business applications, portals, data warehouses, and knowledge management systems.

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is designed to address common pitfalls many companies face when they evaluate and design business processes and implement enterprise software solutions. Companies often focus solely on the implementation of software. They lack the corresponding business process knowledge to realize breakthrough business performance, as well as the ability to monitor and measure the benefits realized once the new systems are implemented.

BPI facilitates business performance improvement through a coordinated approach that simultaneously addresses the key business drivers of people, process, technology, and information. Research by The Hackett Group, an Answerthink company, has shown that companies that use an approach that addresses these issues in a coordinated and integrated fashion can achieve almost five times the business value that can be attained by focusing solely on a technology implementation.

Answerthink's BPI approach and tools fully integrate the renowned business process best practices of The Hackett Group into Answerthink's business transformation and enterprise software implementation services. This enables Answerthink to directly correlate proven Hackett Best Practices, derived from the world's most successful companies, to configuration decisions in the implementation of leading applications from Lawson, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others. The tools also detail for clients the benefits, implementation risks, and key technology enablers relative to each best practice decision. Hackett clients comprise more than 2000 companies, including 100 percent of the Dow Jones Industrials, creating the world's leading repository of enterprise best practices metrics and business process knowledge.

BPI also focuses on leveraging enabling technologies, including the new generation of business process management (BPM) software. Business process management software helps companies track and capture process data, then enables them to assess, analyze, and report on performance in real time. In this way, opportunities for process improvement can be identified and real-time decision-making can occur. Companies can also see whether optimized processes are being utilized and what impact they are having on the company's efficiency and effectiveness.

"From our Hackett research, we know how the top performing companies achieve world-class business performance. What we've done with Business Process Intelligence is dramatically improve our ability to directly leverage these best practices into the business and technology solutions we develop for clients," said Answerthink Chairman and CEO Ted A. Fernandez. "Our proprietary tools enable clients to quickly evaluate the impact and benefits of business process and software design decisions, and directly correlate the decisions to measurable business performance, service levels, and cost."

"In the past, many companies have invested heavily in technology without improving the effectiveness of their business processes or ensuring their organization's ability to fully leverage it," said Allan Frank, President of Answerthink. "This is always a mistake. The design of key business processes has a tremendous impact on an organization's overall cost structure. If technology simply automates a company's old, inefficient processes, then costs, cycle times, and error rates continue to climb.

"It's also not enough just to put systems with integrated best practices in place. Companies must make sure that processes are consistently executed once the implementation team and consultants walk away. This is where enabling technologies like BPM software play an essential role -- allowing companies to manage and control, on a real-time basis, the process improvements they have invested in," said Mr. Frank.

Answerthink's Business Process Intelligence Approach

A comprehensive application of Answerthink's BPI approach begins with a comparison and analysis of clients against Hackett's best practices database. This process enables the client to identify improvement areas, establish performance targets, and pinpoint areas where the application of proven best practices, application software, and enabling technology will generate the highest return on investment. From this, a coordinated performance improvement strategy is developed. The goal is to achieve world-class business performance by addressing issues surrounding people, process, technology, and information in a coordinated manner.

With the strategy in place, Answerthink works with clients to choose and deploy the right business applications, upgrades, or enhancements to existing systems with integrated best practices. Answerthink has evaluated the leading business applications against Hackett's knowledge base, and conducted extensive fit/gap analyses assessing their ability to support best practices. Utilizing its proprietary BPI tools, Answerthink consultants configure business applications to Hackett Best Practices, ensuring that clients fully optimize their implementation efforts.

Complimentary enabling technologies such as portals, Web services, and enterprise application integration software are utilized to fill remaining business performance gaps and create a unified information architecture that provides employees, customers, and suppliers with the right tools and information at the right time. In creating the information architecture, Answerthink ensures that linkages are created between business processes and information assets. Provisions are also made for incorporating the large percentage of information most companies hold in unstructured assets such as presentation slides, word processing documents, and spreadsheets.

In many cases, the new category of business process management software is leveraged to help companies create environments that foster continuous improvement, ensure that improved processes are being adhered to, and monitor the impact they are having. Process design and modeling tools can help define performance metrics and perform "what-if" simulations as part of the optimization process. Workflow management tools, agents, and rules engines can be used to automate manual tasks, instantiate new processes (within the enterprise and externally), and capture task completion data. Importantly, process monitoring and control functions can be put in place to measure and report on performance in real time and identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. This analysis can be delivered to operational managers via a portal, enabling them to see how well staff are implementing process changes and what further improvements in efficiency and effectiveness are required.

Application-Specific Tools and Intellectual Capital

To support its BPI approach, Answerthink has created an extensive repository of tools that enable its consultants to integrate specific Hackett best practices as they implement individual business applications. These application-specific tools include implementation and configuration guides, current state questionnaires, process flows, and fit/gap requirements matrices. The BPI tools have been individually customized to address business application packages from the leading vendors.

Answerthink has also created Answerlab, an advanced research and development facility that helps consultants and clients integrate best practices in packages implementations and works with enabling technologies and applications to expand the breadth of Answerthink's Business Process Intelligence efforts.

About Answerthink

Answerthink, Inc. (http://www.answerthink.com) is a leading business and technology consulting firm that enables companies to achieve world-class business performance. By leveraging the comprehensive database of The Hackett Group, the world's leading repository of enterprise best practice metrics and business process knowledge, Answerthink's business and technology solutions help clients significantly improve performance and maximize returns on technology investments. Answerthink's capabilities include benchmarking, business transformation, business applications, technology integration and offshore application maintenance and support. Founded in 1997, Answerthink has more than 800 associates and offices in 12 cities throughout the United States and in Europe.

About The Hackett Group

The Hackett Group, an Answerthink company, (http://www.thehackettgroup.com) provides fact-based, objective insights that help clients optimize processes, organization, technology and information in key corporate functions such as finance, IT, human resources and procurement. Hackett's research-derived guidance is backed by its continuously updated database of benchmark metrics and best practices in use at nearly 2,000 client organizations, including 100% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 90% of the Fortune 100 and 84% of the Dow Jones Global Titans Index. In addition benchmark studies of finance, IT, SG&A (sales, general, and administrative), human resources and related areas, Hackett offers management research services and subscription-based collaborative learning programs in shared services and other administrative support processes.

Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Factors that impact such forward-looking statements include the ability of the Company to attract additional business, changes in expectations regarding the information technology industry, the ability of the Company to attract skilled employees, possible changes in collections of accounts receivable, risks of competition, price and margin trends, changes in general economic conditions and interest rates as well as other risks detailed in the Company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SOURCE Answerthink, Inc.

Web Site: http://www.answerthink.com

http://www.thehackettgroup.com