Get Ready to Brag

Found exciting new ways to use Vertex solutions to overcome business challenges and drive improved results? We want to hear from you—and shine a spotlight on your company’s leadership through Vertex’s 2017 Innovation Awards.

Each year, Vertex recognizes companies for using Vertex solutions in innovative ways to overcome business challenges and improve results.

SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATION

Call for Nominations

Have a leading-edge approach to tax management with Vertex solutions? Nominate your organization for Vertex's 2017 Innovation Awards by Friday, June 9.

The awards recognize companies that have developed innovative ways to leverage Vertex solutions in their tax department to overcome business challenges and drive improved results.

Top entries will be announced as winners in July and their winning solutions will be featured in communications and promotions prior to the Exchange conference.

Again this year, attendees at Exchange will have an opportunity to vote for their favorite innovation. The "People's Choice" winner will be announced during Exchange, taking place from October 22 – 25 in San Diego, California.

Winners' Swag

All companies selected as winners receive:

Complimentary registration for two (2) to Vertex Exchange 2017
Complimentary travel and hotel accommodations for two (2) registered attendees
A crystal award in the company’s name recognizing their achievement
Recognition at Vertex Exchange in front of industry peers, and in all Vertex communications regarding the awards program, including media releases

How to Enter

Complete and submit the Vertex Innovation Awards Nomination Form by June 9, 2017. Winners will be notified in July.

Complete and qualified entries will be eligible to receive a $25 American Express Gift Card.

Entries must be completed in their entirety and meet the following eligibility requirements. Gift cards are limited and distributed on a first come, first serve basis. Names of entries not selected will be kept in strict confidence.

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility to participate in the Vertex 2017 Innovation Awards program is limited to current Vertex customers and the nominated solution must be fully implemented at the time of submission. Nominations will be judged based on the following criteria:

Innovation - The ability to demonstrate improvement over previous business operations using the technology to deliver recognizable, measurable and valuable results - providing true business benefit to the organization.
Uniqueness - The solution implements a creative and unique “big idea.”
Alignment - The program, process, or technology nominated supports overall organizational goals.
Adaptation - The potential for the solution to translate into “best practices” application that can be adopted by other organizations.
Cost effectiveness - The ability of the solution to maximize resources and provide scalability and cost savings.

Need inspiration? Check out last year’s winning innovations.

If you have any questions, please contact Tricia Schafer-Petrecz, Public Relations Manager at 484.595.6142.

2016 Innovation Award Winners

The 2016 Vertex Innovation Awards recognized six companies for technology innovation: ALDI Inc., Best Buy Co., Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Koppers Inc., The Coca-Cola Company and USAA.

ALDI Inc.

Putting tax innovation in the express lane

ALDI Inc.

Putting tax innovation in the express lane

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax for Retail

ALDI is an easy-to-shop grocery store, offering customer must-haves like fresh meat, produce and dairy, and even household items, mostly under its exclusive brands. Each month, it helps more than 32 million customers save big on their grocery bills. With nearly 1,600 stores in 34 states—and growing—the company was shopping for a better way to manage indirect taxes.

Innovation at Work

Historically, the IT and Tax departments used manual processes to manage indirect taxes across the growing national ALDI footprint. The reactive approach wasn’t sustainable and could have potentially led to increased risk.

When ALDI set out to automate indirect tax management, they found a solution in Vertex Indirect Tax for Retail, which enables real-time tax calculation and ensures accurate and up-to-date inputs on product taxability. To implement the solution, ALDI decided to configure a local indirect tax engine (LITE) connected to their point-of-sale (POS) system at each store location. This LITE interfaces with the corporate instance of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series to proactively update tax rates while providing much-needed visibility to the support team.

This innovative approach is checking out: Tax rates are updated in near real time with minimal effort. With Vertex deployed at the store level, custom rules are now handled with ease, freeing IT and Tax resources to focus on other initiatives. Setting up taxes for new markets as ALDI continues to grow has never been easier.

In Their Words

“In addition to saving time at stores and regional offices, the Vertex solution allows greater visibility of information at the corporate level so the Tax team can make better decisions.” –Varsha Mittal, IT Analyst

Best Buy Co., Inc.

Tax solutions that ‘check out’ for consumer electronics retailer

Best Buy Co., Inc.

Tax solutions that ‘check out’ for consumer electronics retailer

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

Best Buy is a Fortune 100 multinational consumer electronics retailer focused on providing expert service at unbeatable prices. The retailer’s focus on innovative offerings to meet and anticipate customer needs for blending technology, service and content produces tax challenges. Best Buy attacked these challenges head on with a holistic and agile tax solution.

Innovation at Work

As Best Buy executes its strategic growth agenda, it has faced interesting tax challenges: When a customer purchases a mix of products and services, how could Best Buy associate related items and alter a tax calculation based on that grouping—while maintaining individual products’ tax characteristics when those products are sold alone? With the need for numerous beyond-the-basics tax attributes, how could the retailer orchestrate the collection and application of that data without compromising cross-channel efficiency and scalability? And, in the face of dozens of procurement channels—each with unique business processes—how could it automate governance and error resolution?

Collaborating with Vertex, Best Buy’s Tax team identified and implemented solutions that address those and related challenges. The company’s Solution Master is a custom cart analysis tool that monitors brick-and-mortar transactions to identify and resolve complex tax relationships. The solution analyzes multi-item product relationships and determines how they impact tax determination. With this configurability, Best Buy can continually create new rules that trigger a live-call to Vertex.

Best Buy also implemented the Tax Integration Service as a “hub” for compiling all critical inputs required for accurate tax determination across Best Buy’s sales channels. It simplifies management and maintenance of all information flowing into Vertex via a single control point while streamlining projects and decreasing the cost for future platform enhancements. Finally, Best Buy implemented Vertex Tax Links Integration with Oracle—a use tax solution focused on creating tax governance opportunities complemented by a highly configurable, scalable and maintainable solution.

In Their Words

“The Vertex solutions have minimized Best Buy’s tax liabilities, reduced future IT integration costs, provided a single integration point to Best Buy’s tax service and enabled Tax to react quickly to the company’s strategic growth offerings. Most importantly, these solutions empowered Tax to better support the business in its mission to grow revenue and enhance the customer experience.” –Jessica Nowlin, Senior Director, Indirect Tax

Johnson & Johnson

Tax innovation fit for this large family of healthcare businesses

Johnson & Johnson

Tax innovation fit for this large family of healthcare businesses

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series and Vertex Indirect Tax Accelerator for SAP ERP

Through its family of companies, Johnson & Johnson is one of the world’s most comprehensive and broadly based manufacturers of healthcare products serving the consumer health, pharmaceutical and medical device markets. The tax function must balance J&J’s unique business model with variations among regions and divisions.

Innovation at Work

Johnson & Johnson’s tax professionals manage a very large complex set of legal entities in more than 80 countries. The business operates on numerous ERP instances support various business processes run by multiple stakeholders spanning all regions of the world.

Using the new Vertex Accelerator for SAP along with Vertex O Series, the team has found an innovative way to manage complexity while meeting the distinct needs of each region. The solution has become the cornerstone in J&J’s efforts to standardize and streamline the indirect tax function—while still allowing flexibility to support diverse local requirements.

In addition, J&J’s tax team has provided a model for successful change management. The process of preparing documentation and training did far more than produce many standard operating procedures and work instructions. It also helped the organization understand the value and strength of Vertex O Series. What’s more, it has prompted resources from across the organization to propose new ideas and requests for making the most of the latest functionality—and delivering even greater value to J&J.

In Their Words

“Using Vertex O Series with the Vertex Accelerator and SAP allows J&J the flexibility to manage the various landscapes and unique business models at the country and global level for this industry-leading company.” –Ian Lalli, Senior Manager

Koppers Inc.

Building the infrastructure for an innovative tax provision process

Koppers Inc.

Building the infrastructure for an innovative tax provision process

Winner for use of Vertex Tax Accounting

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Koppers Inc. is an integrated global provider of products and services used to enhance and modernize worldwide infrastructure, such as railroad ties and bridges, utility poles and outdoor structures. The Koppers tax department embraced Vertex Enterprise to modernize their company’s own infrastructure—driving greater efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value.

Innovation at Work

For the tax team at Koppers, old ways of reporting worldwide tax provision data were taking a toll. They were relying on manual processes to maintain a high volume of complicated worldwide tax provision calculations, to reconcile and track income tax accounts and balances, and to identify and track temporary differences. They knew they needed a better way to extract data from the company’s ERP applications—and they wanted to integrate foreign tax provisions into a single worldwide tax provision report using one comprehensive set of workpapers.

They found the answer to their challenges in Vertex Tax Accounting. The solution has empowered Koppers to integrate their foreign and domestic tax provision processes into a single global process. They can now deliver comprehensive reports and workpapers for decision making, tax planning, and audit purposes. And they’ve streamlined the income tax closing process—virtually eliminating the “domino effect” of processing changes when relying on multiple spreadsheets. A “touch-once” approach to managing the data provides internal assurance that the data is valid and accurate, along with the controls requested by internal and external auditors.

As part of the implementation, Vertex partnered with Koppers to assimilate the company’s innovative processes and highly detailed spreadsheets into Vertex Tax Accounting. The resulting customized reports and specialized calculations are now available as part of the solution—benefitting not only Koppers, but potentially other Vertex Enterprise clients as well.

In Their Words

“Often, it is difficult to integrate the flexibility and creativity of manual processes into an automated system. Through the design, configuration, and implementation phases, Koppers has incorporated the Vertex Enterprise Tax Accounting solution to successfully address our challenges and to develop advanced and unique global tax provision processes.” –Kip Kuzior, Manager, Taxes

ALDI Inc.

Putting tax innovation in the express lane

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax for Retail

Innovation at Work

In Their Words

Best Buy Co., Inc.

Tax solutions that ‘check out’ for consumer electronics retailer

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

Innovation at Work

In Their Words

Johnson & Johnson

Tax innovation fit for this large family of healthcare businesses

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series and Vertex Indirect Tax Accelerator for SAP ERP

Innovation at Work

In Their Words

Koppers Inc.

Building the infrastructure for an innovative tax provision process

Winner for use of Vertex Tax Accounting

Innovation at Work

In Their Words

The Coca-Cola Company

A refreshing approach to managing U.S. indirect tax data

The Coca-Cola Company

A refreshing approach to managing U.S. indirect tax data

Winner for use of Vertex Sales Tax Q Series

The Coca-Cola Company is the world's largest beverage company with more than 500 sparkling and still brands and more than 3,800 beverage choices. Its tax team devised a bold vision to implement an enterprise-wide solution that would address all U.S. indirect tax data requirements and processes across the data lifecycle.

Innovation at Work

For any organization with a nationwide footprint and multidimensional business activities, indirect tax presents complex challenges. Coca-Cola is no exception. To help in standardizing and consolidating data and processes, the company set out to implement a solution that would span the indirect tax lifecycle in the U.S. The enterprise solution would provide better day-to-day support for core tax functions—including managing syrup taxes, bottle water taxes, California Redemption Value/Bottle Deposits and other taxes unique to the beverage industry. It would also deliver a strong foundation for high-value tax functions, such as forecasting, planning, analysis, and reverse audits.

To realize the vision, the team first identified and harmonized 15+ disparate transactional tax data sources across legacy systems and SAP. The next major phase was mapping, re-evaluating, re-engineering, and optimizing tax work streams and their sub-processes. The goal: to ensure that only high-value deliverables were implemented while reducing process waste. Finally, the team bolted on secondary technology, such as Vertex Document Manager, to Coca-Cola’s tax returns module to allow for seamless retention of tax returns and supporting documentation.

The ultimate outcome? Coca-Cola now has an indirect tax data warehouse that’s far more than a data repository. Requiring minimal IT support, it’s a dynamic, multipurpose solution that offers embedded tax logic to fulfill several tax requirements throughout the tax lifecycle. Standardized processes are helping the tax team to increase speed, efficiency, consistency, and accountability. All the while, the data warehouse is driving down the effort for non-value-added activities—and opening up a new level of transaction-level visibility and analysis.

In Their Words

“Similar to the industry it supports, this tax solution is ever evolving. It continues to change and be enhanced to support both our business and the tax landscape we operate in.” –Christian Diaz, Principal, Tax Technology

USAA

Better service for military members and their families

USAA

Better service for military members and their families

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

USAA is dedicated to serving military members and their families, offering a full range of highly competitive financial products and services. Reflecting the company’s core values of serving members with loyalty, honesty, and integrity, the tax team set out to find ways of driving the cost efficiency and productivity of USAA’s printing and mailing services.

Innovation at Work

USAA’s tax team was seeking a more accurate means of calculating and allocating use tax for printing and mailing services. The calculations would have to reflect membership percentages by state and legal entity along with Vertex tax rates. With the legacy approach no longer delivering the needed support, the team identified Vertex O Series rules and tables as the ideal tool for automating the process.

In a cross-functional collaboration, the team successfully created allocation tables in Vertex O Series. The automated tables are saving time and driving accuracy. They’re enabling more accurate and efficient tax returns and they’re producing a consistent audit trail that should be more readily accepted and easily understood by auditors.

Building on their success with printing and mailing services, the team created similar tables to support USAA’s information services by using employee count based on employment location for calculating underwriting and claims percentages. Above all, the Vertex technology is helping the organization anticipate and incorporate tax savings to better serve its members while delivering enhanced business results.

In Their Words

“Using Vertex Indirect Tax O Series for Sales and Use Tax has eliminated numerous hours a month in processing manual adjustments and the risk of human error against multiple transactions.” –Catherine Rodriguez, Tax Analyst, State and Local Tax

The Coca-Cola Company

A refreshing approach to managing U.S. indirect tax data

Winner for use of Vertex Sales Tax Q Series

Innovation at Work

In Their Words

USAA

Better service for military members and their families

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

Innovation at Work

In Their Words

2016 People's Choice Awards Winner

Many nominees. Six finalists. One company voted as the “People’s Choice.”

Conference attendees awarded Best Buy Co., Inc. the People's Choice Award for innovation and inspiration for their approach to tax management using Vertex solutions.

Best Buy Co., Inc.

Tax solutions that ‘check out’ for consumer electronics retailer

Winner for use of Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

Innovation at Work

In Their Words