Pigment Awards 2025

Business transformation project of the year: Danone

Danone Specialized Nutrition transformed its Long-Term Demand Planning (LTDP) from a fragmented, Excel-based task into a mission-critical strategic capability. The project with Pigment introduced a unified simulator that integrates global demand with supply chain capacity for long-term planning. It automated the consolidation of growth assumptions from global and local teams, powered a custom recalculation engine ensuring consistent outcomes across scenarios and integrated demand-capacity alignment across factories, technologies, and formats.
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This project elevated LTDP from a reactive exercise to a strategic decision-making capability, enabling Danone to make more informed, timely, and cross-functional decisions that influence both long-term performance and operational investments.

Recognizing the most impactful process optimization initiative that has turned internal workflows into streamlined, efficient business-forward operations: Accelerant

Accelerant has centralized cross-functional planning and forecasting into a single platform and embedded rolling forecasts across the business. Pigment has unified planning to accelerate feedback loop between performance, planning, and action, to evolve planning into a forward-looking engine for business performance.

Leaders gained deeper visibility into key performance drivers with the ability to model scenarios and immediately see the impact of decisions.

Most innovative use of Pigment: Cross River

With Pigment, Cross River transformed its financial architecture by engineering a sophisticated, multi-dimensional cost allocation engine that handles complexities far beyond the reach of traditional spreadsheets. By replacing a maze of interconnected manual workbooks with a dynamic 3D data cube, the project now routes expenses from over hundreds of cost centers to specific products and partners with surgical precision. This visionary approach reduced data ingestion and formatting cycles drastically, providing leadership with near real-time profitability intelligence.

The platform has democratized data access, allowing business partners to independently explore profitability levers and refine client profiles based on live financial performance.

Celebrating individual excellence: Kevin Snyder, DIRECTV

Kevin spearheaded a fundamental shift at DIRECTV, moving the organization from a fragmented environment to a unified, connected planning platform. By centralizing headcount, OPEX, and churn data, he transformed the finance function from a backend reporting unit into a proactive driver of executive decision-making. The project’s impact was immediate, reducing the involuntary churn production cycle by 90%, shrinking a multi-day manual process into just two hours.

Kevin’s leadership has established a scalable, AI-ready foundation that ensures every level of the business plans and grows from a single, trusted source of truth.

Best use of AI in business planning: Docker

Docker established a new standard for AI-augmented finance by embedding intelligent agents directly into the company’s monthly close and strategic planning workflows. By leveraging Pigment AI to generate structured first-draft narratives and variance commentary, the team reduced time spent on close reviews by up to 50%. This "AI-first" philosophy eliminated the manual burden of repetitive drafting of summaries to different internal stakeholders, allowing analysts to apply their judgment to high-level insights rather than data assembly.

The project’s success has expanded into a wider portfolio of AI initiatives, including an Infrastructure Insights Analyst and a phased AOP Planner. Docker is proving that AI is more than just an efficiency play; it's how finance becomes a strategic force across the business.

Honorable mention: BMG

BMG fundamentally redesigned its global planning landscape by replacing a legacy EPM provider with a modular, 12-app Pigment ecosystem that serves as a backbone for their financial planning and forecasting. This transformation unified P&L, Cash Flow, and consolidation across several companies, moving away from rigid templates toward "fit-for-purpose" models that reflect real business dynamics. By introducing lifecycle and AI-supported forecast logic, the team can now dynamically select the most appropriate planning methodology for over 10,000 individual projects. The project has significantly accelerated planning cycles and eliminated manual Excel workflows, establishing a scalable FP&A architecture capable of supporting complex global consolidation.

This initiative has not only improved data transparency for executive decision-making but has also been recognized as an industry benchmark for modern, design-led financial transformation.