Business Objects Launches Incentive Compensation Management Solution; Application Brings Automation, Optimization, and Transparency to Employee Compensation Programs

Business Wire, April 24, 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif. & PARIS -- Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ) (Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the availability of BusinessObjects(TM) Incentive Compensation Management (ICM). This new application enables companies to easily link strategic plans to compensation to better align company goals with individual performance.

BusinessObjects ICM is designed to address a pressing issue at most banks, as well as companies in the communications and retail sectors. These companies are struggling with numerous incentive compensation plans and often rely on home grown systems or basic spreadsheets to calculate and manage these programs. This highly manual approach is cumbersome and inefficient, often resulting in errors and delays in compensation calculations.

With BusinessObjects Incentive Compensation Management, Business Objects provides organizations with an automated system that optimizes the process of planning, calculating, analyzing, and communicating incentives. BusinessObjects ICM, built using BusinessObjects Planning, supports even the most complex plans with multi-faceted payout criteria. The solution allows companies to develop advanced compensation models, perform "what if" analyses on new or existing plans, and effectively communicate results across any dimension through reports and dashboards. BusinessObjects ICM provides branch managers, loan officers, and other similar employees with clear and immediate access to the customer transactions and calculations that generate their incentives.

Incentive Compensation Management in Action

North Fork Bancorporation, a regional bank holding company in New York that operates commercial and retail banking, as well as a complementary national mortgage banking business, has already deployed BusinessObjects Incentive Compensation Management. North Fork Bank needed a solution that would improve data integrity and calculation accuracy, consolidate and streamline the incentive management process, and be able to handle both financial and non-financial data critical to its incentive program. Using the Business Objects application, North Fork Bank has gained the ability to conduct advanced modeling and analyses, while reducing the overall processing time for its program. In addition, since the solution is automated, North Fork Bank has improved data integrity and calculation accuracy.

"With an incentive compensation budget of more than $125 million and complex incentive formulas, we knew we needed an automated solution. Having had excellent prior experience with Business Objects, we sought out their assistance for the development of this new solution," said John DiGiacomo, executive vice president and CFO at North Fork Bank. "It used to take two administrators roughly 80 hours each to process incentive payments for a one-month period. With Business Objects, that process now takes those same administrators only eight hours each -- or one-tenth the time. In addition, the solution has built trust among our employees that their payments are correct and reduced the unproductive shadow accounting they used to perform on a monthly basis."

Completing the Performance Management Process

Incentive compensation management is an important part of a complete performance management process, as employee rewards must align with broader corporate strategies and goals. Most traditional performance management solutions have ignored personal performance management as part of their offering. Integrated with the full suite of Business Objects Performance Management solutions, the Incentive Compensation Management application helps take companies beyond simple budgeting and planning to create a true closed-loop performance management process.

"We continue to execute aggressively to bring new and valuable solutions to our overall performance management offering," said Peri Pierone, vice president of vertical markets for Business Objects. "Leveraging our vast industry knowledge, this new application delivers the industry's first integrated incentive compensation management solution for financial services institutions and closes the loop between organizational strategies and employee actions. While this was designed with retail banks in mind, this solution can certainly be applied across other industries as well. Any company interested in aligning organizational goals with individual performance can benefit from this solution."

Availability

BusinessObjects Incentive Compensation Management is available now. For more information on this application and the other Business Objects planning and performance management solutions, please visit http://www.businessobjects.com/planning/.> About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company. With more than 35,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500, Business Objects helps organizations gain better insight into their business, improve decision-making, and optimize enterprise performance. The company's business intelligence platform, BusinessObjects(TM) XI, offers the BI industry's most advanced and complete platform for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes Crystal Reports(R), the industry standard for enterprise reporting. Business Objects has built the industry's strongest and most diverse partner community, and also offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.