We are thrilled to present the winners for the AP Honors 2024 Awards!!! The winners were announced during a special ceremony on Wednesday, December 4.
The AP Honors Ceremony celebrates the accounts payable profession and recognizes excellence in the field. During the ceremony on December 4, Ardent Partners presented awards for outstanding performance and execution in the last year — “The AP Honors” — to a variety of high achievers, including Accounts Payable and P2P leaders and teams, as well as ePayables (AP Automation) solution providers and other experts.
The AP Honors are brought to you by Ardent Partners and Medius. The AP Honors 2024 winners were selected by an expert committee from the pool of external nominations.
Ardent Partners congratulates all of the nominees and finalists, but particularly the winners of this year’s awards.
We now present this year’s AP Honors 2024 winners!
THE AP HONORS CATEGORIES:
The AP Leadership Award (AP Manager of the Year): This award is presented to the AP leader who has driven new performance heights due to their direct involvement, leadership, and overall exceptional managerial achievements.
**WINNERS [TIE]: (Carrie Thompson, East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust) and (Tiffany Miller, Empire Portfolio Group)
Carrie Thompson is Deputy Head of Accounts Payable managing a department of 54 staff with 18 clients for East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, which currently processes over 1.8 million invoices a year. Thompson supported the implementation of the department’s self-service “ASKAP” portal, where suppliers can check the status of their invoices, contact approvers directly for overdue invoices, and address any disputed invoices. Prior to the ASKAP portal, the department averaged 7,700 queries at any one time, which has now been reduced to 800. Thompson also implemented improvements to the agreement of balances exercise that all NHS organizations must complete at month 6, 9, and 12. This is governed by the Department of Health and strict deadlines must be met.
Tiffany Miller joined Empire Portfolio Group in 2021 when the company had no automated processes in place to handle the rapidly increasing AP volume. She leveraged her extensive AP expertise to guide Empire through this transitional period, leading the decision to adopt Basware, but also managing much of the implementation herself to minimize costs, demonstrating her resourcefulness and commitment to efficiency. Miller’s leadership has been instrumental in building a scalable, highly efficient AP department at Empire. She meticulously designed a workflow tailored to Empire’s unique needs, incorporating different functions such as member services, property management, and medical billing—areas that required specific regulatory and operational compliance. Her impact has been particularly impressive considering the organization’s growth trajectory. Despite Empire’s rapid expansion — into new locations and entirely new business areas like healthcare — Miller has successfully scaled AP operations without increasing the size of the AP team. Under Miller’s leadership, Empire’s AP team has adopted industry-leading practices, including using KPIs to monitor and optimize performance. Key metrics such as payment timeliness, touchless processing rates, approval workflows, and exception handling are now tracked consistently. This data-driven approach has led to measurable improvements in payment accuracy, processing speed, and overall AP performance.
Best Team Performance Award / AP Team of the Year: This award is presented to the AP department that has excelled across the full scope of the ePayables Framework (invoice receipt, approval, and payment) to make a significant impact on overall enterprise results.
**WINNER: AP Team – Intuit
The Intuit AP Team was a key contributor in driving DEI strategies for the company. AP developed a comprehensive strategy focusing on accelerating payments for Intuit’s small and diverse businesses. Due to the efforts and dedication of the AP team, in FY 2024, Intuit generated $388M in economic impact through its partnerships with diverse and small business suppliers. Recently, Intuit expanded their supplier DEI strategy globally to include the United Kingdom and Canada. This has positioned the company to broaden its scope of suppliers in other countries internationally.
The AP Innovation Award: This award is presented to the AP team that has used new and innovative strategies and approaches to overcome significant hurdles.
**WINNER: Blue Water Shipping
Blue Water Shipping has been continuously growing and expanding into new countries year after year. Their commitment to streamlining AP processes is evident in their remarkable performance. With an “average invoice processing time of just 3.8 days,” handling “700,000 invoices annually,” and achieving “61% fully automated invoice processing,” they have significantly reduced manual intervention and maximize operational efficiency.
The Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Collaboration Award: Presented to the organization that has best exemplified the improvements that can be achieved when AP and Procurement departments and personnel work closely with one another to benefit the greater enterprise.
**WINNER: P2P team within Kendo Brands
Kendo Brands did incredible work on its P2P transformation. Christina Cordova drove the PO pilot, allowing Kendo Brands to roll out its P2P initiative in record time.
The Technology Excellence Award: This award is presented to the AP/Finance team that has leveraged technology solutions to impact AP operations and performance.
**WINNER: Bridge Industrial
Bridge Industrial was able to integrate AP into its existing tech stack in just 3 weeks, alleviating pressure from its AP staff even as invoice volume increased. The team was able to shift their attention from repetitive manual data entry to more meaningful work, improving overall job satisfaction and allowing them to focus on bigger picture projects. Overall, the team was able to shorten its AP process from days to minutes, requiring fewer touches per invoice, and improving the working lives of the AP team.
** NEW Innovative Solution of the Year: Presented to the solution provider who most significantly impacted the market with innovative solutions.
**WINNER: Predict AP
The PredictAP solution brings into focus artificial intelligence. PredictAP is the first AI-powered, fully automated invoice ingestion and coding solution built specifically for the real estate industry by industry professionals. The solution addresses the inefficiencies caused by manual data entry by using machine learning software to help AP teams prioritize big picture business objectives and protects them against future upheaval.
** NEW Best Technology Partnership: Presented to the best partnership between a solution provider and their accounts payable team customer on to a technology deployment.
**WINNER: Novartis and ORO Labs
Novartis & ORO Labs. Novartis has a significant supplier base (more than 80,000 suppliers) spread globally. Onboarding new suppliers and managing existing suppliers is a massive problem. Recently, Novartis went live with a solution called “Supplier 360,” which was developed using ORO’s no-code orchestration platform and in collaborative partnership with the implementation team at ORO Labs. The solution orchestrates supplier onboarding and maintenance workflows in ways that are intuitive, adaptive, and fast — with many improvements in the company’s quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Congratulations again to all the winners of this year’s AP Honors 2024 Awards!
Be sure to submit an award nomination when the 2025 AP Honors Awards opens for submissions next year! Announcement coming in early 2025!