Nothing shows Eastman Chemical's focus and solid ground game better than its participation in benchmarking, a tool for developing best practices and continuous improvement. "It shows you how you are doing compared to other well-run companies," CFO Curt Espeland says. "It lets you go to management and develop a road map for improvements. And it helps us prioritize."

The Atlanta-based Hackett Group applies benchmark formulas to dozens of indicators of efficiency and effectiveness and designates the top performers –less than 10% of its universe–as world class. Eastman falls in that elite group for its finance performance, says Bryan Hall, a principal in Hackett's finance transformation practice.

Continuous improvement is evident is several areas. "When we started benchmarking, we were closing the books in 10 days and rerunning a lot of financial numbers due to errors," Espeland recalls. "Benchmarking highlighted that weakness and we addressed it and improved to five days. When we started benchmarking, we had delinquencies in customer payments of 20%, so we saw the problem and went to work on it. Now delinquencies are under 5%."