This year marks the 11th for Treasury & Risk's Alexander Hamilton Awards for Excellence in Treasury Management. As always, the awards have attracted an impressive array of thoughtful and innovative projects from treasuries in companies from a variety of industries. My congratulations to all of them.

But now we feel it is time for Treasury & Risk to do its own tweaking to make the AHA better reflect priorities of the finance profession and companies around the country. Although we will preserve several of our categories, such as Financial Risk Management, Credit Risk Management and Cash Management, we have decided that we need to add a few–specifically Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Risk Management and Working Capital Management. We also would like to expand one of our current catgories: Retirement will now become Retirement and Benefits. Under this new category, we will accept projects that outline improvements to both defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans as well as innovation in the area of employee benefits, such as healthcare and compensation.

We hope these new categories better reflect the challenges that treasury faces today. We also welcome comments from our readers on other areas that we should consider. Our aim is not to expand the number of awards dramatically, so we may decide to retire a couple. The final category lineup and rules will be released in our winter issue that is published in December. In the meantime, I congratulate all of our AHA winners in 2006 and encourage those who decided against applying to start early on your 2007 project.