Best in Business: Meet the 2026 Operational Excellence Award Winners

Written by Paul Keskeys | Oct 12, 2026

It's time to celebrate the best in business: BQE is thrilled to reveal the winners of the 2026 Operational Excellence Awards!

There are countless awards programs that recognize great architecture and engineering, and one is much like the next. The 2026 Operational Excellence Awards are different, celebrating arguably the most critical art of all: the business behind the buildings.

This unique industry awards program recognizes the architecture and engineering firms that demonstrate exceptional performance in the areas that help build stronger, more sustainable companies. What makes these awards especially meaningful is that they are backed by real business data.

Rather than relying on nominations, subjective judging, or a popular vote that can be easily manipulated, the Operational Excellence Awards are based on actual performance data in BQE CORE. Firms that opted in to the program are evaluated using benchmarking metrics tied to the most important drivers of firm health, including profitability, efficiency, financial strength, client value, and employee productivity.

The result is an authentic, data-driven look at the firms that are doing an exceptional job of managing both their projects and their people, leading to outstanding results for their clients.

The 2026 Operational Excellence Award Winners

This year’s winners represent an impressive cross-section of architecture and engineering firms demonstrating what operational excellence looks like in practice:

See the complete list of the 2026 Winners and Honorable Mentions here.

What Does Operational Excellence Look Like?

Great architecture and engineering firms deliver exceptional projects that transform our communities, and ensure their firm’s longevity, but doing that consistently also requires a healthy business behind the scenes.

Projects need to be profitable, while people need to be productive without being overworked. Firms need to collect revenue efficiently, maintain healthy backlogs, manage overhead, and get the right value from the work they perform. For this reason, the Operational Excellence Awards look beyond singular measures of success and focuses on the collective strengths of firms in key areas.

The Profitability & Growth Award recognizes firms achieving exceptional financial performance and sustainable growth, based on profit per FTE, profit margin, multiplier achieved, and average contract value.

The Operational Efficiency Award recognizes firms that turn highly efficient operations into stronger margins, with performance measured using revenue per FTE, expense per FTE, profit per FTE, realization rate, and average collection period.

The Financial Health Award focuses on firms with strong financial stability and disciplined business management, using metrics including breakeven multiplier, overhead multiplier, billing multiplier, average collection period, and backlog.

The Client Value Award recognizes firms that deliver outstanding value to clients while building strong, sustainable client relationships. Metrics for this accolade include realization rate, multiplier achieved, average contract value, and backlog.

The Talent Productivity Award recognizes firms getting the most from their teams while maintaining strong performance. It considers revenue, expense, and profit per FTE alongside utilization rate.

Finally, the Balanced Excellence Award recognizes firms that perform exceptionally well across the board. It incorporates profit margin, average contract value, revenue and expenses per FTE, utilization, realization, collection period, and backlog.

Architecture and engineering firms are evaluated separately, with a winner and two honorable mentions selected for each industry in every category.

Great Work Starts With a Strong Business

The numbers behind these awards tell an important story.

Operational excellence is not simply about maximizing one metric. For example, a firm can increase utilization, but that does not automatically mean it is profitable. It can grow revenue without maintaining healthy margins. It can win more work without having the capacity to deliver that work effectively.

The strongest firms manage these factors together, enabling them to understand what is happening across their projects while there is still time to act.

This matters for employees, too. Strong operations give firms a better foundation for managing workloads, planning staffing needs, investing in their teams, and creating an environment where architects and engineers can spend more time doing the work they were hired to do.

In other words, operational excellence is not confined to the back office. It is a core part of what makes great architecture and engineering projects possible.

Congratulations to the 2026 Winners!

Congratulations to all of the 2026 A/E Firm Operational Excellence Award winners and honorable mentions. These accolades recognize firms that are building disciplined, efficient, businesses capable of creating lasting value for their clients and their people.

For firms wondering how they can follow in the footsteps of our winners, the path starts with better visibility into your business.

Consider investing in BQE CORE to gather the insights you need to grow your firm, and you could be an Operational Excellence Award Winner next year!

Schedule a live demo of BQE CORE today >

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