subject: Getting Your Money's Worth from Deltek Vision Project Management Software [print this page] Getting Your Money's Worth from Deltek Vision Project Management Software
During the software selection process, you and your sales consultant worked together to identify how Vision could help you solve business challenges. Do you remember your excitement thinking about the end result of how Vision would help you improve your financial system and streamline processes through its integrated features? Along the way you may have had the intent to move on to other modules, but got bogged down in the day-to-day chores of operations and software implementation and training plans were "shelved". Sound familiar?
While the real benefit of Deltek Vision is in the integrated modules and ability to manage the business in just one application, it's common for firms to only purchase Vision's core components -- accounting, billing, time, and expenses -- even though during the software selection process there is a recognized need to integrate and improve other areas, such as marketing or project management. You may want all the modules, but due to limited time or money you chose to wait to purchase modules and add them later.
By use the integrated modules, Acumen Advisors benchmark studies have shown clients have realized:
Increased revenue resulting from an average of 2% higher utilization rates
An average of 5% reduction in project budget overruns
Improved relationships with existing clients
The ability to respond to more RFP's faster and easier and with more targeted responses
How Much Money Are You Losing and What Are You Missing by Not Expanding Beyond Vision's Core Components?
We'd like to remind you of what these "forgotten" modules can do for you, and help you realize the maximum amount of return from your Vision investment. Our clients tell us that they get the most benefit from CRM, Proposals (or Government Forms) and Resource Planning.
Vision CRM
Are you keeping in contact with your top clients? What would happen if you lost one of those clients? It's seven times more expensive to gain a new client than it is to retain an existing client. (Source: Society for Marketing Professional Services, AEC Handbook). Vision consultants have helped clients understand how to use existing functionality, as well as, customize the system to allow your firm to gain insight to customer interaction. A 5% increase in client retention can increase profits by 25 to 95%(Source: Bain & Company study, Harvard Business Review, 2001). Setting up alerts based on criteria your firm finds important can help ensure you retain your clients.
The integration between CRM and your core modules help you streamline your business processes, from business development to project close-out. With the entire integration - from CRM to the finance modules and to Resource Planning - you can move your projects seamlessly from the first contact through an awarded, completed project to use for future project experience and reference. Additionally, Vision connects to Microsoft Outlook, adapting to the way you work and enabling true collaboration. It is very easy to see a return on investment with this module when you consider that just one overlooked project can cost you anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000, depending on the average size of your projects.
Below are specific questions to ask yourself:
Are you able to forecast your opportunities? An opportunity forecast allows you to evaluate potential projects and compare that to your monthly breakeven to make sure you have enough in the pipeline.
Can you easily determine who to send information to for events or the year-end holiday cards/gifts? Would you like an alert that tells you if a client hasn't given any projects within the last quarter? Developing a classification system that tracks historical information about a client or contact can help you see the progress you have made and help notify you if action needs to be taken.
Are you able to easily search out satisfied clients for references? If you track surveys or conduct debrief information, why not put this information in Vision? Creating a place to house this information provides searchable data to easily filter out client references.
Are you tired of the shot gun approach? Developing a Hit Rate List and implementing a Go/No-Go process are great ways to focus on what you do best and eliminate costly proposal cycles.
Vision Custom Proposals or Government Forms
Your Vision system already holds valuable information on your clients, your employees and your projects. This is all information that you can use to help prepare qualification-based proposals reference information, resume and project experience. With the proposal generation process:
Are you able to easily bring all of the information together into a proposal format?
Do you have a way to access your master boiler plate or text library?
Can you quickly change the style of a proposal to create a tailored proposal?
Do you have to call others to find out who worked on a project?
Improve the effectiveness of your proposal process and win just one additional project because your proposal made the cut and you'll already have more than a 100% ROI on these modules. The integrated system gave BCER's marketing staff immediate access to proposal, employee and project information. "In the past, I would hunt down the information in old proposals or from a project manager. Now, our firm has processes in place to capture information ... a simple database query delivers the information I need," said Jennifer Remy. Consistency is another benefit brought by integrated data systems. "No more different font sizes and styles, or outdated text. We have streamlined and provided consistency to our output, which is a tremendous accomplishment."
Vision Planning
Are you able to determine who is over- or under-utilized within your firm? Planning supports well-managed projects and optimized resource utilization to promote growth and probability through automating scheduling, resource allocation, budgeting, and forecasting. The resource scheduling component ensures the right people are on the right projects at the right time.
With integration to the time sheet module your employees have visibility into what they should be working on and when, resulting in better time recordkeeping. Using these tools, our clients have increased utilization by 2%, and with that, increased billings! If you have assigned an employee to work on a specific task you can automatically pre-populate the specific timesheet with the project information so you are ensuring you are capturing all services and capturing them correctly.
The real-time reporting available in this module give you the at-a-glance numbers you need. Allowing your project managers to see a detailed breakdown of actual costs against plans and being able to estimate costs to complete a project can also help to decrease your project overruns; our clients have seen a reduction in overruns by an average of 5%.
There might be other modules you are considering purchasing or implementing, such as Electronic Invoicing, Purchase Order, or Document Management. We encourage you to revisit what your goals were when you invested in the Vision system.
