Customer Success Story
MACTEC

Engineering giant uses Deltek Vision^® firm-wide to unify 3,000 employees, 100 offices and hundreds of projects under one system

The Challenge

An engineering, design, environmental and construction services firm, MACTEC is a leader in the architecture/ engineering industry. With revenue of $436.2 million in 2003, the Atlanta-based firm placed an impressive 25th out of 500 domestic A/E firms as ranked by Engineering News-Record that year. MACTEC's high-profile clients include both commercial and government entities such as Lucent Technologies, the National Park Service and the Department of Defense, including the Army, Navy and Air Force.

With more than 100 offices across the country and 3,000 employees spanning 50 different scientific and technical disciplines, MACTEC needed a single marketing information system to effectively manage its projects, resumes and client relationships. As a result of several major mergers and acquisitions in the early 2000s, MACTEC had to consolidate human resources (HR), financial and marketing information systems in order to bring all of the critical business data into a single database and upgrade its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Part of the new MACTEC organization had been using RFP GenTrak, an early client server version of Deltek's CRM and Proposals software, since 1998. According to Nancy Voiselle, the national director of proposals and graphics at MACTEC, the search for a new solution did not take very long.

The Solution

“There really wasn't any other solution on the market quite as comprehensive as Deltek Vision^®, and that's still the case today,” Voiselle said. “What impressed us was how effectively the software handled all elements of the project lifecycle, from marketing campaigns and new business proposals, to the tracking and storing of client and project data. We knew pretty much immediately that Vision was going to be the ideal solution for our firm.”

Deltek Vision was rolled out over roughly a six-month period to more than 2,400 users in the MACTEC network. MACTEC trained its various office mentors on the solution in the fall of 2003, and converted all its informational databases onto Vision that winter. By January 2004, Deltek Vision had been adopted firm-wide, with each MACTEC office across the country logging their own project and personnel data into Vision via a centralized database.

The Benefits

Today, Deltek Vision stores, manages and tracks employee, project, client, consultant and contact data for MACTEC, as well as marketing opportunities. In addition, the system documents marketing's project records, particularly specific job codes and description's for the firm's various disciplines. As for financial and HR information, MACTEC uses a separate system to enter this data, which they have easily integrated with Vision.

Adding to the system's value, MACTEC has also built a company-wide quality assurance program around Deltek Vision, developing consistency for resumes and tracking the skill sets of its many employees on a regular basis. According to Communications Manager Debbie Perdue, Vision stores information collected from self-appraisal forms, which are completed by each MACTEC employee as part of the QA process. This information is then used to help staff engineering and technical projects. “We deliberately rolled Vision out during the appraisal process, so the system could aid our resource planning efforts,” she said.

Since implementing Deltek Vision, MACTEC's marketing and proposals staff has saved hundreds of man hours per month on tasks such as generating new business proposals, staffing national projects and documenting results for each project undertaken. In fact, producing this information as quickly as possible often has great rewards, generating thousands of dollars in new business revenue as a result.

Before Vision, the marketing employees at MACTEC had to phone local and regional offices and consultants when trying to staff a project, ensuring the project employed the most appropriate personnel for the job. Now, MACTEC's marketing staff can easily use Vision to query lists of potential candidates for each project, sorting this information based on discipline, professional licensure, skill set and various other relevant categories. The staff typically run about 30 reports each month to track and analyze this information, which is then posted on MACTEC's Intranet for quick reference and proposal use.

Using Vision, MACTEC can also track results for past projects and clients using proof statements, which are captured in Vision. The statements regarding project performance, which can be often extracted from client quotes, letters and even newsletters, can be plugged into testimonials, proposals for winning new business and marketing collateral.

Furthermore, Vision automatically updates key employee, project and client information on a weekly basis through Vision's integration with MACTEC's financial and HR systems, including data regarding new hires and terminated employees, ongoing projects versus completed projects, and more. According to Voiselle, this was no easy task prior to implementing Vision, especially considering the number of employees at MACTEC.

“Now that Vision has been implemented, people company-wide have come to understand the investment we've made in the software, because now they understand its immense value,” Voiselle said. “Even better, these people began to pull together and share their projects, their experiences and their ideas under Vision. It truly unified the company.”