Streamlining 4 Success: How Acclaimed Environmental Consultancy, ALL4, Became More Efficient with Deltek Vantagepoint

A conversation with Karen Escobar, Project Management Business Partner and Chester Ney, IT Director at ALL4

ALL4, an acclaimed environmental consulting firm, has been at the forefront of addressing complex environmental challenges for more than 20 years. With a reputation for delivering bespoke strategies for permitting, compliance, and sustainability, ALL4 has grown to over 250 employees with offices across the United States and a global presence in Europe and Latin America. To manage their expanding operations, ALL4 needed an ERP system like Deltek Vantagepoint that would help them with billing, invoicing, and financial management, as well as keeping track of time, projects, and resources.

Enhanced Visibility

Vantagepoint helps consulting firms like ALL4 improve the accuracy of their data and helps project managers and leadership quickly understand the status and financial performance of projects. With Deltek Vantagepoint, ALL4 gets enhanced visibility into their operations, which allows them to pivot and make changes on the fly. The dashboards enable proactive management of accounts receivable and budgeting, leading to improved cash flow and planning. As Karen explained, "We're more on top of our aging accounts receivable thanks to dashboards. The dashboards have triggers and conditional formatting that will alert us, allowing us to be more proactive, and in some cases reactive if we are over budget."

Configure Views by Role or Job Title

Although Vantagepoint helps leadership have an overall view of company performance, it's also important to have a view specific to individual roles or departments. As Karen described, "We recently restructured our security roles, and we really like being able to push those reports to each type of security role. Before, everyone had access to all the data, and it was sometimes hard to find where it was located. Now, we have it set up where each practice director has their reports, and they're set up just for their view."

Keeping Track of KPIs

Project managers (PMs) and department leaders are accountable to specific targets or KPIs at ALL4. With Vantagepoint, they have built dashboards that put specific variances and key performance indicators (KPIs) for project managers and leadership front and center, making it easy for the enterprise to quickly understand when projects are trending above or below expectations.

Improved Utilization & Load Balancing

Efficient resource utilization is crucial for the growth of any consulting or professional services organization. Ensuring that the right people are assigned to the right projects with an optimal workload balance is vital for project success and reducing burnout. Deltek Vantagepoint has been instrumental for ALL4 in achieving effective load balancing and trend identification. Karen noted, "If you are a supervisor and you are looking at a particular region or particular employee, you can easily go in and see their utilization for that week, how they are doing, and better manage your business."

Integration Options Provide an Advantage

Although most project and financial information is in Vantagepoint, companies sometimes want to export data and/or integrate with other systems. Vantagepoint allows multiple ways to integrate data with other systems.

As Chester described, “With a direct database (ODBC) connection to Deltek, we can extract data and build customized views and dashboards in PowerBI for deeper analysis and informed decision-making. This capability to integrate via Deltek Unionpoint or ODBC with a data analytics tool like PowerBI provides a significant advantage, enabling us to elevate our data analytics with added customizations. This connection has allowed us to create data analytics tables that help with load balancing and utilization monitoring, giving us tools and capabilities that other systems restrict.”

Configuration, Control & Support

One of Deltek Vantagepoint's standout features is its configurability. ALL4 capitalized on this by tailoring areas of the solution like the employee hub to include forecasted hours—a metric crucial to their business model. In addition, Chester praised Vantagepoint’s quarterly release updates and the ability to toggle new features on and off, which allowed the firm to adopt enhancements at its own pace.

Great Support from Deltek and Its Partners

Chester also highlighted the value of Deltek's award winning customer support. The dedicated client success manager and tailored support have been instrumental in navigating Vantagepoint, ensuring ALL4 maximizes the benefits of their investment.

"In my opinion, the added support you get is absolutely worth it. The dedicated client success manager we've had for years understands our organization, keeps us informed, follows our support tickets, and advocates on our behalf."

In addition, Chester and Karen both talked about the value of the Deltek partner network and in particular Stambaugh Ness to help provide implementation and configuration services. Deltek's Partner ecosystem includes hundreds of diverse global partners, including systems integrators, value-added resellers, independent software vendors, and accounting and consulting firms, to help ensure you get the most out of your system.

Advice for Other Firms: Simplify for Scalability

For other professional services firms upgrading or transitioning to a new ERP system, Chester and Karen recommend simplifying the data and dashboards to improve adoption. In the early stages of their transition, they had too many people looking at too many different dashboards. After careful consideration, ALL4 streamlined its data by reducing the number of available dashboards from 60 to just 10, focusing on the essential information needed by project managers and executives alike. This simplification, along with the culling of redundant reports and the migration from a report-based approach to a dashboard/live data view, fostered a unified view of the company's operations.

Conclusion

Deltek Vantagepoint has been a game-changer for ALL4, enabling the firm to scale efficiently while maintaining a clear overview of its diverse and dynamic operations. The enhanced real-time insights improved user adoption, decision-making, and collaboration, providing a more dynamic understanding of the business. The case of ALL4 is a testament to how the right ERP system, coupled with a willingness to adapt and integrate, can drive a company's success in an ever-evolving consulting landscape.