National Deltek Webinar presented in summer of 2011 as part of the series "From Guts to Facts: Decision Making At The Best Run AE Firms"

1. From Gut to Facts:
Decision Making At the
Best Run AE Firms
International Toll: 1-913-312-1239
US/CAN Toll free: 1-888-240-9299
Attendee Passcode: 311164

2. Vicki Morton
Information Systems Manager, Bonestroo
Christine Brack, PMP
Principal Business Planning, ZweigWhite
Bret Tushaus
Product Director, Deltek
2 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved

3. Agenda
 Effective Decisions – Business Intelligence System
 Business Intelligence & Decision Making in the AE Industry
 Business Intelligence System in Action at Bonestroo
 Summary & Lessons Learned
 Q&A
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4. Effective Decisions
Business Intelligence System

5. “The key to success in life is to
make good choices”
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6. “The key to success in business is
to make effective decisions”
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7. Effective Decisions
Concrete
Measures
Specific Foundation
Goals and
Feedback
Effective
Decisions
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8. Effective Decisions
Concrete Business Intelligence
Measures System for identifying, extracting and
analyzing business data to provide
historical, current and predictive views
of business operations which in turn
Specific supports and drives decision making.
Goals
•Decision support system
•Analytics
Foundation •Performance management
and •Benchmarking
Feedback •Data mining
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9. Business Intelligence System
 Spend more time making decisions and less time sorting
through the data
 Role-appropriate consumption of performance data
 Goals driving the decision making process
 Historical and predictive analysis
 Real-time scrutiny, not after-the-fact reactions
 Effective decision making
9 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved

10. Business Intelligence & Decision
Making in the AE Industry

11. Top Three Considerations
 Being Ready: Desire to grow? Culture of project
management? Strong practice of understanding and
communication? Commitment to improvement?
 Quantifying: Real-time, retrievable, simple? Who is this
information for? What are we looking at? How much? Do
we understand if it’s good or bad?
 Cause for Action: What if anything are we going to do
with this information? Can we change these numbers to our
favor? Are we willing to make these changes? Even if it
requires hard work?
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12. Successful Practices
 Open book management
 Accounting fundamentals are good for you
 Common language of terms and metrics
 Use the software available
 Don’t focus on historicals
 Establish realistic goals
 Show the value of BI across the organization
 Talk about it—a lot
12 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved

13. Step by Step
 Determine readiness
 Financial and Accounting 101 – understanding, not just
training
 Principals and PMs will go more in-depth
 Collect, benchmark, assess
 Leadership decisions and planning
 Set objectives and performance measures
 Monitor, review, repeat for growth and improvement
13 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved

14. Business Intelligence System
in Action at Bonestroo

15. Bonestroo Background
 Founded in 1956
 Multi-discipline engineering, planning and environmental
science firm
 300 employees in 12 offices located throughout the
Midwest with headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota
 Have been on Deltek Vision since 2005, currently running
5.1 (moving to 6.1 this summer)
15 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved

16. Why Business Intelligence?
 Economic changes and challenges facing the industry
 Needed the ability to make time-efficient and effective
decisions to react to market conditions
 Struggling with the challenge of each business unit
managing in a silo
 Too many metrics, too many reports and too much
information - not effective, simply informational and not
actionable
 Spending too much time after-the-fact = reactive mode vs.
proactive
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17. Metrics In Use at Bonestroo
 Through Vision we have the ability to manage our business
looking forward instead of backwards
 Two main metrics that we currently focus on are:
 Direct hours
 Revenue forecasting (backlog and opportunities)
 Secondary metrics
 Net revenue, profit, effective multiplier, sales, AR, WIP,
write-downs, write-offs, discretionary spending
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18. Response Within Bonestroo
 Very positive response!!
 Ability to compare historical information along with
predicting future revenue
 Executives are better focused on where we need to drive
the business and can quickly determine the areas that need
attention and make more effective decisions
 Team leaders have easy access to real-time information
that assist them in managing their staff as well as their
projects and clients
18 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved

19. What’s Next for Bonestroo?
 Deliver more graphical views of data
 Provide the ability to drill-down into more detail
 Use of KPIs
 Live connection to the data with role-based security
 Looking further into Vision’s Performance Management
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20. Summary and Lessons Learned

21. Summary & Lessons Learned
 Getting Started
 Top-down support and enforcement
 Determine key metrics - start small and get their attention,
establish realistic goals
 Financial/Accounting 101 – cultivate an understanding
 Only produce/distribute views of data that are easy to read,
quickly points out issues and are actionable
 Set goals to track against
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22. Summary & Lessons Learned
 Things to Keep in Mind
 Don’t underestimate the amount of effort to get end-users to
comply with entering information
 Culture of Project Management
 Training
 Commitment to improvement
 Progress does not happen overnight
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23. Vision Performance Management
 Business Intelligence Module for Vision
 Graphical views of data
 Role-based dashboards
 Fed by Vision Analysis Cubes (60 metrics available)
 Revenue
 Profit
 Effective multiplier
 Accounts receivable
 Backlog
 Labor/Expenses
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24. Vision Performance Management
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25. Vision Performance Management
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26. Vision Performance Management
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27. Vision Performance Management
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28. Vision Performance Management
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29. Questions?

30. For more information
www.deltek.com/vpm
jeffmulford@deltek.com
Sign Up for Live Vision Performance
Management Demos
www.deltek.com/vpm
Analysis Cubes Presentation from Vicki
Send email to brettushaus@deltek.com
30 ©2011 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved