Customer Testimonial
BAE Systems
Deltek Costpoint® CRM Helps Global Aerospace and Defense Contractor Streamline Business Development Processes
The Challenge
BAE Systems is the world's third-largest defense and aerospace company, delivering a full range of products and services for military forces around the globe. The company's Electronics, Intelligence & Support unit provides systems and support for a wide variety of government customers, focusing on four core markets: electronics, information, controls, and power management.
The company provides integrated information technology and technical and professional service solutions for the U.S. national security and federal civilian markets.
As a result of several acquisitions, the company had multiple legacy opportunity tracking systems, each with its own limitations. Data was spread out and duplicated across numerous systems, spreadsheets, and even desktops. The team's ability to accurately track, monitor, and measure the new business opportunity pipeline was hampered by the distributed nature of their business development systems and processes. The disparate systems also made it difficult to manage business development budgets and resources.
BAE Systems needed a flexible, easy-to-use, unified opportunity tracking system that allowed business development professionals easy access to opportunity tracking information. “Our folks like to slice and dice the data different ways, so flexible reporting was a huge consideration,” said Richard Zelkowitz, Business Development Operations Director.
The Solution
The business development team wanted the system up and running in 2008, soon after it made the system selection. BAE Systems evaluated multiple options, including outside systems from leading software vendors and a homegrown system that the company had used previously. After extensive analysis, it selected Deltek's Costpoint CRM solution. Costpoint CRM was already in use within the company's contracts organization with positive results, and the contracts team owned much of the same data used by the business development team. “Contracts was already tracking proposals post-award, so it made sense to add tracking from opportunity identification through award. Costpoint CRM was flexible enough to accommodate the needs of both teams, and make the idea of a unified data repository a reality,” Zelkowitz said.
The financial benefits were obvious as well. “From a cost-benefit standpoint, we had already invested in Costpoint CRM as an organization,” Zelkowitz continued. “We just had to work with contracts to redesign screens and add some additional fields, and we'd be up and running.” The group's financial management team used Deltek Costpoint as well, so budgeting and forecasting of new business expenditures and resource allocation could also be integrated with the project accounting system. Costpoint combined with Costpoint CRM could also better track bid and proposal monies.
The Benefit
“We deal with opportunities through the proposal phase, and contracts takes over when it is awarded,” Zelkowitz reported. “Costpoint CRM helped us to streamline the entire business development process, saving us time as an organization. Plus, we're integrated with Deltek Costpoint, so Costpoint CRM is one of the tools we can use to plan our bid and proposal investments and decisions.”
A simple, easy-to-use solution, Deltek Costpoint CRM provides a single shared source of information for opportunities, contacts, customers and contracts. BAE Systems leverages the unified data within Costpoint CRM for accurate insight into opportunities and to make better bid decisions. Costpoint CRM provides information on historical win/loss, financial and resource data within the system to prioritize the most important bids, and decline to bid on those projects that are less attractive. Streamlined processes in the system allow business development to work more closely with both the contracts and financial teams as contracts are awarded. Finally, the business development team is better prepared for audits because they now have accurate data in one place.
“Before our decision to implement the solution, there was never a single source for this data that could be completely trusted,” Zelkowitz said. “Today, we're saving a lot of time and effort by having one unified business development database. Costpoint CRM is opportunity-centric, not contact-centric, which is why it is a great fit for government contractors.”
About BAE Systems
Overview: Provider of systems for a wide range of military and commercial applications, focusing on electronics, information, controls, and power management. Its offerings include integrated information technology and technical and professional service solutions for the U.S. national security and federal civilian markets.
Headquarters: Arlington, VA
| The Deltek Advantage |
The implementation of Deltek Costpoint CRM enabled BAE's business development team to:
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