Customer Success Story
Fullhouse Media

Interactive marketing agency improves data reliability and cash flow with Deltek Vision^®

Overview

An interactive, project-based agency specializing in B2B, consumer and event-driven sales and marketing communications, Fullhouse Media carries an impressive roster of clients including Miller Brewing Company, Midwest Airlines and Insinkerator. Established in 1989, the Milwaukee-based firm offers a full range of innovative services including software applications, web site creation, and promotional videos.

A thriving, successful, full-service marketing agency at almost 60 employees and $10 million in 2005 total revenue, Fullhouse has grown by 20 percent in the past two years. The firm began an aggressive growth track in the early 2000s, expanding into new industries and taking on several new projects while juggling an increasing workload. As a result, Fullhouse began to search for an enterprise solution to manage the growing firm's projects, employees and accounting functions while improving efficiency and productivity.

The Challenge

Fullhouse turned to Deltek Vision in late 2003, a decision that Controller Jan Grimes said culminated from mounting frustration over several different non-integrated databases of information the agency kept to manage their accounting, client relationship management (CRM), project management and business development needs. These systems included a homegrown custom intranet page that collected basic contact data and project opportunities, as well as several commercially available timekeeping and accounting solutions.

“Simply put, because these systems could not speak to each other, there was a complete lack of trust in our numbers at that time,” Grimes said. “If you pulled the same project data from two different databases, you would always end up with two different pieces of information. Without data we could trust or the means to effectively use it, we had little visibility into our firm's performance, which was hindering our ability to make decisions that would drive growth.” Due to the multiple disparate systems, Fullhouse also had to manually calculate certain critical functions, such as revenue generation, on an Excel spreadsheet—a labor intensive and potentially inaccurate process. “This situation lasted for several years before we decided enough was enough, and that we could not afford to deal with the issue any longer if we were to successfully scale up,” Grimes said.

The Solution

After evaluating several different options, including Microsoft Dynamics Solomon, Fullhouse selected Deltek Vision, a comprehensive enterprise solution that improves performance, streamlines operations and helps firms win more business by integrating end-to-end business processes. In particular, the software's robust web-based architecture, combined with intuitive performance reporting and project management functionality, were key factors in the decision to license Vision. “Vision was really the best fit for our business model,” Grimes said.

According to Grimes, the entire implementation took just six months and included a nearly effortless data conversion.

The Benefits

Today Fullhouse is utilizing Vision to manage nearly 1,500 active projects via integrated project management, CRM, time and expense and accounting functionality.

According to Grimes, data reliability has drastically improved across the entire company since the initial implementation of Vision two years ago. “We have an unprecedented level of confidence in the system now,” Grimes said. “Vision allows us to drill down into each project, capture and report on key project data whenever we need it. Now anyone in the company can run a report on just a moment's notice and easily access the most up-to-date, real-time information that they require to ensure our projects are staying on track and on budget.”

Nadya Mottani, Network Administrator for Fullhouse, said that Vision has effectively streamlined the firm's critical business processes. “Project management tasks and business processes were not well coordinated or integrated before Vision,” Mottani said. “Now processes are well-defined. For instance, we have experienced tremendous strides in the change order area. For any billable project, as the scope of each project begins to expand, we can now consistently track and manage each change as part of the original project—something we were not able to accomplish using disparate systems before. Vision has essentially created a best practice for the change order process.”

Fullhouse's cash flow and billing processes have also improved under Vision. “Because Vision is so configurable and flexible, we have been able to set up calendars for our projects' billing forecasts, which has greatly improved our cash flow as a whole,” Grimes said. “There were times in the past when things might slip through the cracks in regards to billing, but that does not happen anymore. Vision truly helps us maximize our monthly cash flow, helping our business thrive as we grow.”

“Vision allows us to drill down into each project, capture and report on key project data whenever we need it,” Grimes said.

Additionally, both Grimes and Mottani agree that Vision's web-based architecture has significantly improved the company's overall productivity, allowing remote employees the ability to access the system to access and enter critical project information real-time, from anywhere. Since implementing Vision, Fullhouse has also seen dramatic time-savings across the board, said Mottani. “We spend half the amount of time we used to on tasks such as timekeeping. Even more importantly, Vision allows us to re-focus our time and energy on analyzing our project data and making critical business decisions, and less upon administrative functions and data guesswork,” she said.

“We can no longer use ‘bad' data as an excuse for anything,” Grimes said. “Vision has restored our measure of accountability as well as our faith in our data.”

Although Fullhouse does not currently utilize all of Vision's functionality and features, the firm plans to add more modules to their operations in the near future. “We recently bought Deltek's purchasing module and also plan to evaluate Deltek's document management capabilities,” Grimes said.