Customer Success Story
SI International
Premier Government contractor cites time and cost savings with Deltek GovWin™ Solution
The Challenge
With competition growing steadily throughout the government contracting industry, more and more solution providers are fully realizing the increasing importance of developing and optimizing best practices for business development. Reston, VA-based SI International is no exception. A 3,700-employee company with dozens of offices across the country, SI International is a provider of information technology and network solutions primarily to the federal government with a focus on IT modernization, defense transformation, homeland defense and mission-critical outsourcing. Since its inception in 1998, SI International has become a premier professional services company with a high-profile client base that includes the Department of Defense, Air Force Space Command, Army, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Agriculture and the intelligence community.
To increase SI International's competitive position in the marketplace, the company brought in new leadership in Sales and Marketing in early 2004. Paul Brubaker, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and Bill James, SRVP Business Development, were recruited to take SI International to the next level, bidding and winning larger contracts. Their first order of business was to develop a winning team and implement a solution that would facilitate their success and help refine their best practices processes.
Part of that winning team, marketing and sales business manager Donna Koch and proposal operations manager Dave Shaw were tasked with overseeing and managing the implementation and corporate adoption of Deltek GovWin, a business development solution designed specifically for federal contractors. They needed to migrate from an existing automated database solution that wasn't maturing and growing as the company grew.
According to Shaw, their legacy system had several drawbacks in how the system stored, managed and ultimately optimized SI International's business development opportunities.
“We could only view and analyze information according to a few select categories,” he said. “The system lacked a CRM focus, rendering it completely opportunity-based. Compared to relational, structured software like Deltek GovWin, (the legacy solution) was a flat system unable to maintain robust opportunity records.”
The Solution
After evaluating multiple solutions, the new team at SI International recognized Deltek GovWin as the enabler for forward-thinking new management to achieve profitability and market share goals. The company had also turned to Deltek in part because of the company's familiarity with the vendor's accounting software.
In 2001, SI International had begun using Deltek Costpoint, the back-end accounting solution at the core of the Deltek Enterprise suite, to manage the company's government-oriented financial and project accounting processes.
“We wanted to start fresh with GovWin and be using only live, viable opportunities,” Shaw explained. “So, before converting our employees from the legacy system to GovWin, we went back several years to eliminate all inactive data.”
According to Koch, both Shaw and she also wanted to figure out a new set of policies and procedures for the company regarding business development and capture processes and to align them with GovWin.
“There was limited structure associated with our previous system,” Koch said. “Information could be formatted in any way an employee felt like, making it significantly difficult to search for data, to analyze it and to process it quickly. As a result, quite a bit of time and effort was wasted — sometimes dozens of hours per week.”
Koch and Shaw finished the installation of GovWin in September 2004. By November, employees were using GovWin to enter live business development opportunities exclusively.
The Benefits
In just a year using the GovWin system, both Koch and Shaw have noticed several key benefits that include cost- and time-savings as well as an improvement in the quality of business development and capture data.
“It would be fair to say that between GovWin and the changes we have set forth in policy, that SI International has saved the cost of what one additional person on our administrative staff would be — an expense ranging anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 a year,” Shaw said.
Tasked with producing dozens of reports used to analyze win/loss ratios, viable opportunities and other key pipeline data, SI International used to spend more than 100 man hours a month generating and disseminating critical business development information across the enterprise. According to Koch, GovWin has helped to streamline the company's reporting functions, resulting in drastic time savings.
“The time we used to spend processing report requests has been reduced from a staggering 30 hours a week to just two hours a week,” Koch said. “I no longer have to go through 50 steps in order to get someone the report they want. I used to have to download to Excel to get the data I needed and manually reconcile each report line by line. Our previous solution simply couldn't sort and search the way GovWin can.”
“Because of GovWin, we have a more robust database where every business development opportunity is easily accessed and linked to related critical contact, event and activity data,” Shaw said.
| The Challange | The Solution | The Deltek Advantage |
| SI International needed to migrate from an existing automated database solution that wasn’t maturing and growing as the company grew. | Deltek GovWin was chosen as the enabler for forward-thinking new management to achieve profitability and market share goals. |
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In addition to reducing time associated with reporting processes, GovWin has also improved the quality of the critical opportunity data used to shape new business proposals and growth projections for the coming year. Information tracked, stored and managed in GovWin helps SI International accurately forecast active opportunities as well as track past performance information useful in optimizing the success of future bids.
“There is true structure now, and consequently our staff can make better-informed decisions based on this data when pursuing new opportunities.”
GovWin has also helped SI International to standardize and enforce a new set of business development procedures.
“We are very meticulous in how we have our business development staff enter new prospect information into the database,” Koch said. “We also ‘scrub” it constantly sending out a weekly list of out-of-date opportunities via reports — to maintain a uniform look and feel. We've created several alerts when an opportunity changes stages in the capture process and pretty soon we'll be able to eliminate most of the ‘scrubbing' processes, saving an additional two hours a week in time savings.”
The flexibility of the GovWin application, configuration and customization of data fields and tabs have also been key success factors for SI International. Shaw and Koch no longer have to solicit internal IT resources, pull developers off billable projects, or engage the supplier's software development team in order to maintain the data in the legacy system. Now, Koch and Shaw are able to spend more time developing and refining workflow processes that in turn help decrease operational costs and maximize the efficiency of the sales and business development staff.