Purposeful Innovation & Technology Trends

Deltek drives purposeful innovation by incorporating emerging technologies into our solutions and reimagining project success. We are continuously making our products easier to use and helping our customers achieve greater business efficiency and productivity.

Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a key force in digital transformation and a technology that many Deltek customers use to automate repetitive tasks. RPA “bots” can be created to mimic and integrate human interactions with digital systems to execute manual, time-intensive, high-volume and rule-driven business processes. By leveraging machine learning models, bots can learn from data over time, identify patterns and make behavioral decisions with minimal human intervention.

At Deltek, we view RPA as a complementary technology to our ERP solutions. By carrying out repetitive and tedious tasks, such as creating new projects, setting up new employees, processing invoices and even monitoring security clearance status, RPA can help companies stay competitive and gain efficiencies. We’ve partnered with Alirrium, a UiPath reseller, to automate repetitive and rule-based work while increasing speed and accuracy for both our professional services and government contractor customers.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning tools are rapidly becoming mainstream and more accessible to all businesses. By harnessing the data around the solutions, AI analyses and recommends how people can make better decisions for better outcomes.

We’re adding AI capabilities to our solutions to reduce manual intervention and human bias. By incorporating Machine Learning to interpret and catalog results, find hidden patterns in data and execute on decisions made by humans, project-based businesses are able to deliver better projects.

Deltek Acumen uses AI to help customers leverage past project performance data to better plan current and future actions. These predictive insights into a project’s outcome coupled with comparative analysis against like-projects helps fine tune project schedules to mitigate risk and increase likelihood of project success.

Natural Language Processing

Digital assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google respond to voice commands that help with simple tasks in our everyday lives. In the business world, such innovation can change how users interact with enterprise applications and increase ease of use, efficiency and productivity.

Deltek first introduced a similar Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology – Hey Deltek – as part of our Vantagepoint product in 2018. Hey Deltek enables fast, simple, natural language interaction with our products to navigate records, create reminders and edit information.

As we integrate Artificial Intelligence with NLP, Hey Deltek will evolve from passive, command-like interactions to proactively suggesting tasks to users by analysing past usage patterns and behaviors. For example, the system could remind a user to run a monthly report on a particular day or that it’s time to follow up with an account. Through these types of advancements, we will bring NLP capabilities to other parts of Deltek’s product portfolio.

Blockchain

Blockchain is an electronic, distributed ledger that can be openly shared among public or private members of a network. The technology creates a completely secure, unchangeable record of transactions, each one time stamped, encrypted and linked to the previous one.

At Deltek, we envision how private blockchain can be used with ERPs and how this emerging technology could fit into the partner and vendor ecosystem. We are working toward the notion that ERP systems could benefit from blockchain technology to streamline business operations with third parties. By leveraging blockchain’s secure distributed ledger capabilities, we foresee the ability to share transactions between companies and foster trust in the supply chain and true industry automation. Those records could then be used to automate systems, giving rise to the ability to automate end-to-end transactions between the companies and eliminating waste within the industry supply chain.

In 2019, we released the first version of the Costpoint Supplier Portal, which serves as a blueprint for other portals in Deltek solutions. As we build out our Supplier Portal technology, we will be looking to create a private blockchain solution that can be leveraged to create a more secure and trusted digital relationship between companies.

OCR/ICR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a software technology that converts typed, printed or handwritten characters into machine-encoded text that can be manipulated and used as a form of data entry. When OCR is paired with Machine Learning, it makes it more intelligent, and the result is Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR).

Deltek leverages ICR to enable users to automate their data entry by capturing their receipt images and uploading them directly into an expense report. Not only does ICR save time by automating mundane, daily tasks, it increases report accuracy while turning it into searchable, editable data. It is the perfect application for capturing paper-based or external documents such as expenses, business cards and invoices that need to be added to a company’s ERP. This makes the user experience more efficient and productive and eliminates wasted time on routine tasks.

UX/UI

Business software users are more sophisticated than ever—especially in today's diverse, multi-generational, digitally savvy and mobile workforce. As a result, organisations need to ensure the mission-critical tools they bring to their employees meet end-user expectations.

Deltek recognises the value of simplifying and improving our solutions, so we invested in a team of UX professionals specifically tasked with improving the user experience and incorporating tools and best practices to ensure we are providing a positive interaction. We are always looking for ways to reimagine functionality and leverage new technologies in ways that provide practical, usable and tangible value for our customers.

Cloud

As customers of increasing size and complexity, as well as smaller companies, choose to work within the cloud for cost efficiencies and systems security, the Deltek Cloud is evolving to stay ahead of customer needs. The mandate for security, privacy and flexibility is at an all-time high, and the Deltek Cloud provides a worry-free environment for our customers, enabling their IT teams to focus on internal strategic initiatives while remaining confident that Deltek will support them now and into the future. Most importantly, the Deltek Cloud helps our customers drive value for their businesses safely, securely and at scale.

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as Deltek's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) partners, Deltek Cloud customers benefit from extensive capacity, geographic reach and workload types. And the partnership gives our customers the assurance that their software, infrastructure and information is handled with industry best practices in mind.