Summary
After more than a decade on Deltek Vision, Pierce Engineers, a structural engineering firm, upgraded to Deltek Vantagepoint with the help of partner Stambaugh Ness—completing the transition in just six months. Year-to-date revenue grew by 58% and visibility improved dramatically through dashboard-driven insights. Vantagepoint now serves as the single tool connecting staff, managers, and clients across the full project lifecycle.
Project Success
- Increased Revenue: Expanded their business to increase year-to-date revenue by 58% by upgrading to Vantagepoint.
- 360-Degree View: Increased visibility over every aspect of the firm’s projects with Vantagepoint dashboards.
- Connected Community: Delivered successful projects to unite stakeholders and clients through simplified workflows.
Pierce Engineers is a 60-person structural engineering firm headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The firm maintains professional and structural engineering licenses across the U.S.
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Helping Employees, Clients and Communities Realize Their Vision
Pierce Engineers is a structural engineering firm with more than 30 years of diverse technical expertise. Headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with offices in Madison, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois, Pierce Engineers maintains professional and structural engineering licenses across the U.S.
The established company covers multiple markets and offers a wide variety of services including structural design of concrete, structural steel, wood frame structures, cold-formed metal framing systems and foundation systems. They specialize in restoration services to concrete, masonry and waterproofing and protection projects, and provide facility maintenance plans and construction document management.
But this Midwest firm does more than just help its clients, says Pierce Engineers’ Principal and Controller, Jill Berenz: “We help our employees realize their vision through career planning at Pierce Engineers. We help our clients realize their vision of successfully completed projects. And we help our community realize its vision through giving back.”
The Common Challenges of Professional Services
For architecture and engineering (A&E) firms like Pierce Engineers, the main business objectives are winning work, optimizing resource allocation, delivering successful projects and improving cash flow.
Yet, regardless of size, market and specialty, architecture and engineering firms face similar challenges: staffing challenges, outdated or manual processes and increasing profitability.
Industry-Based ERP Upgrade Benefits All Phases of the Project Lifecycle
Pierce Engineers had been using Deltek Vision for more than a decade and decided to upgrade to Deltek Vantagepoint in late 2020 to modernize its system. The firm started working on upgrading to Vantagepoint with Deltek partner Stambaugh Ness in January 2021 and completed their upgrade just six months later.
Deltek Vantagepoint, an all-in-one enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, provides a wide array of new features and more functionality—including a fresh, modern interface that is accessible anywhere and reimagined workflows to allow firms to spend more time delivering projects. This intuitive solution is built specifically for project-based businesses just like Pierce Engineers. It helps professional service firms improve visibility, boost productivity, enhance collaboration and increase profitability while giving them a complete view of their business with robust dashboards and resource management.
Jill explains how the team uses Deltek Vantagepoint at Pierce Engineers: “The project lifecycle is key. We start by entering a proposal into Vantagepoint. Once that is won, we easily convert it to a project. From there, our project managers use resource planning to staff those projects. We can then edit contracts or make any modifications within the project hub.”
“Our staff use timesheets and expense reports to record working hours on projects, our accounting staff use project invoicing to bill our clients for the work that we’ve done and we wrap it all up through reporting.”
A Time-Saving Solution that Connects People to Projects
For Pierce Engineers, Deltek Vantagepoint provides a better user experience for project managers, giving them increased visibility over every aspect of the firm’s projects.
“When it comes down to our project managers, it’s all about one word: dashboards,” says Jill. “Dashboards give us the 360-degree view that our project managers are looking for. They don’t want multiple clicks. They want their information right at their fingertips.”
Upgrading from Deltek Vision to Deltek Vantagepoint has also helped Pierce Engineers save time through a single-source solution that provides teams with information on everything from contracts to costs and collections.
Jill explains that the solution unites all the project stakeholders and simplifies workflows to help ensure the teams deliver successful projects. “Deltek Vantagepoint is the one tool that connects our staff, our managers and our clients to our projects. It streamlines our support tasks so that our engineers can focus on what they do best: designing structures and helping our clients realize their vision for successful projects completed on time and effectively.”
By providing a complete view of the company in a single place, Vantagepoint helps project-based firms improve efficiency, productivity and profitability by making better, more informed decisions to drive the business forward.
This was exactly the experience for Pierce Engineers: upgrading from Vision to Vantagepoint helped give the A&E firm deeper insights into monthly project revenue estimates, enabling them to expand their business and increase year-to-date revenue by 58%. It was this success with Deltek software that earned the firm a 2022 Deltek MVP Award in the Architecture & Engineering category.
Deltek Vantagepoint is the one tool that connects our staff, our managers and our clients to our projects. It streamlines our support tasks so that our engineers can focus on what they do best: designing structures and helping our clients realize their vision for successful projects completed on time and effectively.
Building a Foundation to Realize Their Vision
“We’ve gotten through the short-term planning and now we need to move on to long-term planning,” says Jill. “Deltek Vantagepoint has the capability that we need for long-term planning. We just need to invest the time and figure out what will work for our project managers and our firm.”
