How One of Germany's Best Employers, Campana & Schott, Got Even Better with Deltek Maconomy

Tweet it: 'Consulting firm Campana & Schott unlocks a single source of truth and enhances the user experience with Deltek Maconomy. '

An interview with Alexander Knoess, Director of Operations

At international management and technology consultancy Campana & Schott, success is defined by customer satisfaction. And to maintain its enviable 90% customer retention rate, its 500-employee strong workforce requires easy access to a diverse suite of operational tools and customer insights.

But after more than 30 years of international growth and a shift away from regional teams to focus on global business units, it became clear that Campana & Schott’s disparate operational environment would struggle to scale in step with the consultancy’s continued growth.

At the same time, many of the company’s employees struggled with slow access to day-to-day solutions and were diverted from value-adding tasks by manual processes and data entry. While these issues may have been acceptable for the time, Campana & Schott’s leaders could see these challenges would one day impact customer satisfaction.

To help empower its employees to drive growth and delight customers the company deployed a single, standardized project-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution with Deltek Maconomy.

Modernizing a Top Ten Employer

To learn more about Campana & Schott's digital transformation efforts and how it came to use Deltek Maconomy, we spoke with Alexander Knoess, Director of Operations.

"We started evaluating options for a new ERP system a year before the pandemic," says Alexander. "And while there was some initial pushback regarding timing, we knew we couldn't wait any longer. We had to start consolidating our sprawl of Excel spreadsheets, self-developed tools, and partner software to create a single source of truth."

After assessing the competition, Campana & Schott selected Deltek Maconomy to join up its disparate solutions on a single project ERP platform, reduce manual interfaces, and achieve integrated real-time reporting.

"We’re one of the top ten employers in Germany,” says Alexander. “But we can’t rest on our laurels. To attract the best talent with the right digital skills, we need to show that we’re investing in modern project management tools – not just to make their lives easier so they can deliver better customer outcomes, but to encourage innovation too.”

To help educate teams and encourage adoption, the firm built a large project team focused on change management and worked with a Deltek consulting team to hold workshops and training in local language.

“Deltek delivered workshops in German, as some of our team members don’t speak English,” says Alexander. “We also provided training resources such as on-demand videos, and our project teams can field user queries remotely using Microsoft Teams. In fact, employees can even explore historical queries to get faster answers.”

A Single Source of Success

Since deploying Deltek Maconomy, Campana & Schott has started building that all-important single source of truth, improving tools and data accessibility, visibility and usability.

“We’ve improved our teams' user experience. It’s now much faster to submit expenses and timesheets on any device. It’s great for management too, as we can now monitor and manage projects from a single window.”

The firm uses Power BI for its reporting suite. It integrates both Power BI and Maconomy through its data warehouse to create stronger, more accurate reports.

“We’re transferring data out of Maconomy into our data warehouse,” says Alexander. “By blending historical data with current insights, we can better analyze and respond to emerging trends, improving strategic decision-making.”

Campana & Schott is also using Deltek Maconomy to enhance its skills management database to ensure every project is assigned the right talent with the right skills.

“By combining Deltek Maconomy with our old skills database, we can better map skills to every employee. This lets us balance supply and demand and anticipate upcoming project demands to ensure the right people are available.”

Three Innovative Goals for the Future

Since going live with Deltek Maconomy less than a year ago, Campana & Schott has found that its new project ERP can do much more than connect disparate tools and spreadsheets.

Alexander shares with us three upcoming developments the firm hopes to achieve with Deltek Maconomy in the future.

1. Reduce manual process interfaces
   “Over time, we want to reduce the presence of manual interfaces. We also want to make some big process improvements to help us achieve truly integrated end-to-end processes – everything from sales leads to invoicing and employee onboarding to retirement.”
2. Integrate real-time reporting
   “Integrating real-time reporting is on the agenda. In the long-term, we’ll keep adding to our BI capabilities to help create a super powerful reporting layer over Deltek Maconomy. This will also give our people the flexible, self-service capabilities to analyze data and work more efficiently.”
3. Attract and retain the best talent
   “You need to build a culture that people want to be a part of, including giving them the technology they need to do their best work – and I believe Deltek Maconomy will play a big role in achieving that.”

An ERP For All Your Functions and Processes

Deltek ERP solutions help project-based organizations get the holistic visibility they need to improve collaboration, project management, and decision-making.

Learn more about how Deltek Maconomy can support growth by connecting your people, projects, and processes in one place.