8 PSA Features Coming in Costpoint 8 to Help with Better Project Delivery

With the release of Costpoint 8, we‘ve made several enhancements to our Professional Services Automation (PSA) capability to create an even more powerful solution that helps project teams identify and track billable resource information to improve resource forecasting and utilization, enabling faster billing and visibility into every aspect of project delivery. 

With Costpoint 8, we’ve improved the integration between Contract Management, Planning, Time & Expense, Business Intelligence (BI) and Deltek Talent Management to better manage key resource data across the entire project lifecycle.   This helps users determine and pursue the right opportunities for their business, optimize their existing resources with extensive resource planning capabilities, leverage time and expense data to better track estimated and actual costs against budgets, and ensure the skills and competencies of those resources are up-to-date by leveraging our talent integration.

With Costpoint PSA, users have all the information they need in real-time, from opportunity identification through to contract closeout. Our Smart AI provides analytics to help improve resource forecasting and planning, giving users complete visibility to every aspect they need for successful project delivery.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the new capabilities coming in Costpoint 8 that further enhance our PSA solution. 

1. Integrated organizational/project budgeting
   Greater visibility into costs is a key reason PSA is important to project delivery. Within Planning, we’ve integrated organizational and project budgeting to help provide a deeper look into how projects will impact an overall organizational budget. With this integration, users now have a better view of overall costs and can improve future forecasting by not only thinking about the overall budget but the impact of a particular project within the overall annual operating plan.
2. Resource Planning
   At the core of any PSA solution is extensive resource planning capability so organizations can focus on improved resource utilization. With Costpoint 8, we have updated the Budget By Resource application, enabling rescheduling the start and end dates of an assignment for a selected resource and reassigning budgeted hours from one resource to another, for an entire period or a specific date range. With these changes, users have improved flexibility to make updates to their resources and hours as needed, helping to stay in line with planned budgets.
3. Skills integration with Talent Management
   With this integration, users now have the ability to quickly search available resources for talent that has the specific skills needed for an opportunity. This can help save both time and money by quickly determining whether resources with proper skills are available and gives organizations the ability to understand if they have the right resources before an opportunity is even won. Plus, thanks to tighter integration with Talent Management organizations can use capabilities from Talent Management that allow skills to be updated in Costpoint as needed and kept current throughout the employee lifecycle.
   
   
4. Integrated Bid & Proposal Budgeting with Contract Management
   With Contract Management Integration, we have enabled the sharing of key information and created a link between an opportunity and planning. We’re giving users the ability to create a plan (or budget) for an opportunity an organization is going to bid on before actually bidding on it. This provides greater visibility into forecasts, while allowing for advanced planning and preparation for new projects. 
5. Time and Expense Integration with Planning
   Integration is central to PSA to ensure greater insight into budgets and forecasts. That’s why we are pulling time and expense data into Planning.. Project managers now have the visibility they need into both time and expense costs associated with projects before they may even be posted. This further enhances the ability for budgets and forecasted costs to remain aligned.
6. What-if modeling
   Within the Planning domain, we are also rolling out the ability for users to create and compare multiple versions of a project budget, allowing them to generate an unlimited number of “what if” scenarios. By providing organizations a method to create multiple budgets made up of different forecasts and assumptions, they can use data to better determine best outcomes and results.
7. Intelligent Resource Forecasting
   With Costpoint 8 we are delivering greater intelligence to our solutions than ever before. Finding the right resources to support projects no longer has to be a time consuming or costly endeavor. With the introduction of Intelligent Resource Forecasting, users can search for resources based on specific criteria and get a list returned that matches those criteria with a percentage of how well they are matched. This significantly helps an organization align the right resources to the right projects and can indicate if the available talent pool is aligned to the types of projects and skillsets most often needed.
8. Smart AI
   With Smart AI utilizing data within Costpoint BI (and in the future, Talent Management), resource managers will have a full picture of their project and staff utilization at the click of a button, including hours and utilization, both historical and planned. Having this data available in real-time helps users make more informed decisions, provides greater insights around effective resource utilization, assists with budgeting and forecasting and ensures users have the talent they need and resources to support new opportunities.

Ready to learn more? Register for Deltek Virtual Insight 2020 and take a deep dive into PSA, Costpoint 8, and much more!

Here are a few additional ways you can stay up-to-date with all the latest Costpoint 8 news:

• Costpoint Townhalls
• Deltek Virtual Insight
• Deltek Learning Zone
• The Costpoint Product Blog