How CACI Created a Global Cost Management System with Deltek

What does it mean to support the U.S. Department of Defense?

For Paul Sample, Director of Operational Excellence, Tools and Support at CACI – a $5 billion company whose mission, enterprise technology and expertise play a vital role in our national – security safeguarding our troops, and enabling our government to deliver cost-effective and high-quality support for all Americans is a top priority.  

“When members of the military are going out to the field, the last thing they want to worry about is how they are going to be getting paid, or if there is going to be a glitch in the system?” said Sample. “So, there is a lot of pressure on program management within the government to deliver for the millions of military personnel that are using those systems.”

For that, the government turns to CACI – and CACI leverages Deltek products.

Utilizing Deltek Solutions to Help Support the Military

 

 

Founded in 1962, CACI has grown to more than 23,000 employees in over 120 locations around the globe. The company supports multiple verticals within the Department of Defense, and the U.S. federal government constitutes 95% of the firm’s business.

“One of our most significant programs using Deltek solutions is the largest PeopleSoft implementation in the world,” Paul said about the project, which affects more than a million users. “This implementation is modernizing the Army's HR system, and we're utilizing Deltek products to help provide reporting and analysis, so that our program managers can make key business decisions.”

CACI relies on a number of Deltek tools, including Deltek Costpoint and Deltek Cobra, to further efficiency and agility in the reporting and analysis in support of federal programs. An initial Cobra roll-out in 2017 supported 22 different cohorts, each with three to five programs and a minimum of two people as users, enabling a disciplined way to take on cost management. 

“A lot of people think of Cobra as an earned value management (EVM) tool. We looked at Cobra and recognized it can do more than just EVM. It can do global cost management for our company,” Paul said. “It integrates well with other Deltek products, and it also integrates with other commercial off-the-shelf products that we might be using internally in our company.”

The CACI team has been able to automate data from three business systems into Cobra, cutting three weeks of data setup and maintenance work down to just a few days. “Bringing in all the vital program-specific attributes to a Cobra environment significantly reduced time and duplicate data entry from a planning standpoint,” said CACI Senior Program Manager Samir Dhamsania. “It gives us a complete end-to-end disciplined way to streamline and do our cost planning so, at the end of the day, when the time comes, we have all the datasets that are available for us to do comprehensive reporting across the board.”

Cross-product integration – ranging, for example, from Costpoint to Cobra– is a critical component of successfully leveraging these tools, notes Dhamsania. “At the same time, behind the scenes, with Deltek support, we are able to bridge these tools together through automation. That allows us to bring a solution to address those specific needs.”

Both Paul and Samir credit their Deltek partnership as being critical to CACI’s success going forward. “One reason we like working with Deltek is they're innovative and they continue to grow with us as we're growing, and that's very important to our business,” said Paul. “As we're trying to be innovative, they are as well, and utilizing their products to try to improve our business model and help us grow, internally and externally.”