How CDG is Transforming Their Project Management Process with Deltek

Editor's Note: The following interview with CDG Engineers & Associates was conducted in November 2019. Deltek understands that current events may impact how this interview is perceived, and while not wanting to appear insensitive or unaware of the business climate, we felt it was appropriate to share our customer’s story in this blog.

An Interview with Brad Bowman, Information Systems Manager, CDG Engineers & Associates  

CDG Engineers & Associates knew they had to embrace digital transformation in order to meet their goal of centralizing and developing their document management system. With the implementation of Deltek, CDG was able to consolidate their disparate systems and processes into one company-wide project management system, resulting in their most successful year on record. We sat down with Brad Bowman, Information System Manager at CDG Engineers & Associates, to learn more.

Q: How does Deltek improve CDG’s document management processes?

Brad Bowman: Prior to implementing Deltek Project Information Management (PIM) CDG lacked a unified document management strategy. We had another system in place however, it wasn't being utilized very well, and nearly half of the business wasn’t using the system at all. The half that were using it, did so primarily for email management and not for managing other types of documents. So we came to a crossroads, we knew we had to either invest the time and money into training people on how to use the system correctly and spend money to refresh the infrastructure for it, or we needed to look at something else.

As part of this process we considered several options and Deltek ticked all the boxes for us in what we were looking for. It was a solution that we felt would aid us in our goal of centralizing and developing our document process – standardizing what needed to be standardized. Instead of having seven offices doing things seven different ways, we could utilize the power of templates in PIM to create a unified way of doing things and have everybody on the same page all the time.

Q: What key product differentiators contributed to your decision to choose Deltek PIM?

Brad Bowman: We have over 130 employees throughout the state of Alabama in seven different offices. PIM helps us collaborate between offices by centralizing our documents and enabling us to manage and collaborate on documents across geographically diverse office locations.

PIM was our choice for document management because of the template capabilities, the standardization and ease of use of the product, the powerful search functionality, and the ability to tag documents. It makes our jobs much easier.

There are multiple ways to search for data, allowing project managers to find documents within seconds, as opposed to the craziness of before. There is an integration with Deltek Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to streamline the process and reduce duplicate entries, and improve practices for adding new clients, projects and records. 

One of the big things that project managers consistently talk about is the version history and control. That is a very popular feature in PIM, because we can see the process of creating a document, and see exactly how many times it's been edited, who edited it, and what was done in each of those revisions. And then, if necessary, we can easily roll back to a previous version if we wanted to. So that's a very powerful feature that our people really love. 

The automated workflows are also amazing, they allow us to quickly go through an approval process and an approver can either accept or reject the request. This too is a powerful feature with a lot of functionality that we're really just beginning to utilize in its full capability.

Standardizing and Managing Projects to Drive Success with Deltek

 

 

Q:  How does Deltek help drive CDG’s business success?

Brad Bowman: We consider Deltek a strategic partner because we have so much time and effort invested into the Deltek products that we use — Deltek ERP and Deltek PIM for document management and project management. Those two pieces of software are really the cornerstone of our project management process, and without them we'd have to start over from square one. We've spent the last two years refining the process based around PIM, and have come to a much more streamlined, standardized and better way of managing projects and generating the revenue that we need in order to be successful.

When you talk to the people that are involved with these products every day, the project managers love PIM, they think it makes their life a lot easier. It was somewhat of a challenge up front, but we let them know it was an investment. You invest a little bit of time up front to get the document into PIM, you create this data about this document, and then that metadata helps you in the future when you need to come back to that document. It's all sorted by the entity, so we can easily see every document associated with a project, with a particular contact, or a particular organization.

Q: What's next for CDG and the company's growth?

Brad Bowman: In 2018, CDG had its best year financially ever, and I think part of that was because of our successful implementation of PIM in 2017, and because of the changes that facilitated in our project management practices. We're looking to have a phenomenal year again this year, and we expect that to continue on into the foreseeable future. We want to grow and continue to expand outside of the state of Alabama. So we expect to continue to grow our employee base, our customer base, and we want to continue to win bigger, better clients and bigger,better projects.