Peraton Successfully Integrates Complex Acquisitions with Deltek Costpoint

An interview with Darin Cabral, SVP, Sector Finance and Integration and Jane Montecillo, Director of Consulting Services at Peraton

Formed in 2017, Peraton based in Herndon, VA is a national security company serving missions of consequence across the space, intelligence, cyber, defense, homeland security, citizen security and health markets. Through various acquisitions over the last several years, they now have more than 150 offices across the United States. Peraton integrated Deltek’s Costpoint across its acquired organizations to improve business performance and streamline operations within one single platform. Moving to Costpoint introduced a level of automation Peraton did not have with legacy systems and provided an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that could successfully support their large enterprise of over 17,000 employees.

“We are certainly happy with the choice that we’ve made in terms of the platform that we’re using,” said Darin Cabral, Senior Vice President of Sector Finance and Integration for Peraton. The platform he’s referring to is Deltek Costpoint, the project-based ERP solution Peraton implemented across the board with every one of their acquired businesses. Cabral, who served in leadership capacities for one of the acquired companies, relayed that to fully understand the complexity of this effort and how Costpoint has positively impacted the business you need to look at the history of how Peraton was built.

Last year, Peraton purchased Perspecta, which was comprised of three different organizations’ that had merged together in 2018. The three businesses included the U.S. Public Sector's (USPS) business from DXC Technology, and two other companies owned by private equity, and Peraton owner, Veritas Capital: Vencore and KeyPoint Government Solutions.

Following the merger, Perspecta embarked on a journey to get all three companies running as a single entity. “Each one of these companies were running on a different ERP system when they came together. Vencore was running a legacy instance of Deltek Costpoint, DXC’s USPS business was running on SAP, and KeyPoint Government Solutions, was running on NetSuite,” shared Cabral.

It was important that Perspecta move towards presenting a unified brand and experience to its customers and employees. They wanted to operate as one team, not three disparate companies, and that meant everyone utilizing one set of systems. “It was clear it was going to be Deltek Costpoint from the beginning,” said Cabral.

“There was no real consideration for any other solution.” He added, “Deltek Costpoint is a fit for purpose, general ledger accounting system for government contracting. We moved an almost $3 billion business off of our SAP platform and put it into the Deltek Costpoint platform, because Costpoint provides all the controls and efficiencies to manage a government contracting business end-to-end, from a financial perspective.”

A Complex Migration

In early 2019, a plan was developed that would take 15 months to integrate KeyPoint and USPS into what was then the Vencore version of Deltek Costpoint. It was a large integration that had to move quickly.

Once integration began there were typical challenges along the way but overall the project moved smoothly. “I think a major piece of why things were successful is that Deltek has been a partner with us every step of the way,” said Jane Montecillo, Director of Consulting Services at Peraton. “We were always able to escalate issues quickly and get them addressed and even prevent some issues from occurring. Deltek brings strong resources but also has the tentacles into the consulting network to pull in the strongest functional experts and data migration consultants, and that's a differentiator.”

With the project nearly complete and go-live set for April 1, 2020, some unexpected challenges hit that no one could have ever seen coming. “We were in the last month of preparing for the actual production migration, when the pandemic happened. So, we ended up going live virtually with all employees working remotely, which I don't think had been done before,” said Montecillo.

Benefits Beyond What Anyone Imagined

Interestingly, the timing of implementing to Deltek Costpoint as the world was shifting to a remote environment ended up being a great benefit. “The fact that we were getting the same time-tracking system and at the very forefront of this global pandemic, meant we could for the first time understand in a very cohesive single format, single structure way, where all of our resources were deployed and what they were working on. We were able to react to the impacts the pandemic had in terms of alternate work schedules, alternate use of vacation and other benefits to compensate for missed time associated with COVID-19. Our ability to react to our customers was hugely magnified by our ability to be in one time-tracking system,” explained Cabral.

The benefits of Deltek Costpoint also made a significant difference in business operations, shares Cabral. “Costpoint automates a lot of what we had to do manually before. If you think about what we were doing in our legacy SAP environment, tasks were prone to human error and prone to transposition of numbers, but now, with automating the revenue calculations the entire environment is streamlined, automated, and as a result much stronger.”

A Second Migration Becomes Necessary

But while all this was happening with Perspecta, Peraton was being built through key acquisitions from 2017 through 2021. In December 2020, Peraton announced they would buy the IT services business from Northrop Grumman and in February 2021 they announced they would purchase Perspecta.

During that time, Peraton was on a rapid transition to close both transactions and create an integrated Peraton environment. Once again, the decision was made to align these businesses with Deltek Costpoint as the platform of choice. “We closed the Perspecta transaction May 6, 2021, and found ourselves yet again on a lightning fast path to get to a single system environment by January 1, 2022.”

The level of complexity around the second migration was definitely challenging. As Montecillo explains, there were a total of four different enterprise resource planning systems and environments, and the database that each one of them used was different. There were also both on-premises systems as well as data being managed in the cloud. Additionally, there were impacts from the global pandemic to contend with. “We were never able to bring everybody together for even a few days to talk through the process, everything was done remotely.”

While the second migration also had a very aggressive timeline, both teams worked together to make the project a success, explains Cabral. “We thought the Perspecta timeline was crazy, and then we looked at the Peraton timeline, and it was twice as fast. I think the fact that Deltek was able to bring back some of the resources that worked on the first integration really helped ─ they were fantastic.” Montecillo added, “I was a little bit concerned about the Peraton integration, because it was so big and so quick, but it turned out to be absolutely terrific.”

Strong Partnership Yields Solid Results

With the second migration successfully completed early this year, the Peraton team continues to be pleased with the partnership. “Deltek certainly didn't walk away once we had implemented our solution. You never fix everything the first time around when you go-live, so there's a bunch of clean-up exercises and Deltek has stuck with us every step of the way,” shared Cabral.

Perhaps most rewarding, however, Cabral said, is hearing the positive feedback. “I had a conversation with one of my sector CFOs from the legacy Northrop Grumman business, and asked, ‘How is the team doing now that they're learning the system?’ He shared, ‘There are some transitions, but there's no doubt that this is a much better system to use, implement and operate on a daily basis than what we're coming from.’”

As for the future, Cabral said “We will continue to optimize and expand our environments, as necessary, and continue to value Deltek's partnership.”