Expanded AI Capabilities and Improved Usability in Deltek Costpoint

The latest innovations for Deltek Costpoint are here! We’re excited to share with you the ways we’re continuing to serve the government contracting industry with expanded functionality and new additions that speed up everyday business processes.

The first quarterly release of 2024 provides greater visibility into projects and contracts by expanding our use of artificial intelligence (AI) and incorporating additional automation and useability improvements. By utilizing emerging technologies in our purpose-built ERP, we aim to help contractors increase productivity and efficiency by automating tasks, improve decision-making with in-depth and easy-to-access insights, and mitigate potential risks with AI-powered predictions.

Learn more about the game-changing features now available in Deltek Costpoint below.

Gain a Personal Assistant with Costpoint's Newest AI Functionality

While Deltek’s not new to the AI game, we aim to bring additional value to customers with each release by expanding our use of the latest technologies and building off past innovations.

This release brings a new digital assistant as we evolve our original application, Hey Deltek, which was released in 2020, and leveraged Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help users perform tasks and engage through voice commands such as entering time.

Now powered by generative AI (GenAI), our Costpoint AI Assistant will provide end-users the ability to ask questions about contracts and projects and receive an answer based on relevant data available in Costpoint.

For example, a user can ask the assistant to show all currently pending sales orders or open timesheets, which you can then view quickly, all in one place. You can also get more details by asking specific questions about a contract or project, including period of performance or project status.

If you're concerned about a contract, you can ask the assistant to conduct a risk assessment of that project, and the assistant will pull the relevant contract details that point to areas of concern, helping users make more informed and quicker decisions. 

Based on the response to your question, Deltek Costpoint users can then drill down into specific screens and data to validate the results.

The assistant can also help initiate a follow-up task, such as drafting an email or initiating a call using NLP and voice recognition to a project manager outlining key details they need to be aware of—supporting increased collaboration and communication between teams.

With future releases, the Costpoint AI Assistant’s ability to support your team will continue to grow with additional capabilities. But with any use of AI in our government contracting solutions, we continue to keep compliance requirements and security top of mind.

Utilize Smart Summaries™ to Report on Contracts Quicker

Our latest release also brings users the ability to create Contract Smart Summaries with the click of a button!

Whenever you or someone on your team is tasked to report on contract status, our new GenAI-enabled summary will cut down the time it takes to gather basic information, including contract and customer names, key financial metrics, period of performance, and subcontractor data—gathering relevant details and producing a short brief that outlines the information.

Additional Smart Summaries™ capabilities will be released throughout the year, so stay tuned for more ways that you can use AI to quickly access and summarize key information, reducing manual searches and data compilation that you’d typically need to do to generate a similar report!

Enter and Submit Time via Interactive Emails

With Costpoint 8.2, we reimagined the way government contractors collect their employees’ time data while still maintaining compliance controls.

Our solution supports more than 2 million users as an integrated and mobile time-tracking solution, helping to ensure proper delegation and allocation of labor costs while keeping businesses DCAA audit-ready. One of the key ways we helped to make tracking employees’ time less cumbersome was with the release of Interactive Emails, which gives managers the ability to send automatic email reminders to their employees.

Employees receive an email reminding them that their time is due and can then enter their time directly into the email, without ever having to log in to Costpoint.

With this release, users can now submit their timesheet via email, in addition to entering their daily time. Once the timesheet is submitted, supervisors will get an automated email notification and can then approve the timesheet in that automated email —speeding up a process that every government contractor must already do weekly or bi-weekly.

This innovation is one of the first in the market, bringing a new way for contractors to enter time while continuing a longstanding commitment to helping organizations remain DCAA-compliant.

Future plans are already in motion to continue expanding this capability as we bring additional ways to enter time in applications where employees already spend their time.

Adopting and Testing Features at Your Own Pace

Customers now have additional flexibility to test and adopt new features in Costpoint. 

While our aim is always to provide exceptional value for our customers by releasing new capabilities and innovation on a quarterly basis, we want to ensure users have the flexibility to test new features at their own pace. With our Manage Opt-In Features application, customers can view the available opt-in features, which will be disabled by default. Then, based on their own schedule, admins can enable individual features and test them in the application.

After the designated testing period, these features will be pushed live into a customer’s environment, bringing additional value and capabilities that support their everyday processes.

Streamline Daily Processes with Additional Usability Enhancements

Deltek delivered key useability enhancements with the release of Costpoint 8.2, including a re-imagined time entry experience. These new features and improvements provide an optimized experience, so users can quickly navigate to where they need to go and, once there, complete processes across fewer screens with fewer clicks. This Q1 release is furthering that mission with enhancements that provide more flexibility on how you access your data and navigate through Costpoint domains.

Here are a few highlights:

• Costpoint Projects PSR report now contains planning budget data, giving project managers increased visibility into project labor metrics.
• Costpoint Multicurrency allows firms to process transactions in currencies other than a firm’s functional currency. Now management of multicurrency data is even easier with new functionality that allows you to customize the generation of revaluation reports with the level of detail you require — whether in summary form or with expanded adjustment information.
• Costpoint CRM & Contracts has a more seamless navigation experience with additional hyperlinks added throughout and the ability to link existing PR/POs within the subcontract record without having to navigate out of the record.

Continuously Innovating to Support Government Contracting Success

The first release of 2024 brings the latest capabilities and newest uses of AI to support government contractors in delivering successful projects, but this is just the beginning as we continue to bring additional innovations throughout the year.

We will also be expanding the GenAI capabilities in subsequent Costpoint releases to drive additional user efficiencies based on real-life data.  

We look forward to continuing to support the industry with an innovative, purpose-built solution that can serve as the single source of truth while also delivering the AI-driven automations that bring more efficiencies to your projects.