Unlock Your Growth Potential with Deltek AI and Automation

With challenging market trends impacting government contracting over the past few years—skyrocketing inflation, the pressure to avoid a recession and uncertainty amidst a new administration coming in 2025— contractors have responded by reprioritizing their strategies to become more competitive, win more business and grow. With the focus on looking inward and trying to find as much efficiency as possible, it’s no wonder they’re looking to AI and automation to optimize and improve existing processes. By optimizing processes that cut labor costs and improving business performance on contracted projects, businesses can position themselves competitively with proven past performance, increasing the likelihood of winning future business. 

Deltek's suite of government contracting solutions pairs purpose-built workflows, AI-powered capabilities and automation to help government contractors navigate these challenges and grow their businesses efficiently. As learned from Clarity, 80% of contractors are already or planning to use AI for internal operations and processes. These solutions enhance productivity, accuracy, and project success within the solutions to arm employees with time savings directly in the solutions they already have embedded in their workflows every step of the way.

Read on to learn how Deltek AI and Automation capabilities make the project lifecycle smarter to revolutionize how government contractors work – enabling them to unlock their growth potential.

Build a Healthy Pipeline and Improve Win Rates

Increased competition and pricing challenges in today’s inflationary environment are ranked as the top two business development challenges facing contractors. Monitoring potential competitors and any changes to the contract is more important now than ever. This is leading 68% of organizations to evaluate new markets, whether working with new agencies or broadening their offerings to increase their total addressable market and continue to meet their growth goals. A proactive sales development strategy enhanced by AI can revolutionize how organizations find and secure new business. It can speed up lead identification, market research, pricing analysis, and proposal development for strategic growth decisions.

GovWin IQ, Deltek’s market intelligence solution, helps you identify leads up to five years before RFPs are released. Smart Search makes it easy to find proactive leads by allowing you to describe the types of opportunities you’re interested in and then return results with AI-applied filters. By combining early visibility and relevant searches with AI-powered Smart Fit Scores, you can confidently target best-fit leads based on your company's award history. Since award data is public, Smart Fit Scores also help identify top-ranking competitors or potential partners.

Once a lead is identified, research begins—learning about the buyer, analyzing competitors, and qualifying the details to ultimately make a bid/no-bid decision. 80% of small businesses, in particular, are spending more than an hour on research-related business development tasks. Smart Summaries™ simplify complex information about opportunities, agencies, awards, or companies, guiding your market research and pursuit strategy. With Ask Dela, your AI-powered digital assistant in GovWin IQ, you can quickly search opportunity details and dense government documents to support your qualification process. Then, generate expertly prompted proposal outlines directly from source documentation such as RFIs, RFPs and amendments. Bringing outlines into your pursuit process early on reduces risk of disqualification and rework by aligning your team early and anchoring your pursuit strategy to a strategic narrative. At every stage, you need to think about compliance. To make sure proposals meet critical requirements, use Visible Thread’s complimentary compliance matrix from directly on the opportunity notice. As you get into drafting the proposal, you can send the RFP or RFQ from GovWin IQ to SalesFed and generate a Pink Team proposal draft in a matter of hours.

A critical part of proposal planning and research is pricing-to-win. With the help of AI-driven capabilities and purpose-built automation, contractors can better manage proposal cost, pricing and compliance data to deliver more profitable pricing proposals. ProPricer, our proposal pricing solution, helps with labor and material estimating. Simply pull material data from Costpoint Procurement, to populate the Bill of Materials (BOM) in ProPricer. By pairing ProPricer and BOE Pro, our Basis of Estimate software, you can automate the capture process to instantly translate Basis of Estimate (BOE) justification text to priced inputs, saving you weeks of time reformatting data to reduce your current manual processes substantially. Ask Dela™ can be used across products to help you find the features and functions you need to do the job even faster.

With AI-driven capabilities and purposeful innovation, you can ensure you’re pursuing best-fit leads, with more time to refine go/no-go decisions, craft buyer-focused proposals faster, and optimize your price-to-win strategy.

Centralize Projects, People, and Finances into a Single Source of Truth

Winning a contract is just the beginning. Effective project management and cost control are essential for successful contract execution. However, estimating and monitoring budgets and schedules while maintaining quality standards and FAR/DFARs compliance remains an ongoing challenge. By automating key processes between teams, AI can help you successfully re-engineer processes that reduce human error, cut labor costs and improve cost control.

Deltek solutions integrate and automate the management of your projects, from initiation to cost and time tracking, and risk mitigation. Start by easily sending vendor information, agency contacts, and contract information from GovWin IQ to Costpoint and, upon award, begin tracking costs and billing faster and more accurately. After you’ve initiated the project from Costpoint Capture & Contract Management, AI and automation capabilities in Costpoint reduce the burden of managing the project, people and finances.

Cost control is one of the biggest factors impacting project profitability. With increasing profitability as the number one finance challenge facing small businesses in Clarity, the impact of proper time-tracking can’t be overlooked. Time-tracking is a crucial component for delivering successful projects within compliance and a nuanced aspect of business in government contracting. Deltek’s AI and innovative automation capabilities make time and expense headaches a thing of the past – allowing your users to track their billable hours however they like by bringing the power of Costpoint to the applications and places where they are already working. Users can easily enter time by responding to an email reminder in Outlook, or leverage Ask Dela to enter time in Costpoint or from Microsoft Teams. And for firms with a global workforce, AI-powered predictive timesheets in Replicon Time Tracking enable compliance with the variety of complex labor laws that differ by location. By providing a variety of ways for every end user to accomplish these daily tasks, and make it as easy as possible by bringing it to the places where they are already working—you can increase productivity, enhance employee satisfaction and ensure compliance.

If, at any stage, a change occurs or your project scope shifts—which we know happens often, especially on large, multi-year contracts—the AI capabilities in Deltek’s PPM solutions can help you manage those changes and mitigate risks for successful project execution. Cobra and PM Compass work together to help you optimize program management and comply with EVM requirements by improving project visibility and control, while the AI-powered Narrative Score feature in both products provide variance analysis report narratives with detailed explanations, impacts and corrective actions you can take before issues arise.

Automating workflows with Deltek’s AI and innovative automation in project management, cost control, and risk analysis processes reduces manual inefficiencies and input errors, enhancing accuracy, productivity and decision-making.

Find and Retain Top Talent

People are at the heart of any project-based business. Which makes getting the right people on the right projects essential for project success. However, finding and keeping qualified talent with the necessary clearances, certifications, or experience has proven to be quite challenging for government contractors. Specifically, 60% of small businesses struggle to find good candidates in the marketplace and attract diverse talent, which can cause them to put their projects at risk. AI-powered capabilities can drastically improve acquisition and retention efforts by generating job descriptions, predicting applicant fit, improving performance reviews, drafting learning paths, and allocating resources to the right projects.

With the Candidate Relevancy Score feature in Deltek Talent Management, AI-generated resume scoring helps recruiters predict if an applicant is a good fit for a requisition that can be automatically created from Costpoint. This seamless connection between Talent Management and Costpoint then allows you to put newly hired staff on billable projects faster. Once you've filled the gaps, AI-drafted learning paths and AI-supported performance reviews help you retain top talent by providing ongoing development and feedback.

As project and resource needs change, Costpoint and Replicon Resource Management can help you effortlessly manage and optimize planned and budgeted resources with real-time insights, intelligent recommendations, and skill-based matching. By utilizing our AI-driven resource management capabilities in Replicon Resource Management, you can expand the power of Costpoint's Budgeting and Forecasting capabilities to better allocate resources and optimize utilization to prevent cost overruns while ensuring compliance with workforce allocation and financial regulations.

When AI-powered capabilities are applied to your existing human capital management (HCM) and resource management processes, you can reduce turnover, ensure compliance, and improve cost efficiency across projects by streamlining talent acquisition, utilization and development.

Deliver Project Results & Simplify Compliance

Efficiently delivering on contract obligations with the financial visibility you need while managing costs, supply chain risks, and compliance is critical. As many organizations re-examine their existing processes to stay a step ahead of these challenges, AI can support project delivery by flagging compliance requirements, automate cost-tracking, and optimize the production floor.

Delivering a successful project requires careful planning to ensure contract milestones are being met. Smart Summaries™ in Costpoint provide quick access to important contract information, enabling faster decision-making to ensure a smooth delivery.

Invoicing and billing become a breeze with AI-powered capabilities like ICR for AP Vouchers and expenses, and AR/AP automation in Costpoint enable you to optimize cash flow while reducing entry errors. With Costpoint’s compliant framework, built-in controls, and out-of-the-box reports, Deltek’s AI and Automation capabilities help you gain efficiencies while meeting DCAA and FAR/DFARS requirements.

Costpoint Manufacturing, Deltek’s manufacturing ERP software, keeps pace with Industry 4.0 to help manufacturers embrace advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and automation and meets Material Management & Accounting Systems requirements. With a seamless connection between Costpoint Manufacturing and TIP Technologies, our quality management system (QMS) software, manufacturers can automate manual and paper-based processes, streamlining operations from managing Bills of Materials (BOM) and material requirements planning (MRP) to supply chain management, shop floor execution, and integrated quality management.

TIP Technologies automates quality processes, offering real-time visibility and control over production activities while ensuring consistent quality through automated inspections, approvals, and reporting. Deltek Shop Floor Time, our time and labor tracking software, further simplifies labor tracking by capturing labor hours accurately against project objectives and syncing them with Costpoint to enhance workforce performance and prevent cost overruns. Together, these solutions provide end-to-end visibility, empowering manufacturers to align decisions with project goals, maintain compliance, and achieve superior delivery outcomes. This integrated approach enables manufacturers to embrace Industry 4.0 with precision, driving smarter and more agile operations.

With streamlined financial processes and greater visibility, you can make better decisions that directly impact your priorities and project delivery success. Deltek AI and automation capabilities support the re-engineering of workflows to improve cashflow and digitize manufacturing processes for more agile project delivery within a compliant framework.

Enable and Accelerate Decision-Making

Throughout the life of a project, project managers are measuring and reporting on performance and reporting the results to the firm’s decision-makers. This goes beyond compiling project data to include arming your teams with relevant insights to make informed decisions to continually improve the process. By applying AI to these processes, you can make data retrieval and analysis effortless to accelerate informed decision making.

To measure success, Deltek offers AI-powered dashboards and reports that provide a 360° view of project, pipeline, and organizational health. By harnessing Dela capabilities in Costpoint to gather and interpret data with 300+ out-of-the-box reports and AI-powered data visualizations. These tools help you quickly evaluate performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions to improve processes and profitability across the entire project lifecycle. By making your data accessible and consumable, you gain insights that can be used to support short- and long-term growth.

AI and automation in our Deltek solutions make reporting on the health of your projects easier, allowing your team to monitor project details more closely and course-correct as needed. By making data more actionable, you can make informed business decisions that support your bottom line.

Have Confidence in Deltek’s Commitment to Data Security

While you’ve seen evidence of how Deltek’s AI and automation capabilities can improve project success and foster growth for your firm, any discussion about AI in the government contracting industry begs the question of data security. You can rest assured that Deltek is committed to staying current on evolving regulations, so we maintain rigorous cybersecurity and compliance controls within our technology.

Increase Project Success & Organizational Growth with Deltek AI & Automation

Leveraging AI from opportunity identification to closeout throughout the entire project lifecycle can increase project success, make your processes more efficient and make your firm more attractive to future opportunities. By leveraging the variety of AI and automation capabilities in Deltek solutions, you can streamline workflows, enhance decision-making, and drive business growth efficiently. These tools not only improve productivity and accuracy but also ensure compliance and cost efficiency, positioning your organization for sustained success in a competitive market. These capabilities position Deltek customers to reap the rewards as 82% of those that participated in the Clarity study expect their use of Deltek AI and automation capabilities to help them increase win rates for the coming year.

Deltek’s story begins in the government contracting industry, and we’ve continued our commitment to supporting this industry for more than 40 years because we believe that when government contractors have the right technology to make their lifecycles smarter and more efficient, we all benefit. As you embrace the power of AI to transform your business, we will continue to invest in bringing you the latest innovations that enable you to unlock your potential for growth.