How Smart Is Your Data?

Do you ever have an inkling of doubt in the data you pull for quarterly updates or to close out the fiscal year? Are you confident that your data is 100% reliable?

Deltek’s 2020 Clarity Report for Government Contractors revealed that 24% of government contractors consider “Big Data” or the analysis of patterns and trends to be a very important part of their operations, with another 30% reporting that data science as a whole is critical to their business, and an additional 25% are heavily investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities.

With workforces more mobile and global now than ever, government contractors are heavily investing in Business Intelligence (BI) solutions as it is critical that data is accurate. There is no room for error.

Often times government contractors struggle to gain a complete view of their organization or projects, lack effective methods of resource management, or frankly, spend countless hours on data collection. A recent study showed that just in marketing alone, 12.5% of an employee’s work week is spent focusing on data collection. What if that time was spent elsewhere, to improve performance?

We have also heard from our customers countless times that before moving to Costpoint Business Intelligence, it was difficult to maintain version control across an organization, because the data was dispersed, but by making the move to Costpoint BI, version control was no longer a problem, as all of the data lives in a single system, enabling all departments to access the same data.

But what if your data could not only be stored in one location and was consistent across all teams, but what if that data was also intelligent enough to help predict future business needs?

In September with the release of Costpoint 8.0, we introduced the first of many Smart AI packs, which gives you more options for analyzing data specific to your unique business needs.

What is a Smart AI pack?

Our new Smart AI packs include data sets to improve the overall performance of AI against large volumes of data, which uses the new “AI assisted BI” features and contains pre-built data modules, data sets, dashboards, and other relevant documentation to help provide a clear understanding of a particular subject area (i.e. resource management).

For example, Costpoint customers can use the AI features on the data that they have prepared through data modules and uploaded excel data. We will also provide pre-packaged data modules that run off of data sets to provide fast performance with the AI new components.

Smart AI for Resource Management

The first Smart AI pack that we introduced applies AI to the resource management process, leveraging Costpoint Planning to help you better understand how to best allocate your resources or identify additional resource needs for each project.

Even though our first area of focus is Resource Management, we plan to expand into other areas of the business. Since this Smart AI pack utilizes Costpoint Planning data, you now have the ability to more effectively plot out your resources on projects, enabling you to better optimize your resource utilization with a holistic understanding when there is not enough work to sustain your resources or when there is an abundance of work that requires additional resources to meet your project requirements.

Smart AI for Resource Management is a component of Professional Services Automation (PSA) and paints a clear picture of resource management for BI users like never before. This tool ultimately provides key insight into the management of projects, resource management, and optimizing utilization.

Additional Benefits of Smart AI for Resource Management include:

• Understand future needs including generic staff and vendors
• Analyze historical utilization vs. budgets and EAC’s
• Optimize future utilization
• Incorporate future plans for New Business projects into decision making

Included in the Smart AI package are:

• A data module and data set for fast performance to create dashboards and explorations
• A pre-built dashboard that will show the capabilities for the Smart AI subject area
• Sample questions for the AI assistant that will automatically create visualization with your data

Check out this quick video to see Smart AI for Resource Management in action!

Schedule your Smart AI demo today.