The Three Pillars of Costpoint 8: Trust, Innovation, and Intelligence

The government contracting industry-leading solution you trust now bringing you more innovation and greater intelligence across the entire project-lifecycle…Introducing Costpoint 8!

It’s important to have an intelligent solution in place that you and your team fully trust to support your business and compliance needs, offering purposeful innovation for all of your projects, from the start bringing you successfully across the finish line. Our commitment to providing our customers with trusted, innovative, and intelligent solutions is evident in the latest version of Costpoint. We’re bringing you new innovations to help your businesses succeed and better intelligence through AI and BI tools, packaging up the data and answers you need, when you need them, in one place to improve precision and guide business decisions.

Let’s take a look at how the three pillars of Costpoint 8, trust, innovation, and intelligence, cohesively work together!

TRUST

Did you know that Costpoint has helped government contractors pass over 30,000 audits? Or that more than 90% of the top 100 federal contractors are running on Costpoint? It’s no secret that Costpoint is the industry’s leading solution for government contractors, thanks to its out-of-the-box capabilities to support financial compliance requirements and the ever-changing cybersecurity regulations.

Costpoint 8 offers peace of mind that your data is accurate and secure, moving the needle forward. We strive to continuously earn that trust by bringing you rich new customer-driven features, an enhanced user experience, and more purposeful innovation. This helps you and your business with successful project delivery without sacrificing the government contracting compliance features, controls, and reports your organization knows and trusts.

Additionally, Costpoint 8 will be the platform that powers our new GovCon Cloud Moderate offering that customers can trust to help support their unique and emerging cybersecurity requirements, including CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST, and ITAR.

INNOVATION

This release leverages cutting-edge technologies within a secure financial and compliance framework that can support you as your business grows, providing a complete view of your business with powerful intelligence throughout the entire project lifecycle.

Here are some examples of purposeful innovation that will be introduced in Costpoint 8!

• Artificial Intelligence – Eliminate much of the manual intervention and human bias when answering critical business decisions and discover or analyze hidden data, identifying patterns that turn data into actionable insights, to help make more informed decisions.
• Natural Language Processing - Automatically receive a written analysis about the data in a visualization, pointing out anomalies in the data that may not be obvious.
• Digital Signatures – Increase efficiency by making invoice transactions legally binding – even without the physical signed copies, using the new, innovative digital signatures, both parties will approve the invoice by signing the document with a FIDO compatible device.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) + Machine Learning – Improve accuracy and increase efficiency during the expense process with the new Mobile Expense app, as OCR and Machine Learning come together to create Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). OCR scans and interprets the information on receipts, while Machine Learning leverages historical data overtime, improving accuracy. This enables the app to capture images of receipts on your smartphone, populating data in the expense report.
• Progressive Web Apps (PWA) – Access any application in Costpoint as a PWA on a laptop, tablet, or phone. We are specifically focusing on improving the PWA mobile user experience for Mobile Time and Mobile CRM.

INTELLIGENCE

Paving the way to transformative innovations, we are providing our users with more intelligent solutions that pull in and process more data across your teams for one consistent view of important business information that can be viewed from many different angles to make quicker decisions, with the ability to know when to change and what this change may look like prior to executing to maintain a strategic path.

Here are some examples of greater intelligence in Costpoint 8:

AI assisted BI    

AI is recently making more of an appearance in the public sector, showing up in contract requirements. A Bloomberg Government study revealed that the number of AI opportunities increased by 61%, 100%, then 155% year over year since 2016. Additionally, a 600% increase was noted in opportunities valued over $100M.

We are also seeing popular keywords such as Autonomous Systems, Intelligent Systems, Advanced and Predictive Analytics, Robotic Process Automation or Machine Learning that appear frequently in recent AI-related federal contract obligations. Further analysis within contract spending data reveals that there is an on-going investment related to Artificial Intelligence, especially in the government contracting space.

With Costpoint 8, we are making the shift, adopting Artificial Intelligence through AI assisted BI where AI can enable BI tools to produce clear, useful insights from the data they analyze. In order to accomplish this, Artificial Intelligence features were added to Business Intelligence in Cognos Analytics 11.1.5. Powered by IBM Watson, licensed Costpoint 8 users now have access to more interactive and automatic data comparisons through Artificial Intelligence, gaining complete visibility into data faster than ever before – helping government contractors bring value to data in unique ways, on-demand, to drive the business forward by using data that tells you how you’re performing, and how you will perform in the future.

Additionally, AI assisted BI can help in data preparation through machine learning. This flattens the learning curve for casual BI users by guiding users to generate BI content with a high –level-knowledge nature. In turn, reducing human bias as AI objectively and consistently analyzes data without injecting bias into the process. Costpoint 8’s BI increases users’ eureka moments by reducing the time to find the needle in the haystack and gain important insights that can change your company’s strategy.

Intelligent Resource Forecasting

As if Artificial Intelligence isn’t impactful enough, we also rolled out Smart AI Packs for Resource Management. Leveraging the new AI capabilities, Deltek’s Smart AI Packs automatically provide key insights into hidden data, making it easier for users to create reports and dashboards. With Smart AI, users have access to an AI Assistant, data-set extraction, data explorations and data comparisons – creating a more interactive analysis, to help you easily navigate and analyze your data. For example knowing that there is a high correlation of a certain manager to employee attrition can focus attention on addressing the issue.

Smart AI uses a data module to leverage the AI features in Costpoint BI 8, sources from Costpoint Planning in this case and focuses on hours and utilization rates (both historical and planned).

Additionally, through Intelligent Resource Forecasting, we are helping Project Managers and Resources Managers intelligently predict if they have the right resources in place to staff a project and calculate the percent match for them, so they can really see how well the resources they have are aligned to a specific opportunity.

In this particular example you can see there are a few resources that are identified as a 100% match, important to note how that percentage is calculated - by taking the number of matched criteria against the selected criteria.

With Intelligent Resource Forecasting organizations can find the right resources more quickly than ever before, improving the overall user experience.

Intelligent Time & Expense

Costpoint 8 also transforms the time and expense process with Intelligent Time and Expense, an integrated solution making it quick and easy to stay compliant. With the introduction of Costpoint 8, we released the new mobile expense app, which allows users to add and capture out-of-pocket expenses wherever or whenever, without accessing Costpoint Time & Expense. 

Improving the user experience, Costpoint Mobile T&E leverages Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) to capture data from images such as receipts. When a device captures a receipt, Costpoint Mobile T&E gathers all of the detailed data available in the image and intelligently maps the collected data to the relevant fields of the expense entry.

This is just the beginning! Check out Deltek’s Virtual Insight 2020 to learn about more innovations in Costpoint 8 and watch the sessions on-demand through December 31, 2020!

Below are some must see sessions:

• CP-02: Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Business Intelligence … Together
• CP-08: How AI is Shaping the Present and the Future; featuring IBM’s Chief Strategy Office of the Public & Federal Marketplace, Sam Gordy
• CP-36: Streamline your business with Digital Signatures in Costpoint 8
• CP-45: Bringing You Smarter Professional Services Automation (PSA)
• CP-49: The Future of Expense is Here
• CP-57: Costpoint is a Progressive Web Application (PWA) What does it mean?

Here are a few ways to stay in the know about Costpoint 8:

• Costpoint Town Halls
• Deltek Virtual Insight (see above)
• Deltek Learning Zone
• The Costpoint Product Blog