Battelle Powers Positive Change for Humanity

At The Leading Edge of Discovery

By the early 1900s, entrepreneur and philanthropist Gordon Battelle had amassed a small fortune through his work in mining and scientific experimentation. Battelle believed that the only way to achieve lasting impact from this wealth, was to use it in a way that would benefit mankind—applying science to solve societal problems and improve the lives of people everywhere.

In his last will and testament, Battelle laid out his vision: to use experimentation and technology to make the greatest discoveries and inventions and do the greatest good for humankind.

Today, that vision is executed through the Battelle Memorial Institute, the largest independent non-profit applied science and technology company in the world—and one that has worked for 90 years to realize the vision of its founder.

The institute provides solutions to private companies and government bodies across multiple markets including healthcare, national security, infrastructure and environment. And, in the benevolent spirit of the man who started it all, it reinvests its proceeds in the advancement of science and technology, as well as building schools to advance STEM programs.

Battelle’s research has left its mark on history in a way few others have, from supporting the Manhattan Project in World War 2 to helping develop the photocopy machine and barcode and assisting the launch of Apollo 11.

Today, the institute’s relentless pace of innovation continues. As a testament to its recent work, its President and CEO, Lou Von Thaer, was presented his seventh Wash100 Award in 2022. The Wash100 is the highest honor in government contracting, and Von Thaer has featured heavily in its nine-year history.

“This is why Battelle exists—to happen to the world,” he says. “We keep Battelle at the leading edge of discovery for the benefit of humanity.”

New Levels of Efficiency

A big part of Battelle’s success over the last year has been an IT transformation project focused on bringing new levels of efficiency to the organization’s processes.

“It's really been a long journey that we've been on to ensure we're driving the most optimized, efficient processes, providing more value to our customers and less complexity around how we manage our business,” says Josh Kliner, Director of Strategy Delivery and IT Finance for Battelle’s IT department.

At the heart of this transformation project is Deltek Costpoint in the Cloud. Costpoint is a robust all-in-one project, accounting and resource planning solution for government contractors that simplifies compliance and provides real-time visibility into project costs that enable data-driven decision making.

“We wanted to be in a tool that was built for government contractors,” says Beth Daly, Director of Performance Excellence at Battelle. “Too many times we've picked a tool and tried to adjust it to fit for government contracting, instead of finding the tool that was the right fit for what we actually do.”

Alongside Costpoint, Battelle also uses Deltek’s GovWin IQ solution to help manage opportunities, win bids faster and plan strategically to get ahead of the competition.

“GovWin IQ is incredibly important during that opportunity process,” says Josh. “We're leveraging this solution to understand what our customer database looks like, to identify new opportunities in the marketplace, and to really help augment the start of that pipeline through the project process. It's a key component of our opportunity space.”

Enabling Consistency and Innovation for 1,500 Employees

Just one year after implementation, Battelle has already noticed a significant change in the way it works, with standardized processes leading to a greater customer focus.

“We had come from an ERP that was 10 years old, and never updated because we had customized it a lot,” says Beth. “Since we've configured and implemented Costpoint, we’ve seen standardized processes across the board. We can actually look at how we're being more effective and or more efficient and see opportunities to become even more effective and efficient. It allows our program managers to actually look at the solutions for our world's toughest problems.”

Of the organization’s 3,800 employees, around 1,500 work with Deltek solutions every day to oversee project delivery and support finance operations and bring new levels of consistency to their work—all with minimal back-end involvement from its IT teams.

“The transformation project was really focused on ensuring that we were leveraging the processes that come with Deltek Costpoint and not doing any sort of customizations or having processes that were less efficient,” Josh says. “Costpoint has really allowed us to manage projects with more consistency across the organization. And it’s allowed our delivery teams to focus more on driving solutions to their customers—and less on driving innovative solutions to the backend project.”

The Difference Between Night and Day

Josh describes the difference between Battelle with Deltek and Battelle before as “night and day.” No longer does the organization have an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that requires a group of people to be a hundred percent dedicated to keeping it up and running, which means the company is able to focus on its primary goal—doing the greatest good for humanity.

“Deltek has allowed us to have a bigger impact on the community,” adds Beth. “Battelle's unique in the sense that when we win more work or have more proceeds, we put all of that back into the community and back into STEM education. Costpoint has allowed us to put even more money into that and fund our scientists to come up with the innovations that will impact our communities over the next 10 to 15 years.”

More importantly, with Deltek, Battelle knows it has a solution that can keep pace with the organization’s changing requirements and compliance to help them remain at the cutting edge for years to come.

“Deltek Costpoint, through its position in the marketplace and the fact it’s built for government contractors, is really a perfect fit for Battelle,” says Josh. “In the year that we've stood it up, we've already upgraded to 8.1, which we could not say in the decade that we ran the previous system. It's the perfect fit.”

A Partnership with Endless Potential

Going forward, Battelle is excited to see some of the new innovations and user experience (UX) improvements announced at Deltek ProjectCon in 2022 and plans to embrace Deltek’s tools to drive further efficiencies.

“Having just implemented Costpoint within the last year, we're still really driving on ensuring that we're optimizing what we own,” says Josh “We plan to continue to engage with Deltek and the folks supporting it to make sure that we're driving the best processes out of that tool that we can.”

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