SURVICE Uses Connected Project Intelligence to Drive Warfighter Survivability

Small Company Values with Big Company Capabilities

Since 1981, engineering leader SURVICE has delivered system protection and enhancement projects for Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and various commercial and environmental communities.

Despite its fast-changing market, SURVICE remains loyal to its founder Jim Foulk’s original vision: “to provide the U.S. warfighter with the safest, most survivable and most effective equipment possible.”

“We play a big part in improving the survivability of our troops,” says Stephen Franzoni, Senior Financial Systems Analyst at SURVICE. “And right now, we’re focusing on drone technology to help automate and accelerate the transport of critical supplies to frontline workers.”

SURVICE also believes in using business intelligence to empower its employees and clients with the actionable data they need to stay informed, connected and ultimately, protect the nation.

It’s Time to Make the Switch to the Cloud

An early adopter of Deltek’s legacy GCS platform, SURVICE worked with Deltek Partner, Infotek Consulting to upgrade to Deltek Costpoint in the Cloud—the industry-leading project-based ERP for government contractors.

“We were satisfied with GCS and it felt natural to upgrade to Deltek Costpoint,” said Stephen. “With our cloud upgrade, Infotek Consulting helped clean up our data and point us in the right direction after some internal challenges.”

By moving to Deltek Costpoint in the Cloud, SURVICE democratized platform access and enabled a single source of truth for all project workflows and data and with integrated Business Intelligence (BI) powered by IBM’s Cognos they gain enhanced data analytics and automation capabilities to drive collaborative reporting and decision-making.

“The cloud makes it easy for everyone to use Costpoint and explore more of its apps and features, and we’ve automated our BI processes to ensure managers get the latest reports as soon as they’re ready” says Stephen. “We’re also keeping employees informed by automating updates to their time sheets, leave allowances and even vaccination status, which also helps us all stay compliant with U.S. Government regulation.”

Accommodating Employee Needs with BI Automation

After the COVID-19 vaccine became available to U.S. citizens, SURVICE faced the same challenges as many others: collecting accurate and compliant vaccination data while tracking employee locations and activity.

After exploring multiple options, including Microsoft SharePoint, SURVICE looked at Deltek Costpoint’s extensibility designer to develop its own custom features.

“We developed multiple extensibilities to meet our needs in three to four weeks,” shared Stephen. “These included an employee interface so users could enter their shot information, a vaccination tracking tool for HR and then a live Costpoint Business Intelligence dashboard to help monitor the organization’s overall vaccination status.”

Of course, not every employee was prompt in updating their vaccination status or could receive the shot due to health or personal circumstances. To account for this, SURVICE developed an accommodation system to approve those unable to get the shot and track alert people who hadn’t updated their status after a specified period.

“The last thing we want to do is punish employees who aren’t eligible,” said Stephen. “Our COVID tracking system helps us make special accommodations for those exempt from vaccination and moving forward we intend to use it for other medical and extenuating circumstances—such as when an employee needs specialist equipment.”

Survice Turns Its Sights on A2B Tracking and Time & Expense

Looking to the future, Stephen is excited to enhance the company’s equipment tagging and tracking capabilities as part of its project procurement workflows.

“We have a lot on the horizon at SURVICE Engineering,” says Stephen. “We just signed with the Deltek Marketplace Partner, A2B Tracking, to manage Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) tagging and inventory as part of our special drone technology project.”

SURVICE is also rolling out additional Costpoint features to retire paper forms and simplify employee approvals for remote teleworking leveraging Time & Expense.

“We use paper forms to manage teleworking approvals, which was fine when only four or five people were requesting it,” says Stephen. “Now that everybody is balancing time between home and the office, it’s no longer fit for purpose. That’s why we’re building a new extensibility feature in Deltek Costpoint to manage our hybrid workers with a BI dashboard to track where people are and when.”

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