Customer Spotlight: How RS&H is Driving Schedule Consistency with Deltek Acumen

RS&H provides fully integrated architecture, engineering, and consulting services to help clients realize their most complex facility and infrastructure projects for land, air and space. The company is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 100 design firms and has worked in more than 50 countries across the globe.

Before each new project can begin, the RS&H Project Team must review the contractor’s schedule for quality and accuracy. Depending on the size and scope of the project, individual schedules can range anywhere from 200 activity lines to more than 1,500. With dozens of projects requiring comprehensive review and analysis each month, the RS&H Project Team needed a reliable way to ensure schedules were being held to a consistent level of quality during the review process. They began searching for a tool that would help them quickly identify changes and missing logic on schedules of all sizes, while still being easy-to-use and complementary to their existing toolset.

The Challenge
In any given month, the RS&H team must review dozens of contractor schedules for both new and existing projects. The company’s existing tools provided the baseline data they needed to check for missing logic and changes, but Project Managers were still having to manually create formulas, charts and other analyses in Microsoft Excel to get to the data they really needed. They also had to use a combination of custom-built templates and manual reviews to ensure projects were in compliance with individual state regulations for construction schedules. With schedule quality being a key indicator of project success or failure, the RS&H Project Team needed a faster, more consistent way to perform their analyses.

The Solution
RS&H purchased several licenses of the Deltek Acumen’s comprehensive analysis and visualization platform, Acumen Fuse. Project Managers use Acumen Fuse for:

• Project Analysis: Using the built-in, customizable metrics library, Project Managers check project schedules for missing logic, redundancies, common errors and compliance with state regulations – all in a matter of minutes.
• Project Comparison: With a few clicks of a button, reviewers are able to pinpoint exactly what has changed in a contractor’s schedule in any given month and why, as well as the effect those changes will have on the overall date for project delivery.
• Reporting: As a result of Fuse’s automated reporting, Project Managers can easily grab highly visual graphics and summary data to build custom reports to meet their clients’ individual requirements.

The Benefits
Deltek Acumen Fuse has allowed the RS&H Project Team to streamline their overall schedule review process and provide deeper insight and analytics to key project stakeholders. The team enjoys a wide variety of benefits, including the ability to:

• Ensure consistent schedule quality
• Quickly pinpoint missing logic and changes in contractor schedules during monthly review cycles for each project
• Cut the time it takes to review a schedule by more than 50%
• Leverage Acumen’s built-in Executive Reports to easily summarize findings and report back to the customer
• Build custom metrics templates to meet individual state requirements for construction schedules, saving significant time and effort

“With Deltek Acumen Fuse, the time it takes to review a schedule – no matter how many activity lines it has – is cut in half. We used to be bogged down with manual processes to build formulas and graphs in Microsoft Excel. Now we can simply hit ‘Fuse’ and the tool does all of the heavy lifting in a matter of seconds.” - Brad Hildebrand, Project Manager

To learn more about how you can achieve similar results with Deltek Acumen, check out this short eBook, or contact us to get started with your free trial today.