Quarterly Town Hall Recap: Leverage Vantagepoint in the New Normal

In our continued commitment to provide Deltek users with the latest information about their solutions and what’s happening at Deltek, the Deltek team hosted the second quarterly town hall of 2020. During this quarterly update, the product management team and experts from the Deltek Global Consulting team provided best practices for making Vantagepoint work better for you in the new normal. Attendees also heard exciting updates for Deltek Customer Care and Deltek Learning Zone.

Improving Your Business in the New Normal

As companies are looking for ways to navigate the new normal and adjusting to a more distributed workforce, many companies are looking for ways to improve accessibility and streamline processes. Project-based solutions like Vantagepoint are developed to make your business work seamlessly regardless of physical location, but many companies are not taking full advantage of their solution. During this session, the Deltek experts will give you best practices to take advantage of automated processes, easily accessible information, paperless financial management and much more.

Monitoring Your Pipeline

Deltek expert Tracy Peets shares key insights into how to better manage your pipeline with Vantagepoint including creating an active pursuit dashboard to keep teams focused on upcoming proposals and opportunity status and follow up activities. Tracy also highlights how the pipeline dashboard can show more than just potential total revenue, but can provide the business a better view of realistic timing of potential projects so the firm can manage resources and plan accordingly. Another expert tip is leveraging Vantagepoint Mobile CRM to easily manage activities with talk-to-text notetaking, quick updates to pursuits and reminders to ensure clients stay top of mind when it matters most.

Managing Projects and Teams More Efficiently

Product Director Dawn Gajewski shares several tips for improving how you manage your projects with Vantagepoint including taking advantage of the tools you have, increasing collaboration and improving accessibility. Dawn shares tips for leveraging Deltek Collaboration within Vantagepoint to keep teams connected in the context of a project, instead of buried in emails and shares how you can access critical project information from Deltek Project Information Management (PIM) right from the projects hub to ensure that your project teams have the information they need to deliver the project. And, as projects may shift in schedule or get put on hold, Dawn shares reminders on how to easily adjust resources and schedules with project planning, tips for using the Gantt chart functionality and more so you can keep your teams connected, keep projects on track and keep budget intact.

When it comes to managing a distributed workforce, managing the workload is critical. Workload assessment and reassignment allows teams to quickly adjust as project demands change or employee status changes. And, as assignments or priorities change, it’s also critical to communicate to your team members so they know what they are assigned to, what their priorities are and where to log their time. Giving them view only access to resource management gives users access to projects they are assigned to, increasing awareness, efficiency and collaboration with others working on the same projects.

Leverage System Approvals and Notifications

Deltek expert Stephanie Staats reviews system approvals that can help your teams save time, reduce manual paper-based processes and improve data accuracy. Stephanie highlights the numerous ways Vantagepoint allows users to create automated electronic approval processes for tasks like timesheets, expense reports, AP invoice approvals, purchasing, absence requests, general ledger budgets so approvers can review records regardless of their physical location. Stephanie highlights some often underutilized approval features that allow you to move away from traditionally paper-based processes to digital, giving your teams more accessibility and flexibility while maintaining control and expediting workflows.

Implement Paperless Billing to Increase Cash Flow

The faster you bill, the faster you get paid and product director Melissa Coffey shares key insight on how to set up your company for paperless billing in Vantagepoint. Dashboards are a great starting point for paperless billing processes giving PMs visibility into unbilled and AR information across a large set of projects. Melissa will highlight several ways that billers and PMs can use dashboards monitor invoice status, prioritize invoices and easily identify missing information in billing terms. Melissa also highlights the importance of leveraging electronic draft invoice approval processes to manage the entire process, alert reviewers when they are needed and improve collaboration between biller and PM in Vantagepoint. You will also see how Vantagepoint delivers more detailed billing information to project managers to eliminate dozens of emails and printed detail reports. Once the drafts are finalized, Melissa also shares tips for emailing accurate invoices and streamlining collections.

Monitor Your Business in Real Time

Melissa also shares tips for empowering your leaders to make timely, informed decision based on accurate, easily accessible information about your business. You will see how you can leverage dashboards to keep teams focused on the right metrics and see often overlooked dashboard functionality. You can create consistent views that can be shared with other users, leverage conditional formatting to call attention to problem areas and use filters to focus on only the data your user needs. You’ll also see how to better monitor your business with examples of how to configure dashparts to easily monitor specific views of employee utilization, the GL, or most challenging AR clients to name a few.

These tips can help your teams ensure you are leveraging all that Vantagepoint has to offer to support your dispersed workforces and streamline your business processes.

Customer Care and Deltek Learning Zone Updates

The products aren’t the only thing improving at Deltek. We continue to focus on the user experience and being easy to do business with and this extends beyond the products. Deltek Global Support is making it easier to get your questions answered. Now, you can initiate a "Call with Support", providing another channel to quickly speak directly to a support analyst to get the assistance you need. The Knowledge Base is also being enhanced to make it easier for all users, not just support contacts, to access the Knowledge Base information.

Gary Smith, VP of Customer Care, also shares some exciting changes coming to the Deltek Learning Zone to make it easier to find the content your users need. To learn more about the changes coming to the DLZ, be sure to watch the town hall.

Deltek Insight is Going Virtual

This year’s Deltek Insight conference will be virtual and is available complimentary to our Deltek users. The Deltek product management teams are working to create a track that will enhance your knowledge of Vantagepoint and help you better manage your business with your solution. You won’t want to miss this event so mark your calendars for September 15-16, 2020 for Virtual Deltek Insight. To learn more, go to DeltekInsight.com.