Enhance Your Tech Strategy with a Two-Tiered Agency Management System

As your agency grows, the challenges of running your business efficiently and profitably grow with you.  At a certain point, a patchwork of disparate software tools to manage resourcing, scheduling and budgeting independently just won’t cut it. The struggle to avoid costly delays, over-servicing, and employee burnout only gets bigger and more complicated as you spend more time managing your tech stack than you do on the creative product.

The solution is to simplify – consolidating operational processes into a smaller number of tools. But given the pace of innovation and the need for office autonomy, network and in-house agencies may require a more strategic approach to double-up their IT strategy. Under a two-tiered solution, parent companies can keep existing systems at the corporate level, while empowering individual studios to manage day-to-day operations with an agency management platform built specifically for the creative process. By building an integration between the two, agencies achieve a level of visibility that allows them to better manage projects, while leveraging global resources and optimizing resource planning across offices.

A two-tiered solution allows agencies to:

1. Get better data at the agency level to gain operational visibility from an enterprise perspective
2. Maximize the potential of global talent and optimize resources across offices  
3. Optimize established systems while empowering agency individuality
4. Leverage industry-specific tools at the local level to maintain a competitive advantage
5. Support regulatory and geographical requirements for individual offices, while following global governance requirements and maintaining the integrity of upstream master data
6. Achieve operational value at a faster pace and lower cost than a single global system would allow
7. Minimize downtime and costs associated with implementation, training and ongoing IT maintenance

How it Works:

Using Deltek WorkBook’s open API, a two-way integration can send transactional data to and from the central network system. In the simplified example below, a job is created with master data from the central system, pushing that data to WorkBook, which can then be used to create project estimates, schedules and resource plans that leverage resources from across the network. At this point, agencies can work independently, accomplishing all task management, time entry, project management and detailed project reporting within WorkBook, giving the individual agency the ability to collaborate and monitor progress autonomously. As costs such as hours and expenses are incurred and approved within WorkBook, webhooks alert the central system to extract the final data and post them to the master job in the central system. From there, final transactional processes can be completed to close out the finished job and generate reports.

Deltek's Proven Approach

No integration is too big or too small. Over the years our Deltek Global Consultants have helped agencies enhance their two-tiered infrastructure by integrating WorkBook with some of the most popular enterprise resource planning systems. 

We have extensive experience working with: 

• SAP
• Oracle
• Sage
• Microsoft AX
• Deltek Maconomy 

In addition, we have helped agencies further customize their agency management solution by building integrations with many other business management tools including: 

• PeopleSoft
• Microsoft Power BI
• ActiveCampaign
• various storage providers
• email and calendar platforms

Our Deltek Global Consultants leverage their industry leading software and industry knowledge to provide a streamlined, best practice solution to fulfill your unique needs. Based on decades of experience and hundreds of successful implementations, our WorkBook consultants follow a Proven 5-stage approach to get your agency up and running on your integrated system faster. This scalable approach works for any type of solution engagement, from implementation to new functionality enablement, and includes specific tasks and objectives to keep team members from both Deltek and your agency, aligned throughout.