How Fox Engineering Enhanced Profitability, Efficiency, and Customer Satisfaction with Deltek

By Jean Sheets, CFO, COO, FOX Engineering Associates

FOX Engineering Associates is a civil engineering firm in Ames, Iowa, that helps cities and industries across the country provide clean water. Technology, innovation, and sustainability are at the heart of everything we do. We focus specifically on innovative water and wastewater technology and associated systems. We regularly employ new and emerging technologies to meet the growing need for sustainable water and wastewater solutions.

During the past 22 years, our company has more than tripled in size, growing from 12 employees to 43. We brought in Deltek to help keep our project-based business on track as the company continues to grow. Bringing in Deltek has done far more than simply keeping the company on track. We have enhanced profitability and efficiency, and improved customer satisfaction.

Enhancing profitability came, in part, through more effectively managing our sub-contractors. Before bringing in Deltek, we weren’t able to break out sub-contracting costs. So, for example, we would submit fees for a particular phase of a project, bill the customer, and then later get bills from the sub-contractors—even though we might already have billed to 100 percent. With this process, it became more and more difficult to correctly estimate project costs.

That all changed with the implementation of Deltek. We can now keep track of the work our sub-contractors are doing on each project, and are better able to manage projects and our overall profitability.

We’ve Enhanced Profitability and Efficiency, and Improved Customer Satisfaction with Deltek

 

 

Here are the Top 3 Things We Love about Deltek:

• Improved project billing and financial management

We’ve dramatically improved our ability to do financial reporting through paperless billing and online, mobile timesheets. With real-time access across our business, we can easily and accurately track our financial health and stay on track, and on time, for each project.

• More effective project management

Because project managers have instant access to their projects, they can follow project performance more closely—making sure it’s profitable, and watching the hours as they’re charged to the project without having to rely on accounting staff for this information. Having data at their fingertips is invaluable to our project managers. These efficiencies alone have made a huge difference to our company.

• Enhanced resource management

With Deltek, we have better visibility into all projects company-wide, which helps us better manage—and leverage—our company resources across projects.

While billing and financial, project, and resource management are incredibly important to us, our main goal is to ensure our customers are happy. And with Deltek, we are actually able to enhance customer satisfaction.

Deltek helps our clients always know where they stand on a project. The ability for us to have project data right at our fingertips, or produce an accurate invoice at a moment's notice, is priceless. Our clients know they don't have to wait for a closing cycle to get the information they’re looking for. They can get any information, at any time.