RPS Group Takes Internal Controls, Data Quality and Project Management to the Next Level with Deltek

An Interview with Matthieu Billes, Business Systems Manager for North America, RPS Group

Summary: RPS Group, a global professional services firm headquartered in the UK, specializes in a variety of industries including energy, oil, gas, environmental risk and infrastructure. As part of their expansion into North America they acquired a series of companies that needed to be consolidated onto Deltek ERP, helping the firm focus on providing environmental-, science- and engineering-based advice to their North American clients.

Q: Can you tell us about RPS Group and some of the challenges you faced before implementing Deltek?

Matthieu Billes: RPS was founded in 1970 as a very small business and has grown to over 5600 professional consultants and service providers across 125 countries. As part of our expansion into North America we acquired 15+ companies over a ten year period. These acquisitions left us managing 9 different accounting and reporting systems across 17 separate operating entities and 10 different payroll systems with multiple benefit structures. You can imagine the complexity of our accounting processes and the challenges we faced in maintaining such a complex structure.

In late 2016, RPS decided to transform our business in North America. The main objective of the project was to consolidate onto one ERP platform throughout all of North America. The goal was to optimize and standardize our processes, strengthen our internal controls, and provide key reports and dashboards to our project managers and company executives.

In addition to Deltek, we had other ERP systems running—BST, Great Plains, and QuickBooks to name a few. We chose to consolidate onto Deltek because more than 50% of our businesses in North America were already running Deltek. These were all successful businesses, so we thought that would be the best option.

Q: What are some of the benefits you’ve gained through Deltek?

Matthieu Billes: From an IT point of view, implementing Deltek throughout North America has helped us reduce the number of legacy systems we were running. Now, that we are running one ERP system—it’s so much easier. We worked with Deltek Global Consulting on the planning, testing and data migration. Because we put an emphasis on testing—most of our go lives went very smoothly. 

Prior to this consolidation I was not familiar with Deltek and was actually using one of the other ERP systems. I've been impressed with Deltek; it’s easy to configure, easy to learn and user friendly. This is one of the main benefits I've seen compared to the other ERP systems. Deltek is a great tool and ideal for companies that need a project-based solution.

We have been able to improve most of our internal processes. We’ve simplified our tax reporting and have cut our monthly financial reporting from 10 days to 6 days—and are looking to reduce it even further. We are now able to run revenue recognition on a weekly basis instead of monthly basis—which we were doing before. This gives us up-to-date data for project performance analysis. Most of our people are using Deltek Touch, Time and Expense so they can now do their timesheets and expense reports from anywhere—at any time.

Q: What’s next for RPS with regard to Deltek?

Matthieu Billes: We really want to push to the next level with Deltek. We now have the foundation; we’ve created unified and standardized processes. We have implemented the CRM core accounting, the project planning, and most of the standard features within Deltek.

Next, we’re really interested in improving and optimizing the way we use Deltek’s capabilities. Specifically, we want to continue to enhance our internal processes and get the right information from Deltek so that we can make faster and better decisions.

We plan to accomplish this in part through additional training from the Deltek Learning Zone (DLZ). Personally, I would like to see all of our employees use the DLZ—not just my team. I’d like to ensure that each project manager, as well as each employee, can leverage the dashboards to get the right information to enhance their work performance and enable them to make better decisions.

With Deltek we now have the right foundation and the right processes in place to take us to the next level and make our company even more successful.

Deltek Recognition

RPS Group was recognized as a finalist for the Deltek MVP Awards at Insight 2018 in the Architecture, Engineering, & Construction category. Let Deltek and your peers celebrate your organization’s achievements, submit for a MVP Award 2019 today!

About Matthieu Billes

As the Business Systems Manager and ERP Project Manager for RPS Group, Matthieu Billes leads the ERP implementation program for all North America RPS entities. To learn more about RPS Group visit their website at https://www.rpsgroup.com/