Shaping a Better World with Deltek Project Information Management

With over 1,000 people in 21 offices across Canada, Associated Engineering was looking to easily and efficiently access and share client and project information in order to create synergies throughout their organization and increase their competitiveness. With Deltek Project Information Management (PIM), they’ve transformed their project and client information while creating solutions for a healthy, resilient world.

Associated Engineering is passionate about building vibrant communities that support economic growth. An employee-owned company, Associated Engineering has worked with clients in the public and private sectors for more than seventy years, offering a wide range of expertise that includes planning, engineering, environmental science and management, landscape architecture, asset management, communications and facilitation. Their multi-discipline team has local and global experience ranging from studies and assessments to the design of major infrastructure projects.

Seeking a Better Way

Early on, Associated Engineering used traditional file folder methods to organize and store project information, which posed some challenges. The company lacked a uniform method to create, store and retrieve information, and they needed a better approach for capturing emails, associating and tracking documents issued to external parties and establishing a single source of truth for their project records and information.

As a result, Associated Engineering spent a couple years scoping the market, evaluating products and performing some housekeeping. They ultimately decided on Deltek Project Information Management (PIM) based on its demonstrable ability to help Associated Engineering improve the way they work. PIM helps them work smarter, not harder, and increases the performance of the information that they create, use and share.  

"Deltek's Project Information Management solution has proven to be the platform for the future to achieve our goals."

– Steve Robinson, Director of Information Systems, Associated Engineering

Delivering on the Mission

Deltek PIM provides Associated Engineering with an essential tool (which they internally named “AERIS” or “Associated Engineering Records Information System”) for consistently handling project information across the organization, making it easy for any user of the system to find and determine the status of project-related information. Users are now able to query and report on “documents created,” “published by whom” and “read by whom,” which helps reduce risk and measure success. Additional benefits include the fact that project record information is in one place; data duplication across the business development lifecycle is eliminated; and new users are able to more easily discover information about active and historical projects. Overall, this created synergy throughout the organization and enabled Associated Engineering to build better communities and increase their competitiveness in the market.

Associated Engineering’s project team, together with guidance and expertise from Deltek, extended the capability of PIM. The Deltek Select Care team added custom features, such as proposal entities and approval work flow automation that Associated Engineering desired in order to collect, manage and transition information through key phases of their professional services lifecycle.  

As Steve Robinson, Director of Information Systems, describes, “Deltek’s Project Information Management is a foundation solution that enabled Associated Engineering to achieve many project information management and records management goals. This contemporary solution has enabled us to streamline our professional services delivery processes by providing clear visibility and accessibility to the contacts, organizations, opportunities, proposals and project information that we use to deliver value to our clients. The ability to add bespoke elements to the solution has provided many opportunities for us to modernize and automate operational tasks and processes while providing better visibility and integrity to the current and historical records. Deltek’s Project Information Management solution has proven to be the platform for the future to achieve our goals.”