How Elevation Architecture saved 4,302 hours per year with Deltek

Tweet it:'How Elevation Architecture saved 4,302 hours per year with Deltek'

Elevation Architecture sought a new software system to overcome multiple challenges across the practice, ranging from project-related and client-facing tasks to financial management processes. In the course of finding the right technological solution, Office Manager Rachel Tilleyshort identified the following issues:

• Siloed information;
• Unscalable processes;
• Lack of version control of designs and critical documentation;
• Files being lost or duplicated;
• Incorrect revisions being sent to clients;
• Inefficiencies around issuing invoices and resulting high DSO figures
• Out-of-date and onerous reporting data;
• Timesheets lacking useful information;
• Double and triple entry of some data;
• Systems that didn’t integrate with each other;
• Problems stemming from incorrect use of transmittals; and
• The fact that practice information wasn’t readily accessible from remote locations.

The practice currently handles approximately 150 projects per year, each of which requires 100 drawings, and Tilleyshort discovered that Elevation’s 18 production staff were hindered by an average of 20 issues per project. These may seem minor in isolation, but across the practice they added up to significant time and productivity losses each year.

“We wanted a system that was customisable and scalable; something that we could make work for us and the way we did things,” Rachel Tilleyshort said. “We also wanted the flexibility of a system that we could access anywhere, because we have remote workers in our office. What we really needed was a single source of truth, instead of things being doubled up, or repeated three or four times.”

It took Tilleyshort several years to research and scope the firm’s needs, review various product offerings, benchmark existing performance standards, and identify the right expert partner to guide Elevation’s transformation. “That process of looking at alternative products was overwhelming, but we kept coming back to Deltek,” she says.

Elevation implemented Deltek Project Information Management (PIM) in 2016, and has achieved significant time and money savings on project tasks since then. These include:

• 10 minutes per day saved searching for files = 734 hours / per year
• 10 minutes per day saved searching for emails = 734 hours / year
• 10 minutes per day saved filing emails = 734 hours / year
• 1 hour saved per project setting up transmittals = 150 hours / year
• 5 minutes per drawing saved filing & updating drawings = 1200 hours / year
• 15 minutes saved per drawing Issue = 750 hours / year