Project managers don't have a time problem. They have a friction problem.
The information you need is in Deltek Vantagepoint. The answers are there. The risks are visible if you know where to look and have the bandwidth to look. But between client calls, team check-ins, invoice approvals, and the relentless rhythm of keeping projects moving, “going to look” is often the first thing that slips.
That's exactly the problem Dela was built to solve.
Dela is Vantagepoint's AI, not a chatbot bolted onto the side of your ERP, but an AI orchestrator woven through the platform you already use every day. It works inside your security context, respects your permissions, and understands the language of project-based work. And for project managers specifically, it changes what a typical day looks like in some genuinely meaningful ways.
Here's what it can do for you right now.
Ask Anything. Get Answers in Seconds.
How much time does your team spend hunting for information that's technically already in the system? Looking up who the PM is on a project. Finding the top revenue-producing jobs. Checking the status of a contract. These are two-minute tasks that add up to hours every week across a firm.
With Ask Dela, you ask the question in plain language and get the answer immediately. No menu navigation, no report-building, no “let me dig that up for you.”
- “Who is the project manager on the Carlton Industries Plant Expansion?” Answered instantly.
- “What are the top 10 projects by JTD revenue?” Ranked list, no report required.
- “Summarize this contract document for me.” Dela reads the file and pulls out what matters.
Dela understands architecture & engineering (A&E) and consulting terminology, including project phases, fee types, and billing structures, so you don't have to translate your questions into software language. You just ask.
Ask about any project, revenue, or contract and get the answer instantly.
Log Time Without Touching a Timesheet
One of the most persistent friction points in project management isn't strategic. It's administrative. Logging hours. Doing it accurately. Doing it on time.
Ask Dela handles it conversationally. Tell it what you want to log, including project, phase, task, hours, and date, and it confirms the details before posting. No navigating to the timesheet hub. No hunting for the right project number. Just tell Dela, confirm, done.
For PMs managing their own time across multiple projects, this alone is a meaningful time saver. For firms where timesheet compliance is a perennial challenge, it removes one more reason for late or inaccurate entries.
Tell Dela the project, phase, and hours, and it logs the entry for you.
Spot Problems Before They Become Expensive
This is where Dela shifts from useful to genuinely valuable.
Dela Insights continuously monitors your projects and surfaces issues proactively, before you go looking for them and before they've had time to compound. For project managers, the most impactful alerts include:
- Earned Revenue Ahead of Invoicing. Your project has completed more work than you've billed. That's money sitting on the table, and it can quietly hurt cash flow if no one catches it in time. Dela flags it, explains the gap, and gives you one-click options to navigate to a draft invoice for approval, kick off the billing process, or message your project biller directly so that the right person is looped in immediately.
- Spending Ahead of Earned Revenue. Margin is at risk. Dela catches this trend early, not at month-end when it's already baked into the numbers and surfaces it with enough context to take action while you still can.
- Earned Revenue Ahead of Spending. Your reported progress is running ahead of actual project spending, which could mean your team is executing efficiently and margins are strong, or it could signal that the percent complete is being reported more optimistically than the work actually completed. Either way, Dela flags it so you can investigate before it becomes a financial or billing discrepancy.
- Expense Policy Violations. A team member submits an expense that violates company policy. Dela flags the specific line item, explains the issue, and suggests the corrective action before it's approved and paid.
- Timesheet Anomalies. Missing hours, unusual patterns, and entries that don't match the project structure. Dela catches these before they become billing problems or compliance issues.
The difference between Dela Insights and a dashboard is significant: a dashboard shows you data when you go look at it. Dela Insights finds you when something needs your attention. That's not a subtle distinction. It's the difference between reactive project management and proactive project management.
Tell Dela the project, phase, and hours, and it logs the entry for you.
See It in Action: AI-Powered Profitability in Vantagepoint
Watch this webinar to see the AI and automation capabilities covered in this post live in Vantagepoint.
Get a Full Project Briefing in One Click
Before a client meeting, how long does it take to pull together a clear picture of where a project stands? Financial health, recent activities, key milestones, open pursuits, assembling that from scratch takes time your schedule often doesn't have.
Dela Project Smart Summaries do it in seconds.
One click generates an AI-written briefing drawn entirely from your Vantagepoint data, covering financial health, recent activities, plan status, pursuit information, and project KPIs. It's formatted and ready to use, whether you're walking into a client meeting, preparing for an executive review, or making a go/no-go decision.
Smart Summaries are also available at the client level, giving you a consolidated view of all active and completed projects, recent touchpoints, and client KPIs before you pick up the phone or walk into the room.
Generate a full financial and milestone briefing in one click.
Create Records Without the Manual Entry
Field work, client visits, networking events: PMs are constantly collecting information that needs to make it back into Vantagepoint. Contacts from a business card. Receipts from a site visit. New activity records from a client call.
Dela's image capture and recognition (ICR) feature handles this from your phone:
- Snap a business card, and a contact record is created with fields pre-populated.
- Photograph a receipt and an expense record that is ready for submission.
- Scan an invoice, and an AP invoice record is created for review.
Snap a business card or receipt and Dela creates the record for you.
No manual entry. No, “I'll add that later.” The information is entered into the system when it's fresh, so it's available when someone needs it.
Draft Emails Without Starting from Scratch
Project managers write a lot of emails. Status updates to clients. Follow-ups to the billing team. Reminders to the project team. Dela can draft these for you, in context, based on actual project data, so you're editing and sending rather than staring at a blank screen.
Dela can draft project status emails, accounts receivable follow-up correspondence, and client communications directly from within Vantagepoint, using the project and financial data it already has access to.
Dela drafts the email from your project data, so you just edit and send.
The Bigger Picture
What all of these capabilities have in common is this: they give project managers their attention back.
Not by doing your job for you, but by handling the friction that pulls you away from the work that actually requires your judgment. The information hunting. The manual entry. The monitoring that should happen automatically. The drafting that starts from scratch when it doesn't have to.
Dela is live in Vantagepoint today. These aren't roadmap promises. They're capabilities your team can use right now. And as additional Dela features roll out, the story gets stronger still.
If you're a Vantagepoint user, the question isn't whether AI will change how project management works. It already has. The question is how quickly your team starts using it.
Also Worth Reading: Strengthen Your Planning Foundation
Dela gives you the intelligence layer on top of your project plans. But the strength of those plans matters too. Vantagepoint also includes powerful scenario planning, change order management, and baseline tools that let you model options, isolate proposed scope changes, and protect margin before execution starts.
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