For a project to be successful, it takes a strong team, the right process, and tools to keep project strengths and weaknesses on everyone’s radar. When our Project and Portfolio Management team saw the difficulty customers had receiving and processing updates to their project schedules, Deltek introduced Acumen Touchstone to help automate their efforts to save time and resources. This centralized repository for storing, evaluating, and benchmarking project schedules removes the burden of validating schedule submittals while helping to improve quality and deliver successful projects.
Through a series of opportunities, including Deltek’s quarterly Town Halls, annual user conference, and ongoing customer meetings, we’ve listened to the feedback and utilized it to evolve the Acumen Touchstone product. We are proud that Touchstone’s evolution has led additional customers to conduct pilots and move forward with implementation. Like our other industry-leading solutions, we rely on Deltek Project Nation to provide valuable feedback to help enhance our product capabilities and fine-tune features to match business needs and processes better.
Meeting Our Customers’ Needs
After consulting with early adopter customers and prospects, we identified a variety of product enhancements that could create more value and benefit our end-users. These requests included a transportation customer in Europe who wanted flexibility when establishing the upload window for schedule submissions; a government contractor who wanted to establish acceptance criteria to reject a submission if an individual metric failed; and a customer in the oil and gas industry who wanted to customize the terminology when accepting or rejecting schedules. Thanks to the open dialogue we have with Deltek Project Nation, these features, and more, were included in the Acumen Touchstone 8.1.2 release earlier this year.
Learn how you can digitally transform your project schedule with Acumen Touchstone by viewing this short demo video:
One of our newer clients, Atkins Global, a leading design, engineering and project-management consultancy recently turned to Acumen Touchstone to reduce the impact of schedule reviews on their project management staff and free up time for more analysis of problem schedules. When asked about the drivers for the project, Neil Reese, Senior Planner and Project Lead, commented:
“For Atkins, one of the main drivers for purchasing Acumen Touchstone was that it automates 90% of the schedule evaluation process and quickly completes what’s needed. By handling the schedule submission and initial quality review, Touchstone frees up time to do more detailed risk analysis with Acumen Fuse.”
In terms of expected results, Neil added:
“We hope to 1) improve the quality of the schedules, 2) better track schedule submissions and timeframes, and 3) benchmark schedule quality over time. Our initial phase will focus on internal schedules, then we’ll go on to external clients, after gaining familiarity with the tool.”
Similarly, Scheduling and Information Services (SIS), a project consulting firm that delivers integrated project planning, CPM scheduling, risk analysis and project controls services, selected Acumen Touchstone to help schedule quality assessments each month for a Microsoft campus modernization project, which saves time and allows results to be shared with team members more quickly. SIS also uses Acumen Touchstone to review internally submitted schedules which helps managers review and improve quality before they are sent to Army and Navy clients. Learn more about how SIS leverages this innovative solution to not only help scale their business but also provide a competitive advantage.
Customer Story
Learn How SIS Streamlined Their Schedule Review With Acumen Touchstone
Whether your firm is looking to free up valuable resources by automating schedule reviews, locate the most recent versions of schedules with the click of a button or keep track of submitted and missing schedules through the status snapshot view, Acumen Touchstone is designed to meet your project-based needs.
For more information visit Deltek.com and be sure to check out the On-Demand Solution Speed Session, Automate your Schedule Review Process with Acumen Touchstone, or click here to request a demonstration.
