Baxter & Woodman Focuses on Accessibility, Usability and Automation with Vantagepoint Upgrade

In this blog series, we asked several customers to share their insights on their experience upgrading to Deltek Vantagepoint. Read about driving factors, tips for success, preparation best practices, benefits for end users and more to empower your firm to successfully upgrade to Vantagepoint.

Baxter & Woodman is an infrastructure planning, design and construction firm with 14 offices and more than 400 employees. Thomas Melone, staff accountant and system administrator, led Baxter & Woodman through their upgrade from Deltek Vision to Deltek Vantagepoint in May 2023 and shared his perspective to help other firms successfully upgrade.

Compelling Drivers for Upgrading to Vantagepoint

Baxter & Woodman has been rapidly growing, nearly doubling staff in just three years. They needed a single solution that was easy for new employees to navigate and could help them improve their internal processes, especially for managing projects.

The Baxter & Woodman team knew they wanted to upgrade to Deltek Vantagepoint, but it was just a matter of determining the right timing. With their head system administrator preparing for retirement, the team knew it was critical to start the upgrade before she left to capture her knowledge and history with Deltek Vision.

“When I came on board, the person in my position was retiring and we knew we wanted to upgrade to Vantagepoint while we still had her knowledge and expertise,” says Tom.

So, the Baxter & Woodman team engaged SilverEdge, a Deltek Gold partner, to help manage their timelines and share best practices for a successful upgrade. They set up a test environment and started preparing for their upgrade.

Embracing Change for the Better with Vantagepoint

Baxter & Woodman upgraded to Vantagepoint in May 2023 and have seen tremendous engagement from their teams post-upgrade.

“After the upgrade, their very first comment was they love that there is web access,” said Tom. “Instead of having to find secure Wi-Fi and VPN in, they can log in from anywhere from any internet browser.”

With many management team members working in the field, this accessibility to Vantagepoint is game-changing for the Baxter & Woodman team, saving them valuable time trying to connect and making it much easier to update key information in a more timely manner.

Project managers are also embracing changes to how projects and project plans are managed in Vantagepoint.

“Project planning and projects were a change right at the beginning,” shared Tom. “The PMs were used to Vision plans and they work a little differently in Vantagepoint, but now they like that it’s all in one record and it’s all connected. That’s really helpful for them and they like that.”

With Vantagepoint, it is also easier for Baxter & Woodman to incorporate historical project and financial data from companies they acquire into one system.

“Different firms were running different processes and were on different systems, but we’ve been able to easily import their data into Vantagepoint,” said Tom. “It’s also very user-friendly, which is a huge help to us.”

The usability of Vantagepoint is helping Baxter & Woodman with post-upgrade adoption and is making it easier to bring new employees or staff from an acquisition into Vantagepoint and get them up and running faster.

Taking Financial Processes to the Next Level

When Baxter & Woodman upgraded to Vantagepoint, they knew their current accounting processes would be supported and the upgrade to Vantagepoint would be seamless for their financial staff, so they focused on the project managers and other teams that would need more support after the upgrade.

Now that users are getting more comfortable and familiar with Vantagepoint, the firm plans to focus on financial management processes.

“We want to start leveraging more of the automation in Vantagepoint, especially for accounting, such as automated bank feeds and reconciliations – anywhere we can save teams time,” said Tom.

Leveraging the Power of Integrations for More Efficiency

Now that they have upgraded to Vantagepoint, Baxter & Woodman is leveraging the power of Deltek Unionpoint, an integration platform as a service, to save time and improve data integrity across the business.

“In the short time we’ve had Deltek Unionpoint, we’ve seen higher overall company utilization because our teams can spend more time on billable projects rather than creating projects,” said Tom. “We’re also making it easier for project managers and business developers to spend more time on client interactions rather than copying and pasting data between systems.”

One example of significant time savings and data improvement is project creation. For every project created, there is a specific WBS structure with task numbers required to help with workflows, but as Tom shared, there are often errors and typos.

“Before Unionpoint, I was fixing 25-30 projects a week,” Tom said. “Some projects require key conversions to fix the errors because the projects are already being used and it was taking one to two hours every week.”

Now, when a new project is created, Unionpoint automatically adds the right structure, eliminating human error and removing the need for manual fixes by Tom.

“Since we’ve implemented Unionpoint, I haven’t had to fix a single project,” said Tom. “I know it’s always right and I don’t have to think about it.”

Baxter & Woodman is continuing to evaluate more ways to leverage Deltek to drive efficiency, improve data integrity, and streamline workflow processes. Learn more about their use of Deltek Unionpoint.

Advice for Other Companies Upgrading to Vantagepoint

When it comes to giving advice to other Deltek Vision users looking to upgrade to Vantagepoint, Tom has some recommendations to help make the upgrade more successful and to improve adoption after the upgrade.

Tom recommends firms upgrade to Vantagepoint so teams can gather critical project and client information more easily from the right people, like project managers.

“Upgrading to Vantagepoint made it much easier to capture information from project managers and others because it is more user friendly, which helps all of us,” said Tom.

“Vantagepoint also offers more internal integrations and advanced processes like bank integrations and draft invoice approvals,” said Tom. “As you slowly start adding them to your business, they will help streamline processes and make things much simpler for the end user.”

Tom also recommends seeking upgrade support if your company needs a little extra help. Baxter & Woodman worked with SilverEdge, a Deltek Gold partner, to help keep them on track, provide recommendations based on past upgrade experiences, and answer questions as needed.