Customer Success Story
Gould Evans
Architecture & Design firm realizing “Vision” of savings
The Challenge
Gould Evans is an architecture, interior design, graphic design and landscape planning firm with a reputation for innovation. Named by the Washington Post as one of the “most inventive places to work”, the Kansas City-based professional services firm has 200+ employees and offices in 12 U.S. locations, and provides leadership in a wide variety of retail, entertainment, hospitality, government and consumer projects for both private and public clients.
Gould Evans had been using predecessor product SEMA4 for at least 10 years to handle its project and financial accounting needs. In late 2003, however, an internal client database system came “crashing down,” making the timing right for the firm to look for a more projet-focused accounting solution.
“With the need to replace this database looming over our heads, it also seemed like a good idea to convert over to a marketing-driven database at the same time, as well as maximize both the flexibility and reporting capabilities of our company,” said project accountant Jim Harrington at Gould Evans.
The Solution
Gould Evans subsequently purchased a 250-seat license for Deltek Vision, which was up and running in August 2004 after an intensive implementation process. Overall, Gould Evans was pleased with the way the implementation was handled.
“Our questions were answered quickly and any issues we had resolved in a timeframe we were quite happy with,” said Harrington. “We are a long-time customer and it was clear Deltek wanted to keep us happy.”
The Benefits
Surprising even to the Gould Evans management team, was the extent of impact that Deltek's Vision solution is having on the organization. In a quick one-hour audit of the impacted business processes and resulting expense gains, Gould Evans found no less than 10 immediate areas of impact, yielding a total gain to date — in just 10 months — of more than $185,000, with nine of the 10 impacted areas representing recurring opportunities for savings.
Gould Evans is realizing these savings from Vision by redirecting employee efforts away from manually driven processes and by automating ongoing business needs that previously took hundreds of man-hours away from more productive work. Gould Evans is realizing continual gains in several recurring process categories, including project management reporting, payroll processing, P&L reporting, accounts payable administration, internal processes tied to financial administration/reporting, timesheet entry reporting, project financial reporting, spreadsheet consolidations and salary review/increase administration.
Additionally, Gould Evans said that the firm was able to eliminate one project manager staff position because of increased gains in internal business processes. As project accountant Cindy Childers noted, “We used to spend whole afternoons, twice a month, simply printing off reports and passing them out to project managers. Now those same project managers are accessing needed reporting directly on the Web.”
Childers also points to other less tangible but equally important benefits realized with Vision. “Vision is very user-friendly and it gives us more choices with less paperwork to handle,” she said. “When we first switched over from SEMA4, we were used to doing things one way — the way that worked for us — but that was not necessarily the most expeditious. With Vision, we got speed and flexibility, but we also found ways to update our own internal business processes to get more done in less time.”
In addition, the company has also streamlined its human resources processes with Deltek Vision, tying employee functions directly into its payroll and financial systems. This capability has eliminated the previously laborious task of manually entering each employee into the company's dozen or so separate employee databases scattered across the country.
“We went from a rag-tag system and methodology within our employee database to a streamlined business process that ties HR directly to both employees and to the payroll/financial systems,” Childers said. Added Lies, “With Vision, we are now making our HR infrastructure work to our advantage. In a project-driven business, our people management is everything.”