Customer Success Story
Sebesta Blomberg

Renowned national engineering firm increases productivity and business efficency with Deltek Vision^®

The Challenge

With 260 employees spanning 10 offices worldwide, Sebesta Blomberg is a well-established, multi-discipline engineering/architecture firm renowned for its work with clients such as the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, a majority of the BIG 10 Universities, research facilities including Harvard, Yale, MIT, MD Anderson and others including General Mills, 3M, Dow Corning and The Getty Museum. The firm is nationally recognized ranking 314th among ENR's Top 500 design firms, with nearly $37 million in annual revenues.

In the late 1990s, Sebesta Blomberg began to significantly expand its worldwide presence significantly and as a result, began seeking a software system that could accommodate this growth firm-wide, from accounting to project management. As IT Director JJ Brantingham recalled, the firm was using Timberline at the time.

“Timberline was a basic package, and not designed to manage projects from multiple locations,” he said. “As a result, we licensed Sema4 to handle our enterprise management needs, and found it was a much better fit.”

The Solution

Sebesta Blomberg used the financial management system “Sema4” for several years before turning their interest to Deltek Vision, the only integrated business solution designed specifically for professional services firms.

“We had heard of Vision through our longstanding Sema4 relationships, and our CFO, Dan Tollman, had been watching the product's development with great interest since its initial release in 2002,” he said. “After evaluating other solutions, we concluded that Vision was the best integrated project management, CRM and accounting solution available on the market.”

After licensing Vision with strong buy-in from the firm's top management, including Jim Sebesta, CEO, Sebesta Blomberg underwent a quick five-month implementation of Vision and was live on Vision by January 2006.

The Benefits

Today, Sebesta Blomberg is using Vision for comprehensive financial and project accounting, project planning and fee estimating, billing, time and expense, resource planning and proposal generation, client relationship management, purchasing and document management. The software is tracking and managing more than 600 projects across all the firm's locations, including Shanghai, China and Dubai, UAE.

“Already we're experiencing numerous benefits, but the biggest one is the fact that we now have a single home for all our functions,” Brantingham said. “This has eliminated much of our time-consuming manual processes, such as sorting through duplicate entries for our clients and contacts, collecting marketing and employee resumes manually.”

Particularly on the timekeeping side, Brantingham points to enormous productivity and efficiency gains. As he explained, “The ability to pre-populate timesheets with projects that our employees are budgeted and planned on has saved us thousands of hours of data entry a year. Just as important, it has also virtually eliminated data inaccuracy in this area, preventing our employees from inadvertently selecting the wrong project to charge their time to.”

According to Brantingham, the integrated resource planning functionality in Vision has also measurably improved Sebesta Blomberg's efficiency, giving project managers the ability to quickly and easily assign resources to tasks and projects firm-wide.

“With Vision resource planning, we can easily examine and analyze how our resources are allocated for each project, by individual, group, business unit or service offering, and reassign accordingly to maximize our productivity,” he said. “I truly have not seen such intuitive integration between resource planning and project management in any other software solution.”

On the project management side, Vision has also spurred Sebesta Blomberg to create company-wide policies requiring project resource plans. “We've begun to assign people to all our projects as part of this policy as well,” Brantingham said.

“In this way, Vision has helped us to standardize and centralize all our projects, so we're able to accurately track the scope of each project, including status, hours and dollars spent,” says Brantingham.