In our first installment of our three-part series on "Why now is the best time to migrate to Deltek Costpoint" we discussed GCS support and what it means for your business.
Previous Post: Why now is the best time to migrate to Deltek Costpoint – Part 1 Support
Now we will discuss another area of concern we've heard from our growing customers - insight. No, not the annual Deltek conference, but the technology behind GCS Premier and the greater reporting offered by switching to Costpoint.
The most common concerns we have received have been:
Does Costpoint really offer more robust reporting then GCS?
Short answer - Yes.
As a company grows their reporting needs increase, this can be a challenge. Deltek has taken many steps to overcome this, and added systems such as Premier Billing, Cognos BI, and Budgeting & Planning to help alleviate the constraints within traditional GCS software.
However, Costpoint has much more built-in flexibility for importing and exporting data as well as the option of Kinetek Performance Management (KPM) for ad hoc reporting. Costpoint also has a much more flexible project, billing, and reporting options available within the core modules.
More powerful customization capabilities? Will they provide greater visibility into my business?
While running reports is simple, developing them can be challenging for users unfamiliar with Costpoint’s underlying data structure. To solve this problem, Kinetek created standard reports included in our KPM solution that cover everything from project management to payroll to procurement and more. These prebuilt reports enable users to quickly generate reports that capture the most commonly used fields across a wide swath of businesses. Additionally, they can include user-defined fields or specific metrics that you have implemented for your specific needs.
To capture that data, enterprises will want to build custom reports or modify existing standard reports. Creating or modifying Cognos reports requires a strong working knowledge of both the Cognos tool as well as the structure of the Costpoint database. For example, you can’t simply click a button to tailor a report to your accounts payable process or labor-management structure. You will need to understand where the pertinent data elements reside and how to access them using the Cognos toolset. Many intermediate users lack the skills to effectively craft custom reports.
Additionally, Kinetek offers both custom report writing and training, written exclusively for Costpoint and Government Contractors to gain the most from their system, allowing greater visibility with zero downtime.
Additional awesome things - Actionable Dashboards
With Costpoint, executives and operational leaders of government contractors can use out-of-the-box analytical dashboards to understand critical business data, discover key business insights and uncover potential issues.
These dashboards include:
- Projects Dashboard – View Project Loss, Profit under Budget, Billing over Funding
- Profit Dashboard – Ability to view actual profit vs. budget down to the specific project level
- Revenue Dashboard - Allows users to view actual revenue vs. budget per project manager to conduct variance analysis.
- Labor Dashboard – Shows Staff Productivity versus target. Are there variances against forecast? Ability to view down to the employee level
- Backlog Dashboard – Broken out by its components - New Business, Contract Expansion, Adjustments, and Revenue. Ability to review trends and incorporate into future forecasts
- Summary Dashboard – Managers have a summary view of their key analytics to gauge company performance.
Kinetek Performance Management includes additional dashboards for: AP, AR, HR, PO, PM. Kinetek also has C-level executive dashboards available. Need a specific dashboard? We can create a custom dashboard to help you can gain insight, identify specific trends, and make complex information easy to understand.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of our “Why now is the best time to migrate to Deltek Costpoint” series where we will dive deeper into Costpoint. If you have any other questions or would like to discuss GCS or Costpoint further, please contact us.