Transcript for "QODA's Automation Advantage": Hello, and thank you for joining this Deltek webinar today, Coda's Automation Advantage. Before we begin, there are a few housekeeping notes to be aware of. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. Audio will be streamed through your computer. There is no dialling. Make sure your volume is up. You can download the presentation slides and additional resources in the Resources widget. You will receive the recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. For any questions to the panel, please submit those in the Q and A widget at any point during the webinar. You can also use the Q and A widget if you experience any technical issues. And now it's time to hand over to the webinar's host, Peter Jacobs. Peter, over to you. Thanks very much, Steve. So let's go into the agenda for today's session. So we're going to start by introducing the speakers to you today, and then we're going to get into the three core topics. The first being how customers can move from fragmented systems or multiple systems down to one source of the truth and the value or the impact that has to customers of Deltek, how we can reduce DSO days using better billing controls in a standardised or systemised approach, and then looking at a real life transition between the old way of working across to Deltek's best practice and just a bit of feedback about how that implementation went and any lessons learned from David and the team. We'll then end on Q and A, so just to reiterate Steve's point at the start, there is a Q and A box visible on your screen, so just pop your questions in there and David and myself will get to them during the live Q and A section. Before we go any further, just to introduce myself, my name is Peter Jacobs. I'm a solution engineer with Deltek, and my day to day is uncovering customer challenges and working with them to showcase how a platform like Deltek VantagePoint is able to overcome those challenges. And with me today, I've got David. David, do you want to just quickly introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, that's fine. Hi everyone, my name is David Pastel, I'm the Finance Director of Consulting Limited. We're a mechanical engineering sustainability consultancy firm. Before we get into getting David to explain a little bit more about Coda and the great work that they do, just to introduce Deltec as a platform to you, the solution that we're going to be focusing on today, is Varnishpoint. Varnishpoint really is built for the way that A and C firms operate and focuses in on the four main topics that you're seeing on screen. It's looking at capturing the customer relationships as well as the qualification of opportunities through a standardized qualification workflow to the correct outcome for the business, so you can look back and track win rate visually through dashboards. Planning that work, so being able to start from planning opportunities and converting that into a project plan and a project baseline that the system or the solution is actively tracking against as your projects go through the normal ebbs and flows through the project lifecycle, and then looking at executing the work, so collecting the costs from your team and having that flow through the system or through one system, either onto an invoice or to the chart account codes or nominal codes, so that you can measure not just your project performance, but also your performance as a business as a whole. And then lastly, looking to analyse all of the data. So being able to use the inbuilt dashboard technology in order to have live information as soon as it's entered throughout the project lifecycle and enable the improvement of trust in the data because of all of the cost approval workflows that you'll see here, as well as the workflows you can embed by capturing standardized data entry through VantagePoint, enables us to build that trust between your user group as well as the information that the platform shows you day in and day out. So we'll stop there, and David, do want to just introduce Coda as the company and the great work that your team have been doing? Yeah, thank you Peter. So as I said, we're mechanical engineering consultants looking to do sustainable design in the built environment. If you move on to the next slide, I believe you've got an example of one of the marquee projects they're currently working on, which is called Tribeca in Kings Cross. This is I I believe there are four plots to this building. There's over a million square foot of space here. It's mixed use, but it's mainly in the life sciences sector. So this is going to enable the growing demand of life sciences in London. It's going to include premium lab enabled space, and also have about 30,000 affordable lab ready units specifically for biotech startups. There's a big focus on sustainability here. They're going for Well Platinum Briam Outstanding which are the top accreditations. Yeah it's a great project to be part of if you actually pop down the King's Cross off the back of Coal Drop Yards at the moment one of the buildings is completely built and the other ones they've topped out on a couple of them now and I think the second plot is now being all fitted out as well and having the facades put on. It does look pretty spectacular and I've been fortunate enough to go on-site a couple of times. If you want to move on to the next slide, it's a per down view. So this is, I've been told, it is The UK's largest passive house scheme and it's a 900 room student accommodation block for the UWE Bristol. Again, it's one of our expertise in house, is passive house and I wish I could talk to the technical aspects of this project but I can't. It's a really great scheme to have been a part of. It's also won multiple awards now in Q4 last year and into the beginning of this year with a big shout out to I think it's Stryde Draglaan who were the architects I probably got that name wrong but they're the architects they worked very closely on this scheme. Okay, thanks so much. That gives the audience a really good idea of CODA and the great work that's been happening behind the scenes. So let's go into the first section, which is all about fragmented systems, or working from multiple systems, and bringing all of that information into one source of the truth. And this is one of the most common challenges that I hear a lot from CFOs in professional services, which is that fragmentation, so data being spread across multiple systems, and normally it's the finance department's job to act as the reconciliation for all of the company's data. So David, before implementing VantagePoint, we talked about how Coda was very much operating in that environment. Can you briefly describe to the audience what it was you were dealing with? Yes, so when I joined the business we had four to five different finance and HR systems and none of them spoke to each other. This isn't unusual for a business that's growing the way that it has from a small company moving up from probably a small office of 10 people to growing to over 100 people. And most of the time what you find is these bolt on softwares are used for a short term goal, but not with growth and scalability in mind. And you get a lot of data proliferation and things kind of run out of control. So, yes, when I came in, there were many systems, and the decision was taken. One of the reasons I was brought into the business was to have an overview of it, review it, and see if there was a way we could implement something like an ERP system that would bring it all together. That is very common from what I'm hearing day in and day out from our customer base. We've had these bolt ons or these additional modules and things are just slowly and slowly creeping more and more out of control so that the consolidation or the reconciliation of information just becomes really unmanageable. David, can you talk about any specific drivers that made change unavoidable in your opinion and the coders opinion? Yeah, so again when I joined in 2024 business was going through a reasonably difficult time, which it isn't anymore. However, what there wasn't is there wasn't proactive decision making due to the availability of data being so slow. So, you know, month in close was taking nearly two weeks when I joined. Glad to say it's significantly less than that with the ERP scheme in place now, which is good. A lot of it was around that proactiveness of decision making availability of data, and as well as the integrity of that data. Like I referred to a minute ago, the data did not talk to each other. We had different systems that did not speak to each other. Billing was done separately to accounting. It was all a bit of a mishmash, lots of manual intervention. That's the third reason really is the fact that there was so much kind of dead administration going on with having to piece all of this information together every month which is also intrinsically linked to why clothes took so long when they first arrived to the business. I suppose maybe finally overarching it all is kind of the governance and accountability piece. There was, you know, it was really us and them. We should all be working collaboratively together. The function should be more about supporting the business and being advisory, not really just being a function of debits and credits and bookkeeping, which is what small businesses can grow up feeling like until you reach a precipice where you are looking to grow. Absolutely and that collaboration between the teams that's one of the reasons why the Deltec platform is being developed. So if I just quickly change over to CODIS system and just briefly explain to the audience what we're seeing here before we go into a bit more detail about the fragmentation. Connecting both teams is really vital, right? You don't want to have your project team doing something which isn't impacting what teams like Davies are doing. So in VantagePoint, the project is at the center of every transaction that goes through the system. So while you've got the project information, you've also got everything tied to the nominal code. And that's really the value of bringing together both of those ledges into one system so that what your project team are doing is impacting what it is that your Sorry, the project team are entering the transactions that your team is monitoring and posting and adjusting as you're going through that month end life cycle. So on screen is an out of the box summary of Varnishpoint, but all of this is what the end result of this webinar is, to have one consolidated view of all of your information in the system. The project team has their split of the system, but then yourselves as the finance team, you have your own view, but that's all coming from that all important project data. So David, can we just talk us through why you consider VantagePoint to be a single source of the truth, as it were? Yeah, so I can see that you've put your mouse on the top left for me already. If you preempted what I'm going to ask you to do just to open up the kind of menu bar on the left. So yes, we refer to that single source of truth and that phrase can wear on you. We've probably used it so much in this webinar. But as you can see on the left hand side, you know, I previously talked about we had lots of different systems, you know, one for CRM, one for HR, one for timesheets, one for bookkeeping. We even had one for invoicing. So, yeah, this brings it all together, right, in a project based system, because we are a project based business. So on the left you can see some very high level things like dashboards, which you're viewing on screen. You've got your My Stuff environments. You're able to a lot of self-service, that kind of employee experience piece that you get. And then you've got, you can just very high level, without going into it, you've got hubs that holds all the projects, the people, the firm data, the CRM data that's in there. But you can also see you've got proposals. So you've got proposal manager, resource management, the kind of accounting stuff, the transaction center, that's your actual transactional entry side that your accounting team will be doing, the cash management for managing and employing expenses. So I'm starting to build a picture that, you know, this was the single source of truth we were looking for to bring all of those softwares into one. It's a great thing to highlight where, you know, this system has grown in its functionality, and it does grow because we've proven it every quarter to bring in different offerings that our professional services customers need us to. So we always try and develop software that our clients will ultimately use, and we call that things like purposeful innovation. But as well as advantage point being that source of the truth, should we just take a step back and talk about a really key word in any CFO's role, which is control, and looking at not just what VantagePoint does as a single source of truth, but also the conversations that we've had offline, David. We've been talking about how you can embed your cost control processes or workflows into Deltek, where on screen you're actually seeing an example where you can send a cost item to a project, whether that's a timesheet, that's an expense in this case this is a supplier invoice and you can see which stage it's at in the approval process and actually a copy of that invoice as it goes through the door. So the intelligence that you want to put behind the scenes is really key. David, onto that sort of intelligence piece, what impact a screen like this or the sort of cost approval workflows and the visibility had to your role as Encoder? Yes, so there was a process before I joined on how accounts payable was dealt with etc. There was a lot of emails, was a lot of inboxes going around and a lot of decisions being made outside of an approval tree, Especially when you've got a multi office hybrid working environment as we have these days. Know, longer the days we're all in the office together and you can all look across the ball pen from one another. So what did this give us? So this was one of the big appeals is that, you which you haven't shown well, which you can kind of see on here is that this actually does use like an image capture technology. You can actually up you know, you can push invoices straight into the system and it will tag it. There are other anyone who's used the likes of other cloud based softwares and have used add ons, which we used to use as well, you might you may be familiar with, with kind of image capture technology, and, it's doing the heavy lifting on pulling out the date, the invoice number, the purchase order number, all of that information that sticks on the left hand side. So we liked that, number one. Again, replaced the core system that was one of many when I arrived. But the beauty of having something like, Deltec, an ERP system, is this kind of workflow side of things. It's not because Big Brother's always watching. I think it's just the basics of cost control for any kind of senior leader to make sure that there's no surprises. That's what finance people don't like. We don't like surprises. So this kind of it gives us that. The step before this would actually be raising the purchase order, but it's largely the same. So we'll talk through, you know, you would you'd submit the purchase order, you submit this invoice, for example. If do Deltec, as you can set up as many guardrails and gates as you really know, who you want people to jump through. So, we have a fairly lean structure. So, know, it's a finance. So, you can see there David Pestell has submitted it. We then it actually goes from our finance team to the project manager of the project if it's a project related cost, if it's an overhead related project for a specific office for example you know like the rent invoice for our London office that goes to the director of that office and he then would then approve it okay everyone gets an email notification once an approval gate has been passed through so that you can kind of track it through the system And when it gets to the final approver and it is approved finally, and in our business, depending on the size, it actually just loops all the way back to finance so that we so that we get the final visibility and then it's just double check there's been no comments along the way because through the I should say through the workflow process you can add comments to them you saw Peter putting his mouse over the little circle of someone's name that's where a comment would appear so yeah, there. So if there was a comment made, you would see it in there. It then loops back around the finance, and then it's then approved and posted to the ledger. If it's over a £5,000 limit, it comes to me for review. Unless it is a property cost, it's quite rare for me to see an expense more than £5,000 so I do generally like to see it. Yeah, gives you a clear audit trail. Also gives ownership to the local leaders and the project managers not thinking they'll just finance the order of the AP. What we have found actually is it's made our it's made made it much more efficient. Any queries pertaining to invoices coming in are dealt with a lot quicker. If things are a lot more harmonious really when you've got those kind of gates in play. Absolutely, and you've got different eyes on different transactions. You mentioned there that Varnish Point's intelligent enough to split it based on the category of the item that you're purchasing, as well as the limits of when the intelligence can kick in, that's not just on this approval process, by the way, that's on things like expenses as well, so embedded throughout the intelligence layer. With Coda though, you've recently expanded, which is brilliant news, and bought a lot of business. For the audience, any was Varnishpoint a component in your decision making with its ability to do this structured cost approval and standardised entry from the team? Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, certainly when we're looking at it, it was a big selling point going through and we'll go through power launch in a minute, which is the model that Delta used to help to support you along the way. But yes, this is one of the big drivers for it. It's good to hear that sort of standardization, that visibility, not just helps day to day, but also looking at for any business on the call or any CFOs on the call can lead to that enabler for growth as well. If we switch slightly and just look at the last subsection of this, which is insight into the information. So if we just go back to the dashboards, and one of the reports that you look at very regularly is this forecast report. So could you just highlight how access to information has changed at CODA and what does this CODA forecast report give you that aligns with your day to day goals? Yeah, thank you. So previously different directors would submit spreadsheets into accounts for the forecasting side of things and you'd be there the formatting would all go awry, maybe extra columns, you spend your life trying to get 20 documents into one to understand like what what's going to go on going forward right and as a senior finance leader you know forecasting is a big part of what you do right especially in this kind of climate in the construction industry and economically in The UK as we stand at the moment so yeah what does Delta give us you're able to vary you know there's a revenue forecast function in here and you're able to populate that you can change the methodology of how you wish to look at forecasting we just look at raw billing because generally that yes there'll be some movements here nor there which are assessed every single month but generally the billing will follow kind of the labor curve on the project so you know rebus stage three four design stages you know the labor's going to be a lot heavier the invoicing will be a lot heavier as you get to construction if it's a monitoring service or it's just the you know site visit monthly you'll find the run rate comes down. And you can present all of that on the project, on secured projects, which are marked here as one. You will see opportunities as well, and that is then again, you can choose how you as you build Deltek and build the data out, You can you can look at how you wish to to view this data. We look it based on a weighted fee, and we have a methodology between our weighting as well, which is baked into the system. That fee is then spread out over the life of the project. However, we do after there are some guardrails in place we say that people don't if you're forecasting in the month of February we shouldn't see any kind of opportunity revenue because the likelihood of you converting that project willing and delivering anything by the end of the month unless you already know you just haven't converted it yet we would say as a minimum we would expect it to be kind of next month onwards and then the curve you know as you imagine with any business as you go further out the amount of firm order versus your opportunity the opportunity should be like a bit of a hockey stick or an upward curve right and the firm order will go slightly downwards so and this is exactly what this is giving us in I suppose like an accountant form right so it looks like a spreadsheet almost but we're able to split it by office split it by where the peaks and troughs are we can very quickly get an idea of where the business is heading in terms of its recurring run rates and what the challenges are because for any business that works in consultancy it's keeping that engine going right this is winning that work securing it or generating the opportunity, and then securing it, and then turning it into revenue. And previously there wasn't that kind of we weren't agile enough to be proactive in our decision making when it came to this, and what this gives us is it's live by the way so it's real time all this stuff that we're looking at all the dashboards they're all real time data if I go in and I remove an opportunity it will disappear from you know the numbers will reduce here within seconds because this rebuilds itself every time you land on it because we set it in such a manner. But this enables us to quickly export the data on an itemised basis, from the underlying report this is built from, and we put it straight into our forecasting model outside of Deltek, which is an Excel model which then looks at the next twenty four months at any given time for the business and from that we can see from office level, divisional level exactly where there could be a resource need, where there's not enough resource, where there's too much resource, right? So again comes back to that proactive management of the business and risk aversion, and being nimble and agile. Absolutely and that, you know, I really like that talk track of the underlying value of this single source of truth is really being able to see everything at a click of a button and not just today's, what's happening today, not just what's happening in the past, but with your forecast looking at the next twelve months. Well, what's happening? Are we facing a troublesome time in the year? So just before we close off this section then, from a CFO's perspective, from your perspective, what outcomes would you want the audience to take away from this section? If you implement an ERP system, you should expect if it's done the right way, it should reduce the administrative burden within the business, should increase governance and accountability, and it really will transform your function into being more of a strategic adviser rather than just bookkeeping and accounting Absolutely. That is a very good takeaway. I don't need to explain to you cash flow is king, right? But what I hear from many customers or many organisations is that DSOs are still driven by internal processes rather than their customers' behaviour. So at Coda, what you've been able to do was reduce DSOs by ten days. And before we look at the how, can we just look at or could you describe to the audience what were the challenges you were facing pre Deltek? Yeah, so it goes back to some of the initial comments I made on having too many systems, too many cooks. We had the invoice process was long. It started in the middle of the month and closed at the end of the month. That's how long it took. They used two different systems for invoicing. Again, it was because of a need for a short term project and then they kept it so you end up having an invoicing system that was used merely for invoicing and then it was uploaded into the accounting system and then when it came through to credit control what you found is that there was not enough oversight from the project manager and too much reliance on the accountants having to get the old crystal ball out as I call it in finance and plug the gaps in because there was that lack of engagement which comes again comes back to that getting everyone bought into this and that visibility piece that ERP gives you so yeah so that's where we were pre Deltek and I'm sure you're now going to ask me to go through the journey of what it looks like now that we're in Deltek Well what we could do is use the system to highlight some of this because visibility, what you said there, is key right? Because then you're able to share the responsibility, it's not just the accounting function's job to make sure all of this makes sense to the company, it's everyone feeding into that pot. So this is a dashboard that you've built, David. Would be able to just describe to the audience today just what we're looking at here? Yeah it's fine. So you know I talked about the lack of engagement from project managers and that kind of invoicing was slow and painful. This enables us to now track our invoicing every single month. We will shortly, I believe, go into an example of how you raise an invoice to show kind of the improvements on the process that were made, but this is rolled forward every single month and this is a list that shows us at any given point during the billing cycle when we enter it where those invoices are. So you can see the columns on the right talking around draft invoice totals and draft invoice statuses. This allows us to track to track that billing cycle every month when we get into it, knowing who to chase, who's outstanding with their information. Having this available and I should say that based on the permissions you give your users, different users can see different pieces of information. So all the project managers in the business they have access to this dashboard when we enter the billing cycle everyone knows to look at this everyone knows that you know if something's outstanding they don't realise it they can refer to this dashboard and everyone at the top is then trying you know, that that invoice is posted in period, which is for the billing cycle. You know, everyone's got a target of how much they've got to bill. So there's that again, it's it's that visibility and getting everyone kind of tuned into this to hit those numbers, and this is a tool that we've used in order to track the billing for the month. That's something we didn't have before it was done via numerous spreadsheets for numerous offices run by numerous people. I really like the accountability message. You can see very visually here this is the person who should be actioning the next item on it so you can then go and chase rather than firing an email around the office and saying Who should I be talking to about this? But you're absolutely right, let's go and look at an invoice that's raised in the system. But before we open it back up to the talk track, let me just describe what the team is seeing here on the call, because as I mentioned up top, what you want to get, or what Vonage point allows you to do is have those transactions, those cost transactions flowing through the system. This is a screen that basically is the home for all invoicing in the system, and you've got all of your timesheet transactions, all of your expenses, whether they're reimbursable or direct, any supplier invoices that have come through that are due for recharge, all of those land here, as well as any elements that you've defined as your fee structure. And where they end up is a visual representation, and then again, to David's point there about the accountability, it's being able to share that. So in this case, this is David raising the invoice, it coming to a project leader for review, comment, adjustment and approval before it's been sent out the door straight straight within the system. So just bringing it back then, David, can you explain the impact that this has had to your billing cycle? Yes, it's a small change right, but as I mentioned you know now that we're in this kind of hybrid working world and everything's cloud based, you get the ability to have this all within one roof and if I go back to what we did previously, we would have people printing off a run of invoices and going within a certain office, and then there would be red pen markups, then it would be returned, and then the adjustments would be made. Given we're a sustainability MEP practice, we want to try and be sustainable in all areas. So having it all in here certainly reduces our carbon footprint a little bit, but what it does is it has sped up the process everyone is now it's now drilled into them that they can do all of this on screen so during the cycle all the invoices are submitted there's an approval center for the project managers they can go into this and as as I see you've been doing Peter you can mark up these invoices directly within Deltek and you can reject them or you know with your edits and it's all kept within the environment no emails that get missed no printing no delays well the only delay would be able to chase them on teams probably or slack or whatever you use to chase the individuals it's you know all these things are everything that we talk about today are small operational changes within, you know, within the way we do things. But overall, once you start stacking these things up together, you save a significant amount of time. And things after once you bed in, things start to move fairly quickly and more efficiently as a business. It should also be said that you can also one thing that a lot of software you know a lot of software does this but you also have the ability once this is all approved and posted you can email direct out you can email everything directly out the system so you know these invoices go directly from an unmanned think it's an unmanned Deltek inbox gets sent to all the clients with and you can choose who gets cc'd so our credit controller is always cc'd on everything so there can be no denial and no invoice was received by a customer. Again that comes back to the accountability piece, right? So having a system work with you in the process to identify this is the person that needs to review this or do this and trying to streamline what's happening underneath for each of those processes. We looked at the billing track and we looked at a physical invoice. Let's look at the end of the process then for the credit controller, and let's talk about, if we can, the impact that this dashboard has had on DSOs within Coda. I know it's in the slide, but I just want to hear it from you. What impact did a dashboard like this have for Coda? Yeah, so just to take a slight step back around the whole of the ERP implementation, I talked previously about the reduction in administration it gave us, right? Lots of finance administrative functions were kind of automated within the system now and we did actually find we're able to effectively repurpose some resource within the team to enable us to have a credit controller because we didn't have one when they first joined right so yeah senior leaders we're always looking for efficiencies anywhere we can get them right and any kind of cost saving and this you know it wasn't a cost saving per se but the pivot to a credit controller supported by Deltek has enabled us to to further decrease our DSO. We talk around it being ten days. I think straight after implementation, running it without a credit controller, must have been we brought it down by five days within a few months. That's what the trends would suggest anyway from our MI. But since then we've managed to decrease it even further I would go as far to say it's probably even more than ten days now we're consistently tracking about five to 10 no we're consistently tracking ten days below the market average at the moment for AEC firms per Deltek's clarity report, I should say. So I've referenced Deltek's own data there. So this is the credit control dashboard and this is where our credit controller lives and breathes. And, again, there's a little thing in here that I really just want to spotlight that was a bit of a game changer. When we first joined credit control we had to build a brand new spreadsheet to track it all and you know ultimately sometimes you get in businesses that it's all accountant it's the accountant's jobs to go and chase the debt right and resolve any queries but when you're talking around projects in the construction environment there can be all manner of queries and delivery issues and reasons why you're not getting paid and what the whys weren't getting answered in a timely manner and the whys weren't widely known to people right unless you sent this spreadsheet around and you've I can see you've already gone to it you know one thing that really no again another thing with Deltek which actually a couple of other providers who spoke to didn't have was this specific dashboard that allows you to track your comments on your AR so our credit controller lives in here and literally in the comments will put in chronological order everything that's going on with that debtor at any given point in time. All the directors can see this. They can all see their AR dashboard. They can all see who the people who have got debt is over ninety days compared to the others, and that actually does help businesses when they can all see each other's data if it's dealt with correctly, because no one wants to be the one director with a debtor over ninety days while everyone else is like, you know, the gold standard getting paid within thirty to sixty, etc. So yeah, the comments is one of those standout points I just want to share with everyone on this call that I actually would say that and the credit control are manning this is one of the fundamental reasons why debtors get resolved quicker when they go into query or just getting paid you know because in here we're able to write you know we actually have like a little coding system of promise to pay delaying payment for any reason or other and we can and then we can export this data and very quickly look at the buckets of debtor like no dispute will get paid and we should leave them alone because they promise to be paid this one is firmly in query and because it's firmly in query there is an action point with someone and we're and I'm able as the FD I'm able to go in weekly and my one to one with my credit controller to go in and support the business in trying to unlock these debtors. Absolutely. So I think you know as we close this section out really what I'm hearing is it's the accountability and the sharing of responsibility across team members and not just relying on your finance function to run these processes in the dark without the project management team or anyone else in the team that needs to view it. So although it is on screen, if we just do a summary, David, of what was the result of all of these different controls that you embedded within Varnish Point for Coda? I mean it's on your screen. We reduced DSO by ten days. No, so we, as I said, or as you just alluded to, it's everyone's responsibility in a business that in our environment especially, it's everyone's responsibility to collect cash, not just the FDs, right? We're the ones who use the ERP and use our teams effectively to support the business in doing that. So yeah, I mean that was the biggest value creation for us, right? Expediting ten days, which is like a couple 100 gram of cash really hot you know by maintaining it and so yeah it's good doing it it's then maintaining it which we've managed to do so that you know so yeah as you alluded to those as we've just gone through there's three or four little fundamental changes on the process and the procedure in internally and the visibility piece of the ERP that's really once you stack it all up that's what you know the by product is you've got to trust it trust it and it and it works because we've proven it now Absolutely and that concept of adopting change is something that's really key for not just this topic but also the next topic which is looking at how we're able to go from where any of the FDs are on the call at the moment from where you are. You might be working in fragmented systems, you might be looking at the DSO, saying that'd be fantastic to implement in our business, but the resistance is there of, well, what would it take to get something like Deltek into the business, but especially without things like disruption? So at Coda, you went from kickoff to go live in around four months using this best practice framework that I'll describe in a second. David, can set the context of how you approach the implementation from a finance leadership or FD perspective? Yeah, so having had experience of being in companies that had been acquired and done integrations, having done integrations before and worked on integration teams before, already had some experience of what my expectation was of this project and where we needed to get to because I previously worked in a $3,000,000,000 global engineering consultancy that was very mature and used Oracle, which had its own issues. So I knew what good looked like. So it good coming in here and having a look at doing the procurement process of finding a provider. We were looking for something that specifically worked for our industry, right, project based professional services. We're not selling widgets, we're selling hours and those are very valuable hours on our marquee projects. All our projects are marquee in my view. Treat them all the same, depending on regardless of size. But yeah, that's one of the reasons why we chose, you know, Deltek is because of its industry experience, to our industry. And from my own personal perspective at Coda, I didn't mention at the beginning but we are private equity owned. We're part of a buy and build portfolio, so we are a couple of acquisitions in and at the outset I knew that we would need to build you you should always be looking as a senior leader with an exit in five to seven years that you need to treat it as if it's like a waste for sale almost. So you need to build all your infrastructure very early on and Devotek gives us that scalability gives us that scalable infrastructure now for bringing these new companies in effectively with all the standardisation and not really being much more of an administrative burden for the group just a bit of training each time you bring them in. Absolutely and just picking up on one thing you said there, as I move on to the next slide, was looking at sort of Deltic's knowledge of the industry. So if I just stop and talk the audience through this before we spark up the conversation again, It's all that Deltic do. All that Deltic do is provide software for professional sepsis firms. Part of this best practice framework called PowerLaunch, as you've heard multiple times here, is delivering system that combines everything you've seen on screen, right? The dashboards, the screens, the workflows, the configurability element, so that we can give you a best practice jumping off point to all of our implementations. Because what normally happened was that you would have a or in a traditional implementation, you'd have a design and build phase. So those first three pillars on the left hand side there, you'd do some detailed process mapping, you'd then be designing and building a system from scratch. Whereas that's where PowerLaunch or this best practice template comes through, where we're starting with this pre configured system that has got all of the standard roles that you'd find, all of the dashboards, all of the screens, all of those cost approval workflows already built in. Then what we're doing in the implementation, building anything, we're adjusting any of these processes to meet your needs, Then we're importing your data, training you, and then testing the outcome. Really, the benefits, as they're highlighted on the right hand side, is reducing the time that you see value from this implementation. We don't want it to take months and months or years and years. It's also reducing the implementation effort from both teams, that's Deltec and yourselves, because you're starting from a best practice template that's already baked in from forty plus years experience in the market, and also reducing risk. One thing that we provide with the clients is a full manual of the system of how each of these processes work, how the system looks, and all of the demonstrations that I do to ensure that your expectations meet what you're going to receive as the end product. David, going back, so four months, that is from start to go live is fast by most standards. How did you structure the implementation? The first thing was putting the steering committee together, And so making sure that you get buy in. You can never over communicate something like this. So there was trying to get buy in from the necessary directors, senior leaders within the group, also bringing them along for the journey right so getting that what we call the steering committee so the people who would be part of the decision making process for the specific build of Deltek right as we as you've as you said it it comes off the shelf to an extent but there is still like a number of configuration actions you need to take and how overly convoluted you want the system to be okay and PowerLaunch talks you all the way through that so yeah the kind of the first bit of it was putting together that steering committee. Also, we'd already started putting the we already knew that the data needed cleansing and we started doing that as we started going through that procurement process. We were already cleansing data in the background, knowing that it was going to be that, you know, the data is one of the biggest stumbling blocks of people getting live. Absolutely, and that's something, for a personal note, that we were discussing when we were going through that sales cycle, right? Get your data together. I was very glad to help you, guide you through. This is the most common pitfalls that most clients fall into. Let's make sure we don't go through any of that this time. So within that sort of PowerLaunch framework then, what I heard there was sort of the structure and the framework, role did PowerLaunch really play in that four month delivery time frame? It certainly keeps you the task because the power launch effectively you get a team that will support and show you the time, your general timeline for it, what steps need to be taken it's all itemized into you know steps as it were so you know x y z one two three four and you had certain milestones of which you needed to meet so if you were doing it just on your you know I don't think don't take well we're just gonna like you know drop you into the ocean and say swim with the integration there's that it's almost like being handheld it's quite nice because it makes sure that it is done correct right and that's how you know you've gotten that's why you know you're partnering with a good business when they you know the way that power launch worked out for us because it really did get us yeah that's one of the reasons we got to you know doing it in a four month sprint effectively including all of the testing and data and kind of mirroring of our systems and the lead up to it Absolutely and keeping it you know one thing we talked about earlier was keeping it as simple as possible right so I think many of the the FDs in the core will be struggling with balancing the speed of the implementation and the complexity of their business. Was that ever a factor in the implementation for you David, where you're sort of balancing those two and trying to find the sweet spot between them? Yeah, I'd say so. Everything's always a kind of internal management piece, external management piece and we're just glad that it's we're glad that it's worked out for us right but there needs to be goal congruence between everyone involved you know including you know myself the leaders Deltek right we all you know what was funny is at the beginning I think our CEO said it has to be done in three months and I got on a call with Deltek and they said it is not going to happen so there's a bit of expectation setting there it was quite nice to be brought back down the earth by Deltek in that regard. Well it's always good to marry up the expectations, That's the key to any good implementation, any quick implementation, to sort of just goal set at the start and just manage those two expectations off the bat. Before we move into the Q and A, let's just close this implementing best practice topic off. Looking back, I'm sure there's a lot of FDs or multiple roles in the call today or in the webinar today, is there any sort of pointers you could give them based on your own implementation experience of how best to run a simple and smooth implementation? Yeah, firstly you go as fast as your you know you go as fast as your organisation needs right not as fast as your CEO asks you to. You do it you do you know you are most likely the CFO or the FD is normally leading these kind of things because everyone sees it as a finance HR project, right? You're doing, know, why are doing this as a senior leader? You're doing this to provide value. You don't make any decision unless it provides value for the business and therefore time should be taken when it comes to something as big as this you're talking around you're talking about overhauling your whole finance and HR infrastructure here and CRM if you use everything so that's the first thing I would say is you go as fast as you need to go We originally had a go live date February 1, so we you know we did have to communicate to the staff that it was going to get pushed back a month but it was only because I was really it is because I was personally very nervous and I put you know had to put my foot down and say to the leadership it's going to be a month later than we expected I'm like but yeah funnily enough we've had zero hiccups and I'm not saying it's because I delayed it four weeks for you it's probably you know but it get you know it's good if you doubt yourself a little bit during this and that's why and that's what happened is there was a little bit of doubt and I wanted another four weeks just to get my head around the the black you know we did a blackout period and there was some mirroring of the system for January and February 25 and I'm really happy that I did actually delay things so yes so you know to emphasise it again you go as fast as your organisation needs and the second thing I would say is that I'll pay your previous slide, I think it said it was like eighty-ninety percent overlap. You have to go into this if your eyes open that it will not do everything you want and you will find that in your steering committee, which should have some non finance people in it, is that people will crop up and say but it doesn't give me this. Reality is it's change management and that it might not do 100% of what you've got before because you again you've built you've acquired lots of little systems or you've got a current system because it fitted your needs but VantagePoint might not give you all of that and we did find that you know it does do 90% of what we need and we've managed to find workarounds for the other 10% without really increasing the administrative burden. So avoiding what I would say custom code leading on from that because I know other FDs that I trained with who have gone down the custom code route and if you're of critical mass you can do it especially if you've got your own internal Deltec resource like you hire someone specifically to who's a data person effectively knows how to do it all but if you're a business of 50 to 100 people, stay well clear. The whole reason of VantagePoint and Power Launch is that it is out the box and it will be built for you during the Power Launch process. Absolutely and circling back to my role within Deltek, my role is to help you understand what's included in the base offering and also to help set the right expectations so that we can have an implementation like Codas where it's pretty much smooth sailing. Before we go into Q and A, just want to highlight the Q and A box on your screen. Just pop your messages in there if you haven't done already. I can see there's been a few coming through, which is great. But if you have any questions for myself or David, just pop them in there. Before we do that though, just to give you a little breathing room, is just an audience poll. There should be something popping up on screen in a moment. Just to ask you, based on what you've seen today, would you like to speak to Deltek about how our platform could bring speed, clarity and control in every stage of the project life cycle as well as the financial life cycle. So with that done, that is the webinar content completed. So what we'll do is we'll move on and just look at some of the brilliant Q and A that's been coming in throughout the session. Okay. So every team, just to just to remind you, you can ask some questions via the q and a box on the right hand side. We would have had one. We had a couple of really good questions. I hope the one that was asking about how long it took to build the model to meet the needs of CODA has been answered. So that was just shy of four months, which was all about how we we set up for success and how David set Coder up for success internally by organizing the team as well as utilizing the best practice deployment of VantagePoint using Deltec's knowledge. David, we've had a couple more from the team for you specifically. The the first one I can see is what's Deltek's software given you that previous software that you've used hasn't? Yeah. Thanks, Peter. So I I think alluded to it during the during the presentation just now is that it's one source of truth. Right? We had this tech we had a tech stack before, and it's now all been wrapped up into one. That's something that previous software in the business hadn't hadn't given us. Right? Streamline streamline that. For finance, you know, better proactive management to manage the business in terms of forecasting, AR, etcetera. And then from an operational point of view, better project life cycle management, all of those that we weren't getting from our from our previous tech stack when I joined the business. And I hope the the team watching live today has has has seen some of those in action in the first couple of sections that we run through, having that financial control within the workflow processes that are already built into the tool, and we can enhance that intelligence, as David mentioned, using that that implementation process. David, what do you think sport the biggest value to you using Deltek? Keep it keep this short. Time, that's what it's giving me. It's giving me it's giving us time back. Right? Yeah. By implementing Delta Advantage Point, we've shortened our month end. We've got better DSO. We've got more proactive management. You know, it's created efficiency across our functions, not just finance, but also in the non finance space. And that gives us time to focus on other things, like generating work, doing more proactive work, being more advisory led rather than kind of transactional led in finance. And that's really key going circling back from the to the first section, right, which is all about the Frank Benton systems needing a lot of upkeep and and a lot of potential errors being made is is bringing that into that one system does give you that time back so the team can can can focus on, you know, the future and and and look at the forecasting forecasting rather than, you know, admin keying in information. So that's really good. And the last question I can see from the q and a box is all about AI, which is a very hot topic in the industry at the moment. What is Coda's Coda using for AI today, and if you can explain what the strategy for is for Coda for 2026. Yeah. That's fine. It's obviously everyone's favorite buzzword right now is AI, what is everyone doing with AI. It's something that we've more recently this year, you know, as I'm sure other businesses have started looking at quite quite closely. Can't split it into two parts. First is first is really the, you know, the first thing we should be doing as businesses is have a AI policy. Right? Because you you know, there there's a lot of talk around AgenTik AI, what information you feed it, and where that data's held, etcetera. I think that should, you know so I think a policy is the first thing we've done this year. And it's kind of this leads into why it's intrinsically linked to our strategy, Peter. So an interesting fact, which kinda kicked all of this off at the back end of last year was everyone on the call. 29% of employees apparently are already using unsanctioned AI outside of outside of IT approval. So, you know, shows you why there should be a need for AI because you don't know what people in your business are doing with it. So it's important to have the guardrails and confidentiality in GDPR kind of trump trump you know, that's kind of the first and foremost of of everyone's what everyone should be looking at with AI. The second piece is, yeah, to your question, like, what what are we doing? What's Coda doing, the group, from an AI perspective? So we are already utilizing you correct me if I'm wrong, Della. The I don't think I don't think too much about the name of of what it is. It's just it's just an icon. We are utilizing Della within Deltic, which is Deltic's own integrated AI. And I know that in future versions of Deltic future releases, it will only get better and better as the kind of large language model gets better within it. We're using at the moment for insights and CRM. There's then the next piece, which is which is not Della, and I won't I won't name any competitor IT companies, but there is obviously some other some other add ins that we're looking at putting over the top of over the top of Delta, which is more kind of AgenTik AI led, and it's something that from a finance perspective, I'm heavily I'm currently what writing a white paper on Agencik AI for the FPNA function for our group because we do utilize the data feed in the back end. And one thing that certain models are very good at is an is analyzing huge amounts of data very effectively, very quickly from an FP and A standpoint. So that is one thing we are we are kind of doubling down on this year because that will that will provide efficiency for us. Outside out from a non financial point of view, you know, you get AI that does note taking AI that, you know, proofreads emails, proofreads documents. You just have to be careful on what you're putting in it. It isn't confidential. So, yeah, that is that's currently where we're at in terms of AI and what our plan is going forward is try and continue to build efficiencies where we can in the finance and non finance space. Yeah, absolutely. And that's very common because I speak to clients every day. That's a very common strategy to get up and running with AI. And exactly as you said, just be mindful of the fact you need guardrails. In VantagePoint, currently with Dell, the the Dell system only understands VantagePoint. It doesn't understand the wider Internet because once it understands the wider Internet, you're you're posing security risk to your business. So we're currently working through the ways that we can get agentic AI built into into VantagePoint so that we can connect to to the to the great tools that David's planning to use later on in the year. Okay. With that, I haven't seen any more questions come in. So I think the poll has just closed. So what I wanna do is just finish off by thanking, first of all, David. Thank you very much for agreeing to to do this webinar with me. Thank you very much for all the insights that you've you've given for the audience. And I hope that the audience has been able to take away the three key elements that we wanted to when we were prepping this session. Right? So moving from a fragmented environment, being able to introduce intelligence, and utilizing Deltek's knowledge within within the best practice deployment at VantagePoint. So thank you very much, everyone, who's joined, and we hope to see you later. Thank you.