Name: 2026 SAP and Deltek | Replicon PSO Playbook: AI, Efficiency, and the New Client Expectation
Uploaded: 2026-04-23T16:30:05.278Z
Duration: 34 min 40 s
Description: 2026 SAP and Deltek | Replicon PSO Playbook: AI, Efficiency, and the New Client Expectation

Transcript for "2026 SAP and Deltek | Replicon PSO Playbook: AI, Efficiency, and the New Client Expectation": Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar, 2026 SAP and Replicon PSO Playbook, AI Efficiency and the New Client Expectation. I'm Chris Thomas from Replicon. Before we get started here, just a few quick housekeeping notes to ensure you have the best experience today. For your browser, please use Google Chrome. Audio is gonna be streamed through your computer. There's no dial in. Just make sure your volume is up. You'll be able to download the presentation slides and additional resources in the resources tab, but an on demand recording will also be emailed to you within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. If you have any questions, please type them into the q and a box, and any unanswered questions at the end will be addressed individually offline. As I said, I'm Chris Thomas from the Replicon team. I'm the GM here and, workforce management veteran, but very happy to be here with the Replicon product, which is such so targeted to the professional services industry. We're really able to, I think, help create the future with leaders like yourselves and excited to hear about the great things that are happening from our two speakers today. So let me introduce them. First, Scott Bales, our senior director of client services at Replicon, and Stuart Harris, industry executive advisor, professional services at SAP. With that, Scott, take it away. Thank you, Chris. Welcome, everyone. We have an exciting agenda for you today. We're gonna be walking through the top trends that professional services firms are facing today. We're gonna discuss the power of of the Replicon and SAP partnership and how AI time capture can boost your efficiency by accurately tracking every single hour with AI. Now there are zero surprises in this quote from the SPI 2326 PS maturity benchmark report that states, and now, AI adoption is accelerating. 26 to 38% of projects incorporate AI, and 40% of firms actually sell AI related, services. Now to speak with some, speak to some of the AI elements that are driving these percentages, over to you, Stuart. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. What I wanted to do as we, start start the presentation today is just kinda wanna lay the groundwork here with the trends that we're seeing in the industry. I've been at SAP for six and a half years, and I work exclusively with all of our professional services clients and prospective clients. And, you know, based on that work, you know, we're seeing sort of six major trends in the industry right now. And the first that we're that's out there that has been around forever, it's not a new trend, but it's definitely continuing to increase in its importance is the pressure on profitability and margins. Right? We're seeing firms are facing a growing pressure, higher delivery cost, you know, pricing pressure, higher delivery cost, and in some cases, reduce contract value with their clients. And this consulting fee pressure and margin compression, it means that firms can no longer just rely on traditional models to protect and generate margins. Right? Now firms are needing to, you know, increase and get better visibility, tighter execution, and more disciplined operational control to protect those margins. The second trend that we're seeing is related to AI. Right? And in the industry, AI is no longer a future concept. We're seeing AI move from the experimentation phase to being fully operational in the delivery of services to clients. You know, it's a starting point and a compliment and a compliments, you know, a a large share of professional service services work that's being done. And also with AI, it really helps to reduce the manual effort and the operating cost of delivery. So, again, as a trend, AI is becoming more and more a core lever for productivity, for speed, and for scalability. And AI kind of connects to our the third trend that we're seeing around workforce management. Is one of the impacts of AI, we're seeing that workforces are transforming in their into the composition. So talent remains one of the biggest constraints in the professional services firm, and we're seeing skill shortages are a growing threat, to the firms. And increasingly, firms are looking at skills based talent models and more, intelligent and automated ways to identify the right people and place them on the right projects, as well as identify the areas where they need to get professional development and skill development. And this is a major shift away from, you know, the traditional static workforce planning that we've seen in the past. And this is moving down more towards a dynamic skills driven, you know, deployment of talent. And so we're seeing workforce strategy is becoming more of a business performance issue than really just an HR issue. Fourth, we're seeing the rise of new work. And what that means is, you know, clients are increasingly, expecting AI powered, hyper personalized service and faster, more streamlined delivery. Now internally, firms are having to rethink how work gets done by combining their people and, you know, combining automation and combining AI. Right? It's it's just a new composition of delivery. And the impact here is that the firms are really having to, you know, change a lot of their delivery models, to compete and to stay relevant with their client base. So they're redesigning work, and they're also not just digitizing the processes, but, you know, again, redesigning that work. Fifth trend we're seeing is around the business models, the nonlinear business models. And what does that mean? You know, traditionally, professional services, it was a you wanna grow your your revenues, you grew the number of people you have working for you, and it was a time and materials model. You know, that's changing now. That that model is under pressure for, you know, various reasons. But we're seeing a continued expansion around subscription models for services firms and a focus on customer lifetime value. And, you know, it just it's it's just signals a clear move from the purely linear labor based revenue model now to more, you know, AI, AI based and, also the subscription automated revenue recognition type model. And so we're seeing more firms that more and more are exploring, you know, what are the ways we can create more recurring revenue, scalable revenue, and less people dependent, sources of revenue. Now the last trend we're seeing is around, out the business outcome based models. And, again, time and materials billing is is is diminishing somewhat. More more clients are asking our clients, not just for the effort, but, you know, we want miserable miserable business outcomes. And so we're seeing the expansion of service contracts that include some outcome or value based components. And, you know, in the large, you know, the large enterprise clients, you know, we're seeing a real increase in the request for that type of pricing and, billing arrangement. So it's you know, and that's important because it changes both the commercial model as well as the delivery model of these services. So, you know, if we move on and, you know, what what do all these train trends mean for the industry? You know, it's it's just clear that we're we're moving away from labor based linear, delivery models. We're moving to to more intelligent data driven, scalable, and outcome based models. And, you know, talent is is, clearly changing and AI is having a huge impact on the industry. So, again, just wanted to briefly go through those trends and kinda set the stage for the rest of the presentation. And with that, I will turn it back over to Scott. Excellent. Thank you, Stuart. I appreciate it. And and we're definitely seeing those trends impact our customers daily, as they race to keep up with the accelerated pace of AI advancement. In fact, Deloitte research shows that roughly three quarters of organizations expect AI to materially impact their business strategies in the near term. And this isn't dated information by any means, but I would honestly be surprised if that number isn't closer to 90% as of today. Replicon is is helping organizations daily to leverage AI and solve service delivery challenges that we'll get into shortly. Replicon, acquired in 2023, provides advanced time tracking and PSA offerings tailored to project based organizations and their related use cases. Our twenty five years of experience have allowed us to deliver AI enabled solutions to the market years ahead of others. Our global presence supports regional use cases and helps us understand the markets and legislation that drive time capture requirements world wide. Scale and flexibility, we'll talk a little bit about this later on. But scale and flexibility have driven our success. And SAP partnering with Replicon to address professional services complexity with a time capture approach that revolutionizes these firms' market advantage. Now before I proceed further, let's acknowledge the reality that businesses like yours are facing every single day, and a lot of these things have play on on elements that Stuart talked about. Right? Project based businesses are under more pressure than ever. And here's what we're seeing across the industry. Year over year, rise in revenue leakage in 2024. Revenue leakage grew from 5.3% compared to 4.7% in the previous year. Manual time tracking isn't the solution anymore. Right? Along with miss billable hours, firms are also experiencing lower utilization, which in fact declined below 75%. And as a result, firms are struggling to meet their annual revenue targets. As per the latest Deltek Clarity report, 43% of firms are struggling to keep up with the latest labor laws. And with evolving labor laws, worker classification rules across multiple states and jurisdictions, Firms can no longer afford audit failures and costly violations. Although blended workforce models distributed teams are a norm, their distinct time capture and compliance needs pose a bigger challenge for global firms. Oftentimes, they don't actually have representation in these locales and they're forced to trust third parties in these areas or potentially miss, compliance requirements in those geographies. Biggest challenge of all is that you have multiple systems that have time elements within your organization. Your ERP, time systems, HCM, payroll, they all have time capture mechanisms and they're not talking to each other directly. And so that data sits in silos and you have limited visibility into global time data. Finally, as a result, your employees end up juggling multiple tools, double entry. This doesn't only make them frustrated, but this points to the statement that Stuart had around new work. This is the opposite of new work. And in a nutshell, people just are not motivated to track time. Now does any of this sound familiar? I'd be surprised if it doesn't and because this is what comes up most in our conversations with business leaders like yours. Now let's take a look at how AI is already changing efficiency and productivity for project based organizations. Today, utilization isn't just about tracking hours after the fact. AI is increasingly embedded in your daily work, helping teams make better decisions as work happens instead of reacting to missed targets. Organizations are using AI to anticipate risk, adjust staffing, and project margins in real time. MARAI models analyze how people are using their products that they're exposed to. It helps us understand how they're working across projects, systems, and roles. They identify patterns and capacity, workload, and delivery, and they also surface insights managers can act on immediately. For employees, this means less manual time entry and more intelligent prompts that reflect how work really gets done. What's changed most since last year is context and adaptability. AI doesn't rely on static rules. It learns from historical project data, current demand, and individual work habits to provide recommendations that stay relevant as priorities shift. That includes forecasting utilization gaps, flagging potential burnout, and suggesting smarter ways to allocate the time before issues show up in reports. This is where AI moves from automation to decision support. It helps organizations balance productivity with employee experience, while giving leaders clear visibility into performance and outcomes. Together, SAP and Replicon are bringing these capabilities into the core of professional services operations, combining enterprise data, AI driven insights, and practical workflows to support how teams will work today and how they'll scale next. With Replicon Time, you get to experience the future of time tracking with zero time powered by Della, our AI orchestrator. With intelligent timesheets, your teams can automatically capture time from the hundreds of work apps they already use, and AI automatically captures time, fills in timesheets so they can simply review and submit. There's no more end of week scrambling to remember what they worked on with intelligence at every step. Replicon learns from your work patterns and should suggest smarter time sheet entries over time. The more your teams use it, the smarter it gets. And this is beyond pre population. The system is actually cataloging and recognizing the clients, projects, tasks, work breakdown structures, and other attributes that are associated with that time and can be leveraged from billing mechanism and the new billing mechanisms that Stuart mentioned around outcome based billing. This is how you're going to drive adoption. This is how you capture every single billable hour without any leakage. Not by asking people to do more, but by making the system do the work for them. Deltek Replicon's unified cloud based time tracking platform for projects, billing, and pay integrates smoothly with SAP solutions. This modern, secure, configurable solution seamlessly captures accurate work and time data across various collaboration tools, but it also offers compliance support for global labor laws and regulations, all in a single system, all in a single user interface. No need for any double entry. Now I wanna share a real life example of what this looks like in practice. Capgemini, we've all heard of. They're a global leader in consulting and technology services. They realized that they needed a unified enterprise grade platform to replace their fragmented time tracking tools and processes. After careful consideration, they chose us, and here's what their group CIO, Sudhir, already said. Replicon replaces approximately 17 applications around the world as well as many internal Excel based tools. 100% of their consultants capturing time for billable purchases globally is entering that in time into Replicon. That is a single instance of our product speaking to the scale with 335,000 users globally capturing that time on our platform. The partnership between SAP and Replicon combining two top tier platforms instills absolute confidence in customers' investment decisions. Together, SAP and Replicon empower organizations to elevate time into a strategic asset. This collaboration enables organizations to transition from disparate systems to a unified AI powered platform for time tracking. Addressing numerous use cases across various service organizations, we deliver a single source of truth for time, covering billable projects, internal initiatives, payroll, and absences organization wide. With connectivity to multiple platforms, our clients experience accelerated time to value, widespread employee adoption and satisfaction, reduced revenue leakage, and increased operational efficiency. Scott Yes. Stewart. Yeah. Just wanna say thank you to both of you so much. That was really, really a lot of ins insights there, a lot of interesting things. Certainly, what I've been seeing in the industry as well. So that was fantastic. Thank you both so much. While all of you, find the q and a part of the the screen, please do submit some questions, for our speakers. While you're finding that and entering any questions you have, I'll just give a quick reminder that, today we featured Replicon, and its integration with SAP, enabling professional services organizations to streamline their business with unified time tracking and AI solutions. We'd love to talk to you more about this. So please be sure to visit the website deltek.com, to learn more or request a demo, and we'd love to spend time with you individually to talk about how these tools, might help the specific challenges that your for firm is facing. Okay. We have a few questions, actually, from the audience, Scott and Sue, if you guys are ready for the the improvisation start for part of part of the, the the event. The first question, where have you done this integration, and what has been the benefit and ROI you've seen from this? Yeah. Yeah. I'll take that one. I'll take that one, Stuart. I think we talked a little bit about that, with Capgemini and we saw the consolidation, of their systems. In addition to Capgemini, if we think about, you know, the top four to five consulting firms globally, all of which leverage our product in some way, shape, or form, we've seen a reduction in in revenue leakage, anywhere between 57% depending on on the clients that we've deployed this out to. And in addition to that, we've seen utilization rates climb as a result of those missed hours being captured, from an intelligent timesheet perspective. Utilization increases, again, you know, one to 2% across the board depending on the customers that we're talking with. Great. Thank you very much. Another question. How long is it to implement Replicon? Scott, you mentioned time to value. I guess that's that's the the genesis of that question. Yeah. Yeah. So if we think about how long does it take to implement, really, complexity is gonna drive this, this process. But if if we if we look at, if we look at the time to implement, for example, large consulting firms, we're rolling out anywhere from 80 to a 150,000 users in a matter of months. So we're, again, we're we're inside, inside a one year pipeline to roll this out for global organizations. If we if we shrink that down and and we have a smaller group where we take a phased approach geography by geography, we can roll this out in in eight to twelve weeks, in in each of those geographies. So lots of lots of variance there, tied to complexity, tied to to scope. But, again, nothing like you would see with some large, large enterprise software implementations. Thank you very much. Next question's a bit broader, maybe a trillion dollar question. It is, where is AI actually driving productivity today versus hype? Stuart, do you wanna take that? Yeah. I mean, what we're seeing in services industries with our clients, there's a lot of AI being deployed on the people side of the business around, creating skills catalogs and identifying skills, identifying, the, you know, look at the pipeline. What do we have in the pipe? What kind of skills do we need? And then from there being to create, look at your capacity of people, seeing if you have if you have the right people. And if you don't have the right people, can you either create a training track for them or go out and start doing recruiting? We're also seeing it again with solutions like Replicon. We've got AI embedded into the solution and and making it just more automated. But we're we are working on some projects here at SAP where, with the agentic AI, we're trying to, you know, look at ways to to to automate the complete cycle from, you know, you get a proposal with the billing rates or the billing scenarios. From there, just spawn the resource request all the way through creating the engagement, leveraging tools that capture time, and then do the billing. So there's a lot of exciting things happening in AI currently in the market. Well said. Thank you, Stuart. The next question is, will solutions like Replicon ZeroTime, replace manual time sheets completely? Yeah. The answer is absolutely. If we think about the Replicon the Replicon solution, the inception for this years ago was around the fact that all the data that we're asking users to enter into their timesheets is already available in other systems. It's already an artifact of the projects they worked on, the chats they were in, the calls they were on. And asking people to remember and catalog and document all of that work again is is where zero time is gonna take their time entry on their time sheet down to zero. And, yes, that's that's the name, and our view our vision is that it will replace manual time sheets a 100% in the future. K. Bold predictions. Thank you. Next question is, where are firms leaving money on the table today by not deploying AI solutions? Stuart, do you want me to take that one? I'll let you take that one. I think it's a direct tie into Yeah. Your solutions. Yeah. I think if we think about firms leaving money on the table today, it really starts with, access to the technology and when it comes around AI solutions. Fear, fear, uncertainty, and debt out is is preventing organizations from taking advantage of user level automation. If we think about that user level of automation and where it can have the biggest impact in a professional services organization, that's at the people capturing time. That's at the system level where all of their end users and are are are in. And that, that system for professional services organization is the capture of time. Leveraging a legacy system, not allowing, AI to, have access to the systems where time is being captured and bringing it together and cataloging it on behalf of users is a risk. And and, ultimately, that's where firms are leaving the most money on the table in in revenue leakage and miss billable hours. Great. Let's let's do one more question. One final question here I wanna take. This is more action oriented. What what's one action firm should prioritize and take in the next ninety days? My perspective of this and and, Stuart, I'll I'll let you chime in as well. But my perspective here is evaluate and and catalog, the the the time it takes, for your users to document and capture their billable hours within your organization. What is that process end to end? And understand that regardless of what that time is, you can take that down to virtually zero, with the right solution, from a time perspective. Yeah. And what what we're working on with our clients is around the agentic AI. We have a lot, of current, initiatives, say, in the next ninety days. But currently, we have the the clients are, again, looking at their processes from from a quote to to you know, collecting cash and just really digging in to see the areas where they can leverage the Agenctic AI to automate those processes. Great. Again, Stuart, Scott, thank you both so much. This has been a really, really productive conversation. I I've learned a lot. I hope everyone has as well. Just as some reminders, don't forget that the on demand recording of today's webinar will, be sent to you via email in within twenty four hours. If we were unable to address your question today, we will follow-up with you directly offline. Please check out the resources that were provided in the email, that you'll receive, to view our customer stories for more information on how we help firms like yours become more efficient. Additionally, we'd appreciate if you could share any feedback you have about this event. I can put a short survey that will be available at the conclusion of the webinar. And with that, we will, wrap up and close. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, everybody.