Name: Overview of Deltek Vantagepoint
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T10:06:06.694Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Overview of Deltek Vantagepoint

Transcript for "Overview of Deltek Vantagepoint": Hello everyone and welcome. I'm Addie Pooley, a solutions engineer here at Deltek. I'm thrilled you've joined us today to talk about one of the biggest steps firms can take to modernize operations, upgrading from vision to vantage point. Session is an overview of vantage point, what's new, what's better, and why it matters. The last part is key. How it's going to impact your day to day life is important because for a lot of firms, moving from vision isn't just a system update. It's about positioning your teams for the next decade of growth, efficiency, and client delivery. Here's a few things that we will cover today. Key differences between Vision and VantagePoint and what's changed. The latest enhancements in our twenty twenty five point one, two, three, and soon to be four releases, how Dell TechDella, our AI powered assistant, is helping firms work smarter and faster, and real world examples of how firms in the industry are getting results with VantagePoint. Finally, at the end, we'll cover a few practical tips for a smooth upgrade. Please use the chat to drop your questions along the way and we will save time at the end to address as many as possible. Let's start with a big question: How is VantagePoint different from Vision and why is it worth the change? One of the first things is unified project records. In Vision, opportunities and projects lived in separate silos. In VantagePoint, those are unified. That means when a pursuit turns into a project, you don't lose contact, context, notes, or history. You can see on my project screen here, I have a medical center in an interview stage, so this is currently in an opportunity stage. But when the project is marked as won or lost, it's going to be done simply by going into this stage and updating it from there. Now you can see we have the full business development pursuit history on the same record as our active project that everyone is using to plan, bill, and record metrics against. We're going to be able to see the business development information that was used for forecasting, the state of the plan, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and any activities that were recorded when it was in a business development phase will carry through. This means you can continue to use the activities section to record meetings, notes, and important information so that VantagePoint is your centralized project data repository and your single source of truth. If you have the CRM portion of VantagePoint and the Outlook or Gmail connection installed, you're also going to be able to track emails against the project, whether you are working to win it or it's already been won, without you even having to open VantagePoint to be stored here under the activity section as well. This is huge for project managers. That way they can know that everything is in one place for them to reference back to and not in everyone's separate inboxes. Even when this project was still in the pursuit stage, we could go ahead and start adding in information if we wanted to start getting some planning, some back of the napkin work done so we know what it might look like if we win this work. The accounting team can go ahead and be in here adding in any information they want to get ready to go. And under that team tab is where we're going to see who's been proposed on this project. Then, when it's marked as one, you can choose to make that plan go live or you can swap things in to adjust it for actuals going forward. Dates and costs and milestones are going to be that one stop shop to put in where are the key metrics for this project. This is also helpful for looking back on at projects that have been closed out when you're trying to remember what happened with them to get a reference for things that happened a few years ago. The most important thing here is that your business development team is going to be working off the same record that your project managers and accounting teams are also working. So no one has to guess what stage is it in or how is it currently going. Keep in mind, role security does apply, so everyone is only going to see what you give their role the ability to view, touch, and edit. The goal here is that there's never any duplicate entry. The project only needs to be created once, and you're going to have a holistic view of your entire forecast from pursuit projects to ones that are won and closed out right here in the system. The next thing that is different between Vision and VantagePoint is planning. So in Vision, planning was a bolt on. In VantagePoint, every project record has a plan automatically. You can see here under the project hub, there's automatically going to be a plan ready to go, whether you are using it or not within the system. That's huge because project managers now don't have to chase different spreadsheets or separate tools to be able to see what's going on. When you use Planning within VantagePoint, you're also going to get real time reporting between planned versus actuals as people are putting time against timesheets and as billing is going out as well. Here, we are taking a look at the plan for this Glendale Elementary remodel. We're going to see the contract values here. We're going to be able to take a look at the schedule, critical path and any dependencies. If I check the plan out, I can move things around and they will go ahead and shift everything over automatically. This is also where I can go in and plan labor, expenses, consultants, and units. You can see here that it's including the phase structure that I have set on the project, so this can be set as early as when it is in a business development phase, or you can go in and add more detail later as anything changes. Currently, this is planned down to the phase level, but if you wanted to plan one level lower at the task level as well, that is an option. You can see here that I have specific resources planned on this project, but you could also go in and plan generics if you are in an earlier stage and not ready to put specific resources in project yet. Taking a look here, we can see in the construction administration phase, we have Brian planned this week, but we could also go in and reschedule, reassign, redistribute those hours, or go ahead and remove them from the project if we want to make those changes. You can see here that we're currently looking at billing rates on this panel, but if you have the role, security, and access rights to do so, you can always flip things to cost rates and see them right here in the same view. Like we mentioned before, you're also going to be able to plan any expenses, any consultants you are working with, and any units as well if that is something that you want to include in the plan so you're getting a holistic view of what is this project actually going to cost and where are we at as we go through the different phases of this project. Keep in mind that we're looking at the project plan right now, but in a little bit we will also look at things from an individual resource view to take a look at the team utilization scores and what it's going to look like for them as well. Since financial planning is built into the same project record, you'll be able to tie planned hours and costs directly to projects and billing terms. This gives project managers real time visibility into whether they're on track before invoices are even going out. One thing that is new in the 2025.4 release that is coming soon is the ability to have multiple plans and multiple baselines. You can see here on the left we have now a dropdown that shows the different plans and one will always be the live plan. We're also going to be able to see the different plan summaries where we can see what is currently live, any baselines and any change orders as well. Now, we're not going to dive into all of the new features of Resource planning in this demo since it's an overview, but we do have other resource planning webinars that will be coming where we will dive into what is new in 2025.4 and all of the new features and functions that are going to come with this release for planning. Before we move on from the project record, I want to take a look at a couple other sections in here that are helpful to know about when you're thinking where are things going to live within VantagePoint instead of in VisionLoad. So we've taken a look at the Project Overview tab. We've also taken a look at the Project Plan. The Project Review tab is a spot where we can get some live and real time data on where are we currently at with the project. You can see this is an active project and we're going to be able to see everything job to date from labor to expenses as well as consultants. We're also going to be able to see what is our estimate at completion. Down at the bottom, it's going to calculate some KPIs so you can quickly get an idea of where are we currently standing without having to export anything to Excel and make your own calculations. This is also a section where we can toggle between billing and cost values and get a different set of KPIs here at the bottom. The project dashboard is going to be some metrics for this specific project where you're going to be able to see a quick overview of the project process, progress, where the labor is currently sitting, and what you have left on the contract notes. Now keep in mind this is the project specific dashboard and if you wanted to take a look at multiple projects on the same view to get an idea of where all of your projects are sitting, that's going to live in the dashboard section where you're bringing multiple projects into the same different dashboards. One thing we haven't talked about yet is how VantagePoint is including AI into the system as well. This Smart Summary is one of the first places we'll talk about in our webinar today where we can quickly just click the button to pull an overview and it will describe what's been going on with the project, any recent activities, and any plan information to give you a ready to go paragraph and summary that you can copy to a clipboard to send out or to use just to get an update of what's been going on without clicking through all of the tabs yourself. In a little bit, we will talk about billing and invoicing, but for now we're going to go back and take a look at dashboards and see how we can be reporting and drilling into metrics right here within the system without having to do anything externally in a spreadsheet or another software. Here we are taking a look at an example principal dashboard that we've created to show you different metrics that principals across your organization might be wanting to take a look at. Keep in mind that dashboards are shareable across your team, so you only have to create one dashboard and you can share it out and people are going to be able to see their specific projects and any information that you give them the visibility to see in the system. Here, we're going to be able to see an assortment of KPIs across the top. Any of them with the little three line chevron means we can drill into them to see what is making up that number without having to go anywhere else to find the information. We can also filter right here from this individual dashboard if we just wanted to take a look at a specific supervisor or a specific employee. We can also filter at the entire dashboard level. Maybe you just wanted to take a look at certain departments or certain offices, and you could create saved searches here that are shared across the team to quickly be able to toggle this dashboard to view different sets of the information. To give you lots of ways to slice and dice everything here within VantagePoint without you having to even run reports that are exported to a CSV. While we're able to drill into the KPIs, we can also do that for some of these charts and graphs. So if I wanted to see exactly what was making up some of these numbers, I could click into them and get the detail behind that. If we go into edit mode, this is how we're going to be able to change what is on this dashboard. I can go into our dashboard library and pull one of the dashboards that we give you out of the box, or any that you create yourself for your team are going to live here as well. You also have the ability to import and export different dashboards, so if you have one that someone has shared with you that you want to include, you could go ahead and pull that in without having to make it from scratch. Now, if I wanted to change a certain chart or graph, I would just go into edit, change what that chart type is, and I could also make any record selections in here as well. If I had my own calculated fields that I was including or if I wanted to create a new one, this is where I would go ahead and create a new calculation, pulling in different fields and metrics to be able to use on the dashboard. While we were looking at a principal dashboard, we can also show an example of what a My Dashboard would look like for a different employee. So they're going to be able to see what their upcoming assignments are if they're using resource planning. As a team member I could come in and see that I am planned on this Creston project for the next few weeks. I could see my utilization metrics and any projects I'm actively working on. And then if you are using activity tracking and assigning different activities within the system, this is also where someone can see any activities that they've created or that have been assigned to them, add in any notes, and then check them off once they've been completed. Another thing we see a lot of firms doing that they find very helpful is creating a memo dashboard where basic company information and any updates are shared. That way everyone knows where that one stop shop is to find the information they're looking for within VantagePoint. VantagePoint dashboards have lots of different uses and functionality. The goal here is that you're going to be able to create live reporting that is actionable for everyone across the organization from individual team members to the business development team, principals, project managers, and the accounting team as well. Dashboards are going to be able to be used to share information and make sure everyone's looking at it in the same form in one place. VantagePoint does come with a mobile CRM app as well as a mobile time and expense app. Here in the mobile CRM you're going to be able to see any and all of your contacts, quickly add in touchpoint or activity information, and view any previous activities as well. So if you're on the road and want to quickly take a look at some meeting notes, you'll be able to do that directly from your phone. This is also a place where you can scan business cards if that's something you're doing when you're out at your conference to add in new contacts. Take a look at firms and projects as well right from your phone when you're on the go. The time and expense mobile app is the spot where you can put in your hours and submit your timesheets as well as if you're a manager, do any time approvals. The expense report section in here allows you to capture receipts, so if you're on the go, you want to go ahead and make them saved in there and you don't have time to do it from your laptop, you can just take a picture and start from there. This is also where you can request and approve absences right here from the mobile app, so if you're ever away from your desk and need to get one of those in, you're going to be able to do that. Since we just looked at the Time and Expense mobile app, now is a great time to go ahead and take a look at the timesheet here within VantagePoint. Here we can see we have Brian's timesheet for this period and there's a few different ways we can go in to add in his hours or his information. I'm going to choose to copy from the plan, so if we're using planning within VantagePoint and he's been planning on projects, he can go in and say I just want to copy over the projects that I've been planning against. I can see what the planned hours were for the period and go ahead and copy them to a timesheet. Then all he has to do is go in and add in actuals and any notes or comments that are necessary as well before hitting save and submitting that timesheet for approval. This is also where he can go in and do his own absence requests which will flow through to planning as well. Brian could submit an absence request for a week off and then when we take a look at the resource view in a little bit, it's going to show that he's unavailable to be planned on certain projects for that week. I went ahead and submitted that timesheet and now we can see that it is awaiting approval. So as an admin here in the system, I can go ahead and approve it, I can reassign it to someone else, I can reject it, or I can resubmit it. This is also where I can come in and do the floor check and say I want to take a look at what was expected versus the hours that were entered to quickly get an idea of what do we need to be reviewing and make sure that I'm not missing anything as I go through that. So far, we've taken a look at the project, the mobile apps, what's different with the plan, and a little bit about the employee and what their day to day could look like interacting with VantageOne. So let's continue on that idea and go ahead and take a look at the employee record before hopping into resource planning from the individual perspective. Within the employee hub, every one of your team members is going to have a record and along with the important basic information that you are always tracking, you're going to be able to have that consolidated professional tab to include their education, any credentials and licenses, when those expirations are, and any resume information as well. And then that carries over to taking a look at the experience tab where you're going to be able to see what projects they worked on, how many hours they put on it, and any start and end dates. So if you need to quickly find a certain project or type of project that someone worked on and run those filters to figure out when and where that was, you're going to be able to do that right from the Ad experience in Big Tap. Now, before we take a look at planning from a project perspective, but we can also take a look at it under resource management in resource view. So here, we're going to see that I'm taking a look at the employees that I currently supervise. We can have different safe searches if I have access to view all resources, I could go ahead and see all resources within the company. Here you can see that we're currently showing scheduled hours. So blue is under scheduled, gray is regularly scheduled, and red is going to be over scheduled. That way we can get a quick evaluation of where is everyone at. We can then toggle between scheduled hours to scheduled percentages as well as utilization hours or percentages. This is an area where I can see what Allison has been planned on for these weeks so I can take a look at the projects that she's been assigned. I can go ahead and add in assignments here, reschedule, or reassign them as well. This is the same functionality we could do in the project plan, but just taking a look at it from a resource view. Keep in mind, if she is booked for time off, it's going to show her as fully scheduled so that she's unavailable for these projects during this time period. This is also where we can filter by resource type, whether it's specific employees or generics, their utilization percentage if we are just wanting to take a look at anyone who is over or underutilized, and any credentials, skill sets, or organizations that they belong to within your system to quickly sort and filter your teams to find the people that you need. Another major advantage in VantagePoint is the ability to see what's happening with your projects in real time. So instead of waiting for someone to build a custom report or chase down data in spreadsheets, you've got the dashboards that update automatically like we already talked about. What makes this even more powerful is the integration of Deltek Clarity metrics. For those unfamiliar, Clarity is Deltek's industry benchmarking marketing study, and it gathers key performance data like utilization rates, win rates, backlog growth, profit margins, and more from thousands of firms in your industry. Inside VantagePoint, you don't just see how your projects are performing internally, you can instantly compare them to industry benchmarks. You can see here the same KPIs we looked at earlier are compared to the clarity metrics as well. So we can see that our win rate rate is slightly above the industry standard here of 50%. And we can carry that through, taking a look at every KPI we have here across the top. That benchmarking capability changes the conversation from how are we doing to how do we stack up against other firms. And now you have a much more strategic discussion to have with your leadership within the firm. So while we can see clarity in VantagePoint, I'd also be remiss to not highlight some of the newer capabilities around AI in VantagePoint through Della, Deltek's AI assistant. So we saw the smart summary and the project and the firm record, and we also have our chatbot assistant up here where we can come in and see that where Della can help with repetitive manual tasks that eat into your day. For example, I just asked what projects is Brian Sullivan assigned on right now? Can Della return the information where we can see the active projects that he is currently working on? We can also ask Ella to auto summarize project notes or meeting recaps, suggest staffing assignments or adjustments based on historical data, and surface at risk projects early by looking at patterns across your data. So when you combine that with unified project records and built in planning we've already covered, you start to see the bigger picture. VantagePoint isn't just about storing project data and accounting. It's about helping you make better decisions faster. The AI is there to help take the heavy lifting off of project managers and give leadership confidence that they're acting on the most current information. As we continue to go through new releases, we'll continue to add more AI functionality throughout the system. As we mentioned before, one of the biggest challenges firms face is keeping everyone on the same page. In Vision, project data often lived in silos, business development saw one thing, finance saw another, and project managers had their own spreadsheets. With VantagePoint, everyone works from the same single source of truth. While this isn't an accounting focused webinar or demo, we can see here that we have the same accounting dashboards and types that are similar to the ones we saw for the project managers. So project managers see both the financial and staffing sides of a project to the extent their role security allows. Finance teams get visibility into plan versus actual hours and budgets without waiting for updates. And business development can see how active projects are progressing so they can have better informed conversations with clients. That level of collaboration doesn't just make life easier internally, it also improves the client experience. When a client calls asking about status, anyone on the team who has access can pull up the project record and see exactly where things stand. And since everything is accessible through the same interface, you're not chasing multiple systems, logins, or exports. It's all in one place. The last point I want to make is around usability. VantagePoint was designed with a much more modern interface compared to Vision, and it's accessible from anywhere. It is device and browser agnostic, so whether you prefer a Mac or a PC, Google Chrome or Safari, you will be able to access VantagePoint. So whether you're a project manager in the office or an engineer on a job site, you can enter time, update notes, and review project details directly from your mobile device. This reduces the lag in getting information into the system. Instead of waiting until the end of the week to update time sheets or notes, staff can do it in real time. And from a leadership perspective, the faster data is entered, the faster you can act on it. The accounting team is going to be able to close the books faster without chasing down all of the information in separate people's inboxes and spreadsheets. This is especially important for firms working in the field, like A and E companies, because delays in data entry can have a huge impact on reporting accuracy. So to recap here, we started with unified project records and built in planning. We looked at dashboards and clarity metrics for benchmarking. We explored resourcing, AI, and automation, and wrapped up with collaboration and mobile access. Each of these capabilities is powerful on its own, but together they create a project management environment that's connected, efficient, and future focused. So when we talk about what sets VantagePoint apart from vision, it's more than just an upgrade. It's about positioning your firm for smarter growth and greater profitability. Now we're gonna spend the next few minutes getting into questions and answers, and we're happy to provide any other resources that are helpful for you to move your firm from vision to vantage point.