Transcript for "QODA's Automation Advantage": Make sure your volume is up. You can download the presentation slides and additional resources in the resources widget. You'll receive the recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. 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 standardized or systemized 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. So 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 VonagePoint 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? Yep. That's fine. Hi, everyone. My name is David Pastel. I'm the finance director of Coda Consulting Limited. We're a mechanical engineering sustainability consultancy firm. So before we get into getting David to explain a bit of a little bit more about Coda and the great work that they do, just to introduce Deltek as a platform to you and and the and the solution that we're gonna be focusing on today is Varnishpoint. And 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. So 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 the project life cycle. 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 of account codes or nominal codes so that you can measure not just your project performance, but also your performance as a business as whole. And then lastly, looking to analyze 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 life cycle 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 Varnish point 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 you want to just introduce Coda as the company and the great work that 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 we're currently working on, which is called Tribeca in King's Cross. This is a I think 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 a life it's mainly in the life sciences sector. So, this is going to, you know, enable the growing demand of life sciences within London. It's gonna include include premium lab enabled space, and also have about 30,000 of 30,000 for affordable affordable lab ready units for specifically for biotech startups. There's a big focus on sustainability here. They're going for well platinum, brilliant outstanding, which are the top accreditations. Yeah. It's a great project to be a part of. If you actually pop down to King's Cross off the back of coal drop yards at the moment, one of the buildings is is completely built and the other ones, they've topped out on a couple of them now and I think the second plot's now being all fitted out as well and having the facade put on. So it does look pretty spectacular and I've been fortunate enough to go on-site a couple of times. If you wanna move on to the the next slide. It's a third down view. So, this is I've been 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, you know, it's one of our expertise in the house is doing is doing passive house, and I wish I could talk to the technical access aspects of this project, but I can't. But, you know, it's a really great scheme to have been a part of. It's also won multiple awards now in q four last year and into the beginning of this year with, a big shout out to, I think, Stride, Triglown, who are the architects. I probably got that name wrong, but the architects they worked with very closely on this scheme. Okay. Thanks so much. That that gives the audience a really good idea of of CODA and the 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 VarnishPoint, we talked about how Coda was very much operating in that environment. Can you briefly describe to the audience what it 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. Alright? It's not this isn't unusual for a business that's growing the way that it has from a small company moving up, you know, from probably a small office of 10 people to growing to over a 100 people. And most of the time, what you find is these, these bolt on softwares that you use for a short term goal, but not with, like, growth and scalability in mind. And you get a lot of data proliferation and things kinda run out of control. So, yes, when I came in, there were when, 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 day in and day out from from our customer base. It's we 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 the consolidation or the reconciliation of information just becomes really unmanageable. The David, can you talk about any specific drivers that made change unavoidable in in your opinion and and Dakota's opinion? Yeah. So, again, when I joined in 2024, business was, was going through a reasonably difficult time, which it isn't anymore. However, what there wasn't is there wasn't proactive 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 RP 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. And that's sorry. 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, you know, 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 it which is what small businesses can grow up feeling like until you kind of reach a precipice where you are looking to grow. So yeah. Absolutely. And and that collaboration between the teams, that's that's one of the reasons why the Deltek platform is being developed. So if I just quickly, if I change over to the sort of CODIS system and just briefly explain to the audience what we're seeing here before we go into a bit more detail about the, the fragmentation. That connecting both to sorry, that connecting both teams is 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 in VarnishPoint, 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 your, or sorry, the project team are entering the transactions that your team is is monitoring and posting and adjusting as you're going through that month end life cycle. So on screen is, you know, a out of the box summary of 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 talk us through why you consider VarnishPoint to be, you know, a a single source of the truth as it were? Yeah. So I can see that you've you've put your mouse on the top left for me already. If you preempted one, I'm gonna 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 that phrase is gonna gonna wear on you. We've probably used it so much in, 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, you know, some very high level things like dashboards, which you're viewing on screen. You've got your my stuff environments. You're able to, you you know, self a lot of self-service, that kind of employee experience piece that you get. And then you've got you can, you know, just very high level about 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 propose you've got proposals. So you've got proposal manager, resource management, the kind of accounting stuff, the transaction center. That's, you know, that's your that's your actual transaction entry side that your accounting team will be doing, the the cash management for managing and applying expenses. Yeah. So start to build a picture that, you know, this was the 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 this system has grown in its functionality and it and it does grow because we've proven it every quarter to bring in different offerings that our professional services customers lead us to. So we we always try and develop software that our clients will will ultimately use, and we call that things like purposeful innovation. But as well as vantage point being that that's also the truth, right? Should we just take a step back and and talk about, a really key word in in any CFO's role, which is control. And looking at not just what, you know, what VonagePoint 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 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 a copy of that, invoice as it goes through the door. So the intelligence that you wanna put behind the scenes is really key. But and that and David, onto that sort of intelligence piece, what impact is it as a screen like this or or the the sort of cost approval workflows and the visibility had to to your role as encoder? Yeah. So, yeah, there was a process before I joined on how accounts payable was dealt with, etcetera. There was a lot of emails, there was a lot of inboxes going around, and, you know, and a lot of decisions being made without outside of an approval tree effectively. Right? Especially when you've got a multi office hybrid working environment as we have these days. No. Longer the days, we are all in the office together, and you can all look at look all the you know, across the ball pen on one another. You know? So what what did this give us? So is this was one of the big appeals is that, you which you haven't shown well, which you can kinda see on here is that this actually does use, like, an image capture technology. So you can actually up you can push invoices straight into the system, and it will 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 like we like that, number one. You know, again, replace the core system that was one of many, when I when I arrived. But the beauty of having something like, Delta, 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 because 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 a 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. The beauty of Deltek is you can set up as many as many guardrails and gates as as you really know who you won't be able to jump through. So we have a fairly lean structure. So, you know, it's a finance. So you can see there David Pestel has submitted it. We then it actually goes from our finance team to the, the project manager of the project if it's a project related cost, if it's an overhead related project for, for for a specific office, for example, you know, like the rent invoice for our London office, that goes to the the director of that office, and the 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 kinda track it through the system. And when it gets to the final final approver and it is approved finally in in our business, depending on the size, it actually just loops all the way back to finance so that we can 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 the little circle of, of someone's name. That's where a comment would appear. So yeah. There. So if there was if there was a comment made, you could 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 minute, it comes to me for review, because I don't unless it's like 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. So, yeah, gives you a clear audit trail. Also, it gives ownership to the local leaders and the project managers not thinking that just finance deal with the AP. And, 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. Yeah. If things are a lot more harmonious, really, when you've got those kind of gates in play. Absolutely. And you've got different different eyes on different transactions. You mentioned there that that VonagePoint's intelligent enough to split it based on the category of the item that you're purchasing as well as the the the limits of when it can the intelligence can kick in. And and that's just not not just on this approval process, by the way. That's that's on things like expenses as well, so embedded kind of throughout the intelligence layer. With with Coda though, you've recently, expanded, which is brilliant news and bought a lot of business. For the audience, was there any was that was VarnishPoint a component in your decision making with its ability to do this structuring or structured cost approval and standardized 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. Nice. That's good to hear that sort of standardization, that visibility, not just helps day to day, but also looking at, you know, for any business on the call or any CFOs on the call can lead to that, you know, enabler for growth as well. Yeah. If we switch slightly and just look at sort of the the last subsection of this, which is insights into the information. So if we just go back to the, back to the dashboards, one of the reports that the that you look at very regularly is this forecast report. So could you just highlight, you know, how access to information has changed at CODA, and what does this CODA forecast report give you, that 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 the format would all go awry, maybe extra columns. You spend your life trying to get 20 documents into one to understand, like, what what's gonna go on going forward. Right? And as as a senior finance leader, you know, forecasting is a big part of what you do. Right? Especially in this kind of climate, especially in the construction industry and economically in The UK as we stand at the moment. So, you know, what did 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 a project. So, you know, rebus stage three, four, design stages. You know, the late the labor's gonna be a lot heavier. The invoicing will be a lot heavier as you get to construction. If it's a monitoring service, which is 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 on secured projects, which are marked here as one. You will see opportunities as well, and that that is then again, you can choose how you you know, as you build Delta, can build the data out. You can you can look at how you wish to to view this data. We look at based on a weighted fee, and we have a methodology between our waiting as well, which is baked into the system. That fee is then spread out over the life of the project. However, we do have to 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's winning and delivering anything by the end of the month, unless you already know and 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 you know, as 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 and the firm order will go slightly downward. 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 if any business that works in consultancy, it's keeping that engine going. Right? This is winning that work, securing it, or generating 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 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 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 itemized basis, with 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 to visional 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, right, and being nimble and agile. Yeah. Absolutely. And that, you know, I I I really like that that talk track of, you know, the underlying value of this single source of truth is really getting able being able to see everything at a at a click of a button and and not just today's you know what happening what's happening today not just what's happening in the past but also you know, with your forecast looking at the next twelve months, well what's happening? Are we gonna, are we facing a a troublesome, you know, time in in the year? So just before we close off this section then, from a you know CFO's perspective, from your perspective, what outcomes would you would you want the audience to take away from this section? If you intro 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 government governance and accountability, And it it really will transform your function into being more kind of a strategic adviser rather than just bookkeeping and accounting. Lovely. That is a very good takeaway. I don't need to explain to you cash flow. He's, he's king, right? But what I hear from many customers or many organizations is that, you know, DSOs is driven or 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 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, you know, too many systems, too many cooks. You know? 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, you know, that's how long it took. This is they use two different systems for invoicing. Again, it was because of a need for a short term project, and then they kept it. So you ended up having an invoicing system that was, 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, and, plug the gaps in because they were you know, because there was that lack of engagement, which comes you know, again, comes back to that getting everyone bought into this and that visibility piece that ERP gives you. So yeah. So that's where that's where we were pre pre Deltek. 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, to to highlight some of this because visibility, what you said there, is is key. Right? Because then you're able to share the responsibility. It's not just the accounting function's job to to make sure all all of this makes sense to the company. It's everyone feeding into that pot. So this is a a dashboard that that you've built, David. Would you would you be able to just describe and to the audience today just what we're looking at here? Yeah. It's fine. So, you know, I talked about, the lack, you know, 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 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 this is rolled forward every single month. And this 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 and knowing who to chase, who, you know, who's outstanding with their information, having this available. And I should say that, you know, based on the permissions you give your users, you can different 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 realize it. They can refer to this dashboard, and everyone at the top is in try 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 kinda tuned into this, to hit those numbers. And this is a tool that we've used in order to to track the billing for the month. That's something we didn't have before it was done via numerous spreadsheets for numerous office. It's run by numerous people. I really like the accountability message. You know, we can you can see very, very visually here, this is the person who who should be actioning the next item on it. So you can then go and to go and chase rather than, you know, firing an email around the office and say, you know, who 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 sort of the the talk track, let me just describe what what the team is seeing here on the call. Because as I mentioned up top, what you wanna get or what VonagePoint allows you to do is have those transactions, those cost transactions flowing through the system. So 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, 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 And where they end up is a visual representation and then again to to David's point there about the accountability, it's it's being able to share that. So in this case, this is David raising the invoice and coming to a project leader for review, comment, adjustment, and approval before it's been been sent out the door straight from straight within the system. So just bringing it back then, David, can you explain the the impact that this has had to to your billing cycle? Yes. It it's a small change. Right? But as I as I mentioned, you know, now that we're in this kind of hybrid working world and everything's cloud based, you would get the, you know, you get the ability to have this all all within one roof. And pre if I go back to what we did previously, you know, we would have people printing off a run of invoices and going, you know, within a certain office, and then there would be, like, red pen markups and, and then it would be returned, and then the adjustments would be made. Now given we're a sustainability MEP practice. Right? You know, we wanna try and be as sustainable in all areas. So having it having it all in here certainly reduces our carbon footprint a little bit. But what it does is, you know, 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 you can mark up these invoices directly within Deltek, and you can reject them or, you know, with your with your edits, and it's all kept within it's all kept within the environment. No emails that get missed. No no printing. No delays. Well, the only delay would be able to chase them on Teams probably or or Slack or whatever you use, to 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 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 you know, 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 a, an unmanned I don't know. I think it's a 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 no denial and no invoice was received by a customer. Again that that comes back to the the accountability piece, right, so having having a system work with you in the process to identify, you know, this is this is the person that needs to review this or do this and try to streamline, you know, what what's happening on underneath, for each of those processes. So that's, you know, 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 the impact that that this dashboard has had on on DSOs within within Coda. I know it's in the slide, but I just wanna hear it from, from you. You know, what what impact did this did a dashboard like this have, for Coda? Yeah. So just to take a slight step back around the whole of the RP implementation, I talked previously about the, the reduction in administration it gave us. Right? Lots of 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 that first joined. Right? So, you know, the senior leaders were 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 the b in ten days. I think straight after implementation, running it about a credit control that we must have been we we brought it down by five days within a few months. That's what the trends would suggest anyway from our from our MI. But since then, we've managed to decrease it even further. Obviously, I would go as far as to say it's probably even more than ten days now. We're we're consistently tracking about five to 10. We're now we're consistently tracking ten days below the market average at the moment for AC firms per per Deltek's clarity report, I should say. So I've referenced Deltek's own data there. So this is the credit control dashboards, and this is where our credit controller lives and breathes. And, again, there's a little thing in here that I really just wanna spotlight that was a bit of a game changer. When we first joined credit control, we, 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 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, you know, one one thing that re 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, we'll 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 the 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 debt over ninety days while everyone else is like, you know, the gold the gold standard getting paid within thirty to sixty, etcetera. So yeah. So the comments is one of those, you know, one of those standout points I just wanna wanna share with everyone on this call that that is that I actually would say that that and the credit control amending 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 promised to be paid. This one is firmly inquiry and because it's firmly inquiry, there is an action point with someone where and I'm able as the FD, I'm able to go in weekly in my one to one with my credit controller to go in and and support the fund and support the business in trying to unlock these debts. Absolutely. So I think, you know, as we close this section out, really, what I'm hearing is is it's the accountability accountability and the and the sharing of responsibility across team members and not just relying on on your finance function to run these processes without, well 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, you know, what were the what was the results of of all of these different controls that you embedded within VarnishPoint for Coda? I mean, it's on your screen. Yeah. Reduced the SSA by ten days. No. So we you know, as I said, or as you just alluded to, it's everyone's responsibility in a business that in in our environment, it's best no. Especially, it's everyone's responsibility to collect cash, not just the FDs. Right? We we're the ones who use the ERP and use our teams effectively to to support the business in doing that. So, yeah, I mean, that was the biggest value creation for us, right, is expediting ten days, which is, like, a couple $100 in cash, really, hot Neo, by maintaining it. So, yeah, the main it's good doing it. It's then maintaining it, which we've which we've managed to do so that, you know so, yeah, as you alluded to those, after as we've just gone through, there's three or four that will fundamental changes on the process and the procedure in internally and the disability piece of the ERP, there's really once you stack it all up, that's what you know, the byproduct is you gotta trust it trust it, and it and it works, because we've proven it now. Completely and that's that concept of you know adopting change is something that's really key for not just this topic but also the next topic which is looking at you know how how we're able to go from where any of the FDs are on the call at the moment from from where you are you might be working in fragmented systems you might be looking at the DSO saying that'd be you know fantastic to implement in our business But the the sort of 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 the this best practice framework that I'll describe in a second. David, can you can you set the context of how you approach the implementation from a finance leadership or or FD perspective? Yeah. So, you know, having had experience of, being in companies that had been acquired and done integrations you know, have having done integrations before and worked on integration teams before, I I already had some experience of kind 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 engineering consult global engineering consultancy that was very mature and used Oracle. Right? So, which had its own issues. So I knew what good looked like. So, so it was it was good coming in here and having a look at, doing, you know, the procurement process of finding a provider. We were looking for something that specifically worked for our industry. Right? Project based, professional services. You know, we're selling we're not selling widgets. We're selling hours. Right? And those are very valuable hours on on our marquee projects. All our projects are are marquee in my view. Treat them all the same dependent on, you know, regardless of size. But, yeah, yeah, that's what that's that's one of the reasons why, why we chose, you know, Deltek is because of its industry experience specifically to 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 know, 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, always for sale almost. So you need to build all your infrastructure very early on. And Deltek gives us that scalable in you know, it gives us that scalable infrastructure now for bringing these new companies in effectively with all the standardization 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 Deltek'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 Deltek do. All that Deltek do is provide software for professional sepsis first. And part of this best practice framework called Power Launch, as you've heard multiple times here, is delivering an out of the box 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 in 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 what Power Launch or this sort of 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. So then what we're doing in the implementations that are building anything, we're adjusting any of these processes to meet meet your needs, then we're importing your data, training you, and then testing the outcome. And 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 Deltic and yourselves because you're starting from a best practice template that's already baked in from forty plus years experience from in the market and also reducing risk. And 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 and all of the demonstrations that I do to ensure that your expectations meet your what what you're gonna receive as as the end product. So, David, going back, so four months, that is from start to 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. Right? And so making sure that you get by you can never over communicate something like this. So there was a get trying to get buy in from the necessary director, senior leaders within the group, but 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 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 do want the bit of the system to be. Okay? And PowerLodge talks you all the way through that. So, yeah, the the kind of first the first bit of it was, putting together that steering committee. And, also, I had already we'd already started putting the we already knew that the data needed cleansing, and we started doing that as we started issue you know, 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 that people get in live. Absolutely. And that's something from a personal note that we were discussing when, when we were going through that sales cycle. Right? Get your data together and sort of I was very glad to help you guide you through, you know, 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 power launch framework, then when I heard there was sort of the the structure and the framework, what's what role did power launch really play in that four month delivery time frame? It certainly keeps you the task because, power launch, you know, effectively, you get you get a team that will support and show you the tie you know, your 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, zed, 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. I'm just gonna, like, you know, drop you into the ocean and say swim with the integration. Is it it's it's almost like being handheld? And it's quite nice because it it it it it makes sure that it is done correct. Right? And that's how you know you've got in a that's why, you know, you're partnering with a good business when they you know, the way the power launch worked out for us because it really did get us. 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 lead up to it. Absolutely. And keeping it you know, know, one thing we talked about earlier was keeping it as simple as possible, right, so I think many of the the FTEs in the call will be struggling with balancing the speed of the implementation and the complexity of their business. Was that ever a factor in in the implementation for you, David, where you you you're sort of balancing those two and trying to find the sweet spots between them? Yeah. I'd say so. Everything's always, kind of internal management piece, external management piece, and we're just glad that it's, we're glad that it's, 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 gonna happen. So, there's a bit of expectation saying that it was quite nice to be brought back down the earth by by Deltek in a bit with that regard. Well, it's always good to to marry up, you know, the expectations. Right? That's the key to any any any good implementation, any quick implementation to sort of just just goal set at the start and just manage manage those two expectations, off the bat. Let's just close this this sort of implementing best practice topic off. Looking back, I'm I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, FDs or 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 organize organization needs. Right? Not as fast as your CEO asks you to. You do it. You do you 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 know, and you're doing you know, what you why 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 because as big as this, you're talking around the o you're talking about overhauling your whole finance and HR infrastructure here and CRM if you if you use everything. So that's the first thing I would say is you 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 gonna get pushed back a month, but it was only because I was really it's because I was personally very nervous, and I put you know, had to put my foot down and say to the leadership, it's gonna be a month later than we expected. I'm like, but, yeah, funny enough, we've had zero hiccups. And I know I'm not saying it's because I delayed it four weeks for you. It's probably, you know, but it it get yo. 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 re and I'm really happy that I did actually delay things. So, yes. So, you know, to emphasize it again, you go as fast as as your organization needs. And the second thing I would say is that I'll pay your previous slide. I think it said it was, like, 90% 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. The reality is is it's change management and that it might not do a 100% of what you've got before because you again, you've built you've 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 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, you know, avoiding what I would say custom code, leading on from that because I know I know I know other FDs that I 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 Deltek resource. Like, you hire someone specifically to who's a data person effectively knows I would do it all. But if you're a business of, you know, 50 to 100 people, you know, stay stay well clear. You know, the whole reason of VantagePoint and PowerLaunch is that it is out the box, and it will be built for you during the PowerLaunch process. Absolutely. And, you know, circling back to my role within Deltek, my my role is to help you understand what's included in the base offering and also just to help set the right expectations so that we can have an implementation like coders where it's, it's it's pretty much smooth sailing. 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 the session. Right? So moving from a fragmented environment, being able to introduce intel intelligence, and utilizing Deltek's knowledge within, within the best practice deployment of VarnishPoint. So thank you very much, everyone who's joined, and we hope to see you later. Thank you.