Transcript for "Modern Time Tracking for Modern PSO's: A Better Way to Capture Work": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, modern time tracking for modern PSOs, a better way to capture work. I'm Jen Sousa from Dell Tech. And before we get started, here are a few quick housekeeping notes to ensure you have the best experience today. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. Audio will be streamed through your computer. There is no dial in, so make sure your volume is up. You can download the presentation slides and additional resources in the resource tab. An on demand recording will be emailed within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. If you have any questions, please type them into the q and a box. All unanswered questions will be addressed individually offline. And now I would like to introduce you to today's moderate speaker, Sushmita Singh, principal curriculum manager at Deltek. Sushmita, take it away. Hello and welcome everyone. We have an exciting agenda for you today. We're going to be walking through a demo of how our AI powered time tracking improves organizational efficiencies, allowing your organization to better manage time sheets efficiently and accurately. Let me quickly walk you through what we've planned for today. We'll start by looking at the PSO time challenge. Why something as simple as capturing time can actually become such a persistent challenge for many organizations? And then we'll talk about modern time capture with Replicon Zero Time powered by Deller, and how organizations are starting to move away from manual memory based time sheets towards a much smarter and more automated approach. After that, we'll jump into a live demo where I'll show you how zero time works in practice and how it captures everyday work activities and turns them into time entries with very little effort. Once we've seen the product in action, we'll briefly look at the business impact, what better time capture actually means for things like project visibility, billing accuracy, and overall operational insights. We'll also touch base on Dell Tech Replicon ecosystem, and finally wrap up with a Q and A session. So with that, let's get started by looking at the PSO time challenge. Alright, so let's start with something every professional services organization understands very well. Time is the core currency of the business. In a professional service environment, the work delivered to clients is built on the expertise, effort, and time of your people. Every hour spent on a project represents value being created, whether that's consulting, implementation, advisory work, or even ongoing support. And because of that, time data becomes incredibly important. Once time is captured, it feeds into several critical processes across the organizations. It drives billing, because it ensures that your clients are invoiced correctly. It also influences utilization, helping leaders understand how effectively teams are deployed. It supports forecasting, allowing organizations to plan resources and upcoming projects. And ultimately, it determines project margins and profitability. So there's a very clear chain here. Time capture sits right at the start of the entire operational pipeline, as you can see. Which means if the capture itself is incomplete or inaccurate, everything downstream becomes less reliable. Billing may be incomplete, utilization metrics become distorted, forecasting becomes harder to trust. Now here's something to think about. How many people actually capture their time in real time throughout the day? For most organizations, the honest answer is not many. Instead, most professionals still rely on reconstructing their time from memory. And that's where the real challenge begins. Now if we step back and think about how work happens today, something interesting becomes clear. Most of our work already leaves a digital footprint. We send emails, we attend meetings, we collaborate on documents, we work on different project management tools. In other words, the evidence of the work already exists digitally. Let's take a typical consultant's day as an example to understand. You might start with a client meeting in the morning, then respond to emails, join project discussion on Teams, review a document, update a task in a project management tool. By the end of the day, you worked across multiple activities and systems, but when it's time to complete the timesheet, you're expected to remember everything you did. So the question becomes, what if time capture didn't rely on memory? What if system could simply use the digital activity that already exists and help convert that into accurate time. When we compare traditional time capture with a more modern approach, the difference becomes very clear. On the traditional side, time entry is largely manual and memory based. Employees typically sit down at the end of the day, or sometimes even at the end of the week, and try to reconstruct what they worked on. They go through emails, calendars, meetings, and project tools, and then manually allocate time to different tasks and projects. This process can easily take ten to fifteen minutes each entries. Now, compare that with zero time. With zero time, activities captured automatically through what we call collectors. These collectors observe work activity across supported applications, things like meetings, email, browser activity, and collaboration tools. From there, AI driven intelligence analyzes that activity and provides smart suggestions for how that time should be categorized across projects and tasks. So, of starting with a blank timesheet, users will now see a pre populated view of their workday. But an important point here is that users remain fully in control. They can review the suggestions, edit them if needed, ignore certain activities, and then confirm what should actually go into the timesheet. So, the shift here is simple but powerful. We move from manual reconstruction to a much more intelligent validation. And the best way to understand how this works is to see it in action. Let me quickly switch screens. All right, welcome to our platform. What you're seeing here is Zero Time, our AI powered approach to time capture. While AI is transforming how organizations work, we wanted to make sure that transformation stays simple for employees. Typically, people reach the end of the day or week trying to remember what they worked on by checking calendars, emails, and notes. But with zero time, there's no need to reconstruct your day. Activities are automatically captured throughout the day and brought together here in one clear view, as you can see. Now before I talk about this view, I'd like to first give you a little background about collectors. At the core of zero time are what we call collectors, which are really the engine behind how this works. Collectors connect Zero Time to the tools employees already use every day. Things like calendars, emails, collaboration tools, browsers, and different business applications. As employees go about their workday, what these collectors do is that they capture activity signals such as meetings attended, documents opened, emails sent, and time spent in certain applications. All of this activity data is then automatically gathered and brought into a central workspace called the inbox. So instead of employees starting with a blank timesheet, they now start with a workspace where their activities are already captured and organized for them as you can see. The employee role now becomes simply reviewing and confirming those activities, rather than trying to remember and recreate them. Now across the top you'll notice several different views that helps employees organize and manage their activities. All view shows every captured activity regardless of status. Inbox is where employees typically spend most of their time. These are activities waiting to be reviewed and categorized before being converted into time entries. And then private view allows employees to keep certain activities separate if they prefer not to convert them into time entries. Accepted view shows activities that have already been confirmed and moved into the timesheet. And finally, the trash view contains activities that the user has chosen to discard. Another thing I wanted to talk about is the two kinds of views. The current view that you're looking at is called the list view, but we also have timeline view. If employee chooses to select timeline view, which looks more like a calendar format, they can choose that as well. In just a click, you can select the kind of view that you prefer viewing. Let me come back to list view. Now let's take a closer look at how an employee reviews one of activities. So here you can see an activity related to new tax documentation review and reporting. When you open the activity, you see important details such as when the activity was held, the duration, and where it originated from. This is where zero times intelligence really comes into play. Based on the activity information and historical patterns, zero times AI and ML begins recommending the most likely project and task associated with the work. So in this example, the system is recommending the task as invoicing because historically similar work has been logged against that project. And most importantly, the list of projects you see here is coming directly from the organization's Replicon environment. Meaning, employees are always selecting from the same live list of clients, projects, and tasks used across the organization. Now, at this point, the employee simply reviews the recommendations. If everything looks correct, they can confirm it in just a few seconds. But if there are any adjustments that are needed, then employees can easily change the client project task. And then they can also add comments if they want to provide additional context. If everything looks good, they can accept the time entry. Once the employee accepts the entry, it moves into their timesheet under Smart Timesheet. This is where all the accepted entries would start to reflect. So if you want to conduct another round of review, you can do so from here. If everything looks good, then you can simply go ahead and click on apply 46 time entries to the timesheet. It'll take a few seconds to reflect. And there you go. You can see all the entries with details showing up. You can see the client, task, project reflecting. You can see the work type and office reflecting as well. Time data, clearly broken down. Total number of hours showing up. Once everything looks good, you can simply click on submit for approval. It'll take a few seconds for the status to show up. Now it's showing as waiting for approval. Now, before the timesheet can be submitted, on the back end, the system also performs automatic validation checks. If there are any issues, the platform immediately highlights them. Let me pull up an example and show that to you right now. There you go. So in this timesheet you can see there are six warnings, because of which the status of timesheet says submission failed. Minimum number of hours were not logged in and activity and project was not selected, which was required. So these validations ensure that time data is complete and accurate before it moves forward in the approval process. If there is a critical error, the system will not allow the time sheet to be submitted until the issue is resolved. This is extremely valuable for organizations, because it helps enforce internal policies, ensures required hours are captured, ultimately supports accurate billing, reporting, and compliance requirements. So instead of managers having to manually review and correct issues later, the system guides employees to fix them upfront before any submission. So ultimately, what Zero Time does is transform the timesheet experience from manual memory based process into one that is automated, more accurate, and significantly easier for employees to complete. So employees spend less time filling out timesheets and more time focusing on the work that actually matters. Now that we've seen how zero time works, the important question is, what does this mean for the business? Because the value of modern time capture goes far beyond making time sheets easier. When time capture improves, organizations begin to see a very real ripple effect across the business. First, there's a clear improvement in billable capture. When work activity is captured automatically, fewer billable tasks fall through the cracks. For example, think about a consultant who jumps between client calls, quick follow-up emails, internal reviews, and impromptu Slack conversations. Individually, those activities may feel small, but collectively they add up to a real billable time. Without accurate capture, some of that effort simply gets forgotten. With automated time capture, those moments are recorded as they happen, ensuring the work teams are already doing actually gets reflected in revenue. Second, leaders gain much better visibility into utilization, because time data is more accurate and available sooner. Managers can clearly see how teams are spending their time. For instance, a leader can quickly identify whether a team is overloaded on internal activities versus client delivery, or whether certain roles are consistently underutilized. Instead of guessing or waiting for the end of the month report, leaders can make informed adjustments in real time, shifting work, balancing workloads, and also preventing any kind of burnout. Third, there's a significant reduction in administrative overhead. Employees spend far less time filling out timesheets and operations teams spend less time chasing missing entries or fixing errors. Imagine the hours saved when employees no longer need reminder emails, follow ups, or last minute corrections before payroll or billing cutoffs. Finance teams gets cleaner data, project managers spend less time reconciling discrepancies, and employees get back valuable time they can focus on meaningful work. And finally, one of the most powerful benefits organizations gain are more reliable forecasting. When time data is consistent and trustworthy, leaders can make stronger decisions around project planning, staffing, revenue expectation. For example, if historical data shows that similar project consistently requires more effort than originally planned, future estimates can be adjusted upfront. That leads to more accurate project timelines, better margin protection, and fewer surprises down the road. Now imagine a different experience for employees. Instead of trying to remember what they worked on at the end of the day or end of the week, their activity is already captured throughout the day. Their timesheet is essentially pre built. All they need is to do a review and make any necessary adjustments if needed, and then confirm and submit. Often in just a few seconds. That shift may sound small, but when you multiply it across hundreds or thousands of employees, the impact is enormous. Time data becomes more accurate, trust in the data increases, and the organizations move from reacting to insights to acting to acting on them. And that's where the real business value of improved time capture truly begins. Now, of course, time capture is just one part of the broader operational picture. Zero time doesn't operate in isolation. It sits within the large Deltek replicon ecosystem, which is designed to help organizations manage projects, resources, time, and billing in a single connected platform. What that means is that the time captured by Zero Time isn't just sorted in a timesheet and forgotten. Instead, it automatically flows into the system that teams already rely on to deliver projects and manage the business. For example, captured time feeds directly into project management, giving project managers real time insights into effort spent versus budget. It supports resource management by helping leaders understand capacity and availability across teams, and it connects to billing and finance, ensuring that billable work is accurately reflected in invoices without manual reentry and reconciliation. This end to end connection is critical. When time data moves seamlessly across the organization, it becomes a trusted operational input, not just an administrative requirement. As a result, leaders can make faster, more confident decisions project timeline, staffing needs, margins, and revenue forecasts, all based on consistent and reliable data. And that's ultimately how organizations move from simply capturing time to turning better time data into better business outcome. With that, I'll hand it over to Jen. Great. Thank you so much, Shushmita. We'll now give everyone a minute to locate the q and a window on the webinar console to submit your questions for our speaker. While you do so, we have a quick reminder. We want to remind you that Deltek is in the business of powering project success for project based organizations of all sizes. We enable consulting organizations to maximize profitability and increase billable hours through integrated time tracking, ERP, and PSA solutions. Be sure to visit our website to learn more about our solutions and request a demo to see how we can help your organization. If you'd like to discuss your consulting goals and learn more about how Deltek can help your consulting firm become more efficient, please select yes in this poll, and we'll be in touch. Okay. We have a few questions from the audience, Shushmita. Let's get started. Hello, everybody. Alright. So I've got a couple of questions. Right. So how does ZeroTime integrate with projects and billing? Well, that's a great question. So the suggested time entries can be mapped to your project's task and or clients within Replicon. I think as part of the demo, the I had highlighted time sheet labels. So what happens is this ensures that the captured time directly starts feeding into project tracking, billing, and reporting, and then it eventually improves both accuracy and timeliness as well. Okay. I how does this integrate with time sheets in Deltec VantagePoint? Right. So zero time works alongside with Deltek VantagePoint by automatically capturing your work activity and turning that into suggested time entries. Right? So what happens is these entries are then mapped to the right project and shows up directly in your vantage point time sheets. From there, users can review. If they wish to make any edits, they can do so, and then submit as they normally would. So the process stays the same, just much faster and easier. Okay. Does your product allow for time sheet check-in and checkout daily? Yes. It does. Right? How does zero time actually capture my work? Is it tracking everything I do? Well, that's a great question. So zero time uses signals like calendar events or application usage or work patterns to suggest time entry. So it's not about, tracking everything in a surveillance sense. The the focus is on helping users, reconstruct their workday more intelligently. Right? So users always have full visibility and control over what gets added to their time sheet before submission. Okay. Do we have any more questions? I think we have one more, from the audience. Will zero time replace manual time sheets completely? Ah, that's an interesting question. Well, it does reduce the need for manual entry significantly, but, it doesn't remove user control. Right? So users still review and submit their time sheets, but instead of starting from the scratch and relying on memory, they're working with a pre pop prefilled or prebuilt time sheet with much more intelligent suggestions. So think of zero time as a great starting point, but not an end answer. Right? The user judgment users still have to review, edit, and it's it's it's their call to finally submit the time sheet and allow certain time entries to actually get into their time data. That's great. Well, thank you so much for this, Shasmitha. I'm gonna remind the audience that there will be an on demand recording of this available. It'll be sent to your email within twenty four hours. Don't forget to check out our resources that we posted in the doc center here. You'll get some great information around Deltek and some of our thought leadership work that we have. And then before we wrap up, I just want to extend a thank you to Shivniva for an incredible insightful presentation today. Really great walking through zero time for Replicon time tracking. We appreciate the time and expertise you shared today. Thank you. Thank you. With that, I'd like to say thank you to everyone else for joining us today, and please visit delltech.com for more upcoming Deltek events.