Name: AI-Powered Profitability in Vantagepoint
Uploaded: 2026-08-12T19:01:03.088Z
Duration: 27 min 12 s
Description: AI-Powered Profitability in Vantagepoint

Transcript for "AI-Powered Profitability in Vantagepoint": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, AI powered profitability in VantagePoint. Today, we'll show you how VantagePoint AI capabilities can proactively help catch billing gaps, margin risk, and expense violations before they escalate. Della is changing what a typical day looks like for project managers. I'm Jen Souza from Deltek. And before we get started, here are a few housekeeping notes to ensure you have the best experience today. For the best viewing experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. Audio will stream through your computer, so make sure your volume is turned up. There is no dial in option. If you have a question, type it into the Q and A box at any time during the presentation. We'll address all questions at the end of the presentation, and we'll follow-up with any individually after the webinar if we do not get to them. Resources, including today's presentation slides, are available in the document center at the top right of your screen. You'll receive an email with the on demand recording within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. And now, I would like to introduce today's speaker, Adam Churchill, senior principal solutions engineer at Deltek. Adam, take it away. Okay. Welcome, everyone. My name is Adam Churchill, senior principal solutions engineer here at Deltek. Today, I'm here to present exploring Della, the AI powered project life cycle. One common question we are hearing from customers is, how do my project managers use Dell features today in VantagePoint? So today, gonna walk you through exactly that, the AI powered project life cycle, directly within VantagePoint. For those unfamiliar, Deltek Della is Deltek's AI brand across all of our different platforms, and AI based features. VantagePoint has been the system of record for project based businesses for some time. And now with Della, it's the system of action. This is where, most softwares tell you what has happened, and Della tells you what you need to know or do next and then helps you do it. Della is not a new feature. It's been inside in in in the inside the VantagePoint since 2023, and we've been building features around it since. So let's go ahead and take a quick look here, you know, at the Della, feature set in action and really wanted to start talking about the platform, right, and and and and Deltek as a platform that can help you, you know, win, plan, analyze, and execute. So most project firms have a similar project life cycle to this, with the goal of being profitable and or on time and in on budget. And and VantagePoint is really the only platform that covers all four of these stages natively with embedded functionality that win, plan, execute, and analyze in a single connected system. No duct tape. No manual exports. This is all your data living, in one place and having multiple different feature sets. So the AI, story here is Stella isn't gonna change that. It just sits on top of the platform. It's woven through all these stages, and it means that the AI actually knows your projects, your clients, your financials because it lives in that same system where you're working. There's no integration needed. This is just embedded functionality. So now let's let's talk more about this, Dela as being this platform of action. Right? And really starts with the DNA. Right? The the Deltek native architecture. This is our cloud. This is our database. You know, the compliance, the control, the services that we offer. Right? In the next kinda level up in the stack are the apps, right, the different feature sets that we use to run the business, throughout that project life cycle. You know? And then sitting on top of that, again, is this this AI, this insights, this automation, really you know? And it's built with some key fundamentals. Security first. It is secure. It it is gonna honor your role security. It's contained within your database and nowhere else. Data privacy, data is yours. It will stay yours. All communications are encrypted. Their requests are stateless. Your data is never used to train the underlying model. Another key benefit, Dela, again, operates directly within the vantage point's existing security model. So if a user wants to ask some questions or see a field or record a vantage point that they don't have access to, they won't see it in a dollar response either. So there's no separate configuration. Like I said, no integration, a lot a lot less risky than, you know, building stuff outside of the system. And we're gonna, like I said, we're respecting that role security that we're all familiar with. Right? And so kinda reframing that story here, everything that really Della does today is gonna fall into four buckets. Right? They all save time. They'll help your team, you know, perform the work every single day. And really, as you'll see here as I kinda demonstrate, we're gonna start with the smart content, low hanging fruit to be able to get a good accurate picture of your projects or your clients to be able to get answers quickly by ask Della. Right? Stop digging through records or multiple places. Try to do that in one place and drive action. Again, automating that work, you know, being able to generate content, which I'll show. And and, you know, the a newer feature here is gonna be these insights really, again, providing you some guardrails, some guidelines around project performance before the project in is in trouble and before it's too late. Right? So gonna wanna really highlight some of those feature sets today and and really kinda show you, some Dela features in action. Okay. Just a level set here before I jump into presentation. What I'm gonna show today isn't a pilot or a customization. Dela is a mature expanding set of features and capabilities that firms are already using in VantagePoint today. The Dela features I'm going to show are all out of the box and something that you can enable in your database. So let's walk through some of the Dela feature highlights today that are available in 2026 .3 and see exactly how Dela can help automate some of these processes and steps for your project managers today. Okay. Let's jump in, and let's start with, project smart summaries and firm smart summaries. So really ground level, really kinda getting started, low hanging fruit for your, your team. Right? So, again, logged in here with access to the firm's hub, and I've enabled the smart summary for this project manager user. If I go ahead and click smart summary, you know, maybe the use case here heading into a meeting with Anderson, wanna get a readout, like, a firm three sixty here of what's really going on. I get an executive summary. I get a list of recent activities or touch points. I can see the current pursuits. You know, this can be helpful if you have multiple offices, departments chasing after the the same RFP. This is really gonna provide that visibility. You've got active awarded projects here. You can actually see the top completed projects. And I could see there's one Western Oregon Athletic Center. So maybe we want to go ahead and check out that particular project and and do a smart summary there. And, incidentally, you can also copy these to a clipboard. Right? So if I jump over to the project hub quickly and I wanna look at that western, Oregon Athletic Center, same concept here. If I jump into smart summary, I've been provided access to this. It's a it's a project I have access to. So I can go ahead and get a pretty good readout here. I can see it's a one project. I get an overview, sort of a project summary there. I get the financial health picture. I I get the recent activities or touch points again specific to the project, not to the the overall client. And then within here, you get a plan summary if the project plan is currently in use. So really simple, low hanging fruit, a click of a button, provides you some useful information that project managers can then really sort of get better insight without having to go run multiple reports or sort through activities and things like that. Kinda moving along the the stage here of this is another project manager currently logged in. Of course, reporting. Right? So reporting is available. Dash boarding is available out of the system. But what if I wanna start asking questions about the project and get more information? It then I can do that all in one place. Right? So if I'm looking at a list of projects and I wanna focus in on maybe projects that have more profitability, let's say, I don't know, some unreasonable number, 95,000. Right? It's filtered down my list. I've got five projects. And so now shifting away from the dashboard and moving into Ask Della as a feature set here, we can prompt some questions, and we can start to ask, you know, maybe let's list my five top most profitable projects. I've got some saved prompts over here. And we'll let it run. You can go full screen on this too if you can watch it work a little easier here. Great. So I've got those five projects there that fit that criteria that match those that that dataset. From here, I could query further project information. Let's go ahead and pick one specific project there that George Fox Wheeler project, and let's go ahead and dig in a little deeper on the financial performance there. And this is connected to the same base of information that you'd be seeing on your dashboards, or even from the PR summary table there. So it's querying the database and your information. Great. I can see some more information about the project here. So kinda giving you some context about what the system knows. And maybe specifically, I want to follow-up with this. Maybe there's an upcoming project that's similar or maybe I wanna do a project closeout, really post go live or something. So let's go ahead and find out who I need to email, or follow-up with specifically. Okay. And and, you know, maybe I know Robert Wright would be good, but maybe I specifically know I wanna talk to Ben Gordon. You know, maybe Ben Gordon is a better lead or a better contact. And so what I've done here is I've gone ahead and you can take that action. Della can take the next step. And so what it did on the on the screen here is it went ahead and and onboarded and created that activity for me automatically. I can update it as needed, and I can hit save or cancel to go ahead and create that activity. Right? So being able to ask some questions about project performance to go and continue to ask questions about the project, the client, really, common use case and helping to do multiple things in one place versus have to go run different reports and and and and go to multiple screens. Right? Maybe Outlook included here directly with from within this screen. You know, again, maybe this is another project leader. I can see on my dashboard something sticking out here with Brian. What's going on? I can clearly see we we may have a problem with Anderson. And so now I can start to ask some more questions about the AR. So rather than have to go to multiple places again, let's use Astella to create some content. Right? So another common use case, you know, wanting to know what is my AR balance maybe for a client or a project. In this case, maybe I'm a a client manager or maybe a project manager that's responsible for collections. Right? So give me a detailed unpaid list of invoices by project here for that Anderson construction client, and we'll go ahead and make this full screen here too. Give it a second. Be patient and let it run. K. Yeah. From here, I can see George wheel George Fox Wheeler. Again, there's that project. You know, quite a bit of outstanding invoice. So from here, let's go ahead and can prompt it. Who's the billing contact for these projects? I'm trying to give it some context here to build towards generating or creating an email, for collections specifically on the projects that that I'm gonna prompt here. First and foremost, we'll find out who the billing contact is. And while this works, you can clearly be doing other things. You can, you know, minimize the menu, look at other reports, or, you know, ultimately pick this back up. It runs in the background. Okay. So it's giving me a pretty accurate, detailed list here. From here, let's go ahead and let's prompt it further. Let's go ahead and have it generate a collections email to Robert Wright for the George Fox Wheeler and the Edwards Center project. Great. Okay. I can even have it, you know, personalized the signature to Pat Hill's information, for instance. Right? I'm logged in as Pat Hill. Maybe wanna just make it a little bit more flavored. Again, using the prompts here to generate deeper content. So, again, you could go to different places and generate this content, but, again, really, with some simple questions and a little bit of patience, I've gotten to the end here. I'm ready to send this, out to, someone. So from in directly within the system, I can send an email. Right? And from within here, I'm gonna go ahead and I can send it to different employees. For instance, if I know Chris is the principal, maybe I wanna cc Chris. You know, maybe I want to send it directly to what we said Ben Gordon so I could filter this down. I can come in and I can find Ben Gordon here directly from within my contact list, and I can send it to that Pat specifically, maybe even, copying myself there. And then within here, it's got that generative content, right, that I can pretty easily just get ready to send out the door directly from the system. So, really, under another way to just tie it all together in one place, right, instead of having to go to multiple places and copy and paste. It's it's really there at your fingertips. Right? Making a lot easier for project managers, you know, just to automate a process that maybe took took much longer before I had to go to multiple places. You know, kinda moving along the the pipeline here, we also have Della Insights. Right? And Della Insights are newer feature, but they're really the guidelines, the guardrails for, you know, again, for different users, maybe different things. But from a project management standpoint, this ability to really understand project performance or or even if you have to approve and review time cards for your team or for your projects, really the ability to go in and say, hey. I can see I've got some time and expense ones here, and maybe I just wanna see the one specific to this record. And so it shows me here this doesn't look normal. Chris has submitted hours beyond what she normally does. Right? And so I can then click on here. You're gonna be able to link to something where you could take further action. Right? So this is just a standard insight for time sheet approval or, specifically, if you you wanted to see insights for project management. This would be things like earn revenue ahead of invoicing, right, to be able to come in here, to be able to look go directly to project review to understand a little bit more, you know, to see maybe there's an invoice I haven't approved or submitted, or if I wanna go ahead and open a message and dialogue directly with the biller. We're spending ahead of earned revenue. Right? This ability to understand why I'm accumulating cost faster than reported or progress indicates. And then, again, to jump into project review to to get more information to directly update the percent complete, to jump into the project plan and update the estimates to complete, or, again, to open a message and then open a dialogue directly with the, you know, you know, the the the project accounting team. So ways that we're trying to make things quicker, keep you abreast of things before they're happening, and really just to drive action while you have that, ability to do so. Okay. Before we wrap up, just another really simple Dela feature that is available. Again, low hanging fruit, but it's the ability to automate time and expense collection, specifically the expense side of the equation. So if you're using the mobile app today, you can enter your your your time, your expenses. You can, approve time and expense or even absence here. We're specifically really just make the expense process for project managers or field workers that much easier. Snap a picture of the receipt. Use the ICR features. This is one of the Dela features available directly within the system to add to an existing expense report in this case, and I'll go ahead and pick the one that's outstanding. And, really, what it does is it grabs the date. It it it grabs a description, the currency, the dollar amount, the the category of the expense, the merchant description, and then so it really just leaves the the the project team just all they need to do is enter the project number and then go ahead and and then move on to the next one. So just a nice simple way to automate another process to really just make it more efficient to get that receipt in early along with that expense. And so if you if this is submitted, I'm gonna see that within the system as well. So, again, just another nice simple feature that is really just, hanging out there for for ease of consumption. So really tying this all together and, you know, kinda talking about Della, again, as a complete AI solution built into VantagePoint with broad set of features and functions for the the entire organization, but specifically for some low hanging fruit for project managers. Every other system was really built to store data with VantagePoint. And, Della, it's built to use it. Right? This AI, again, isn't an add on. It isn't a third party integration. It's here. It's it's live. It's purpose built for the way your firm works and and really, you know, ability to help automate and streamline processes. So I'm gonna open it up for questions here. Really appreciate the attendance, and, feel free to drop us any questions here. We'll we'll answer them in line. Or if you wanna follow-up, we'll get to you by email. But thanks again for the attendance, and, hope this was helpful for you to learn a little bit about, though. Thanks. Great. Thank you so much, Adam. We'll give everyone a minute to locate the q and a window on the right hand side of your console. While you do so, I'd like to thank you for the insightful presentation again, Adam. We hope all attendees walk away with a better understanding of how VantagePoint can provide clear insights in AI powered automation so your team can focus on delivering great work. If you'd like to learn more about Deltek's AI powered profitability, please select yes, and we will be in touch. Okay. Yeah. Appreciate that, Jen. And it looks like there was a few questions that I'll just go ahead and answer in line. The first question is, Stella available on prem, in VantagePoint? Absolutely. It is available on prem. There will likely be at in some future, some functionality that would really be best, available or maybe only available for cloud users. But right now, everything that we showed today through twenty twenty six dot three is fully functional, fully available today. And then to kind of follow-up on that, Does Delma integrate with the assigned security rules? Probably the most common question, how do I make sure? It it absolutely does by design. And just one thing to note, as you're looking inside the the the the hub, for instance, right, of any of these records, if you go to certain fields, there's another box in there called secure. So that is really the main control feature that you're gonna wanna focus in on if there are fields that you do want completely blocked from that role security setting. But but, yes, that is the design, and the intent is that Dell does, integrate with the security role that you're assigned to. Yeah. So good questions. And, again, if there are follow ups, you know, you can send them via email. We can get back to you. I guess, any other questions, Jen, that I've missed? How does Zela actually different from other AI tools? Yeah. I'd say, well, that's a that is a good question. Right? Well, it is built using AI as a foundational layer, like in that, you know, overarching, kind of funnel we looked at. I'd say it's different because if I go into Claude today and I have to give it some context about my project data, about the employees, about, you know, the data that I want to make available versus Dela is built into the system. Right? It's from ground up. We started purposefully adding feature sets from record specific to now more of an aggregate function. Right? And and, obviously, as we move more into, like, MCP and a Jentic workflow, these these core concepts and baselines that we added are gonna continue to grow and expand. So having it in the system, case in point, allows me to really use the security built into the system against the AI that's in my system. And it's still obviously, we're not using your data in any way. So I I'd say that's a major differentiator, Jen, Mhmm. between just general AI and, like, purpose built AI for project based, ERP. Great. Thank you, Adam. We had one last question to roll in. And if this is too in the weave, let me know. But how will Claude's. integration with VantagePoint version twenty twenty six point four change how Della operates? Love it. I love where you're going, Dan. It it will. Right? I mean, I think it doesn't change how Della operates. It exchanges how you can interact with Della. And so, you know, in your future release, and I think we'll probably likely have a webinar for this when it comes out. But, you know, you'll be able to go into Claude, or say chat and then find Della as a connector. And so everything you can do in Della, you're gonna be able to do in Claude. And as I've been testing this, I can build my skills. I can build projects. So I can have all that, you know, automated intelligence within within Cloud to combine with Dela. And so I've been creating, like, different project kinda summaries or, like, specific project kinda status reports that really allow me to utilize the maximum amount of sort of functionality. So I think it doesn't change the way it's gonna operate in the system or it's end result, but it's really gonna allow us to do more with Della. Hopefully, that helps. I love that. Getting the most out of what we have. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Well, thank you all again for joining us today, and we hope to see you at another Deltek event soon. For more information about upcoming webinars and events, please visit deltek.com or complete the brief survey that we'll share here and, let us know what you think and if you have anything you'd like to see in future webinars. So thank you and have a wonderful day. Alright. Thanks, Sean. See you all. Thank you. Bye Bye. bye.