Deltek Implementation
How We Helped

Project :
Deltek's Costpoint Implementation

Deltek's Costpoint:
Accounting Software for businesses where client relationships revolve around projects, engagements or contracts. It is specifically built for companies that depend on the careful budgeting, tracking and controlling of every project dollar — labor and non labor— on every task, phase or delivery order.

In Sync's Role includes:
-Data Migration
-Custom Programming
-Custom Bridges
-Problem Resolution
-Data Warehouse
-Intranet

Executive Summary:
In 1997, Sparta, Inc. replaced their massive custom legacy accounting system with Deltek’s Costpoint Accounting System.

In Sync was contracted to:

* Migrate the data
* Develop custom tools & bridges necessary to implement the system
* Develop custom reports utilized by company managers and executives
* Develop a simplified Intranet-based timecard entry system
* Automate the transfer of hours and wages from Costpoint to the Ceridian Payroll System

Customer Profile:

Founded in 1979, SPARTA is a national systems engineering and advanced technology company with 13 sites around the country. Their core business area is in the development of strategic defense systems, offense systems, tactical weapons systems, space systems, and information systems for the US Government. Sparta’s innovations, capabilities, and expertise in these areas have enhanced their reputation in the government sector.

Business Challenge:

In 1997, Sparta Inc. made a corporate decision to replace their corporate legacy project-based accounting system, developed by in-house programmers, with Deltek’s Costpoint Accounting System. The reasons behind the upgrade included memory limitations of Foxpro for UNIX, size limitations of their project identifiers, and Y2k problems with their current application.

The legacy system contained a massive database of historical project cost data and employee information that needed to be migrated to the new environment. Sparta also needed a number of custom tools, bridges and reports developed to successfully implement this new accounting system.

In Sync's Role:

Data Migration
Initially, In Sync's professional I.T. consultants were contracted to design the data migration plan and then implement the plan. The old project accounting system was developed in Foxpro for Unix and the data stored in DBF file format. Due to government regulations on project cost reporting, the cost data for all active projects needed to be migrated to Deltek’s Costpoint. This involved migrating the historical data of over 5000 project work-orders spanning over a period of 5 years.

In Sync developed a tool to automate the process. In Sync developed a program to automate creating the project master record for each contract, subcontracts and project work order numbers. In Sync’s program also automatically created the summary cost data by account for each of the project work orders, by account and by year. The program then summarized the data from the old legacy system and migrated it into Costpoint. For employee records, which are master records, another program was developed to migrate all of that data. This migration and data audit took only three months to accomplish.

Custom Programming
To ensure that Deltek’s Costpoint system was correctly configured and operating in accordance to their former legacy system, Sparta’s accounting department was required to run both accounting systems parallel for one year. To duplicate the weekly data entry effort with existing personnel was unrealistic. In Sync developed a custom tool to extract time card and accounts payable data, weekly, from the legacy system and migrate that data into Costpoint. Time card and accounts payable data represents the bulk of the data entry by the accounting department. All other accounting information was entered manually.

After the successful close the fiscal year 1997 Costpoint was put into full production use.

Custom Bridge
Before Costpoint could be placed into full production, a bridge between Costpoint and the Ceridian Payroll System needed to be developed to move employee hours, absence remaining and wages between the two systems. In Sync developed a system to extract the required data into the flat file format that was in use by Ceridian to get the same data from the legacy system.

The system developed utilized Microsoft Visual Basic for Access to connect to the Costpoint Oracle tables, extract the data, determine the appropriate Ceridian codes and create the flat file. The system has been reliably used for 4 years with technical support required only to modify the system for new data types. The system has since been modified to create a similar file to communicate with the Pro Business payroll system that is currently used by Sparta.

Problem Resolution
During the testing phase, it was determined that the Costpoint reporting tools were not adequate for Sparta executives, project managers and staff. In addition, Sparta’s management and staff, located throughout the country, were having problems accessing the Costpoint system installed at the corporate headquarters in California. The system was bogged down and slow.

A CITRIX environment was put in place to support remote access but the cost for the combination of CITRIX and Costpoint license to allow the majority of Sparta staff to access the system this way was prohibitive. It was decided that a web based reporting system would be deployed to support these users.

Data Warehouse
In Sync designed and implemented a data warehouse that provides Project cost data and employee data for these remote users. The system uses a weekly posting process to populate the Oracle RDBMS based data warehouse. A combination of Perl CGI, Java and Oracle Developer report serve to provide web based reports. Reports can be displayed individually or emailed to the user as MS Excel spreadsheets. Sets of reports can be combined into a batch set. The user can then trigger these batch sets and print the reports locally.

After 4 years in use, the data warehouse contains over 50 million records. Individual summary reports can de executed and displayed to the user in approximately 5 seconds. Large detailed report execution is constrained only by the bandwidth to the user.

Intranet
Another major concern that arose upon production release was the complexity and speed of time card entry. Time card data is the largest data set entered into Costpoint. The process is performed every Monday and must be completed by 12:00 pacific on Tuesday. Remote staff utilized a Citrix server to access Costpoint and input data. Speed issues reached a crisis point as Internet use, other than timecard entry, was prohibited Monday and Tuesday morning at many locations.

The Costpoint timecard system presented another concern. Costpoint is a very flexible general-purpose account system. As such it needs to be given a significant amount of information for each project entered on a time card. By contrast Sparta’s old accounting system required only the employee id, project id and hours for each project. Even though Costpoint can default most of the information, the timecard entry staff found it very cumbersome to input and verify. Data entry errors rapidly became untenable.

To solve both of these problems it was decided that a web based time card entry system would be developed to provide higher speed data entry and a simplified entry forms. The system would use a conversion process to implement Sparta’s business rule to determine the data values required by the Costpoint timecard system. The new web system would upload the timecard data to Costpoint after the verification was complete. Once uploaded Costpoint would be used to audit and post timecard data.

In Sync developed the intranet. The system was deployed on an IIS server using ASP and Visual Basic technology. It has been used reliable on a weekly basis for over 4 years. It has successfully processed over 400,000 timecard detail records. The system has been able to deal with a large number of business rules modifications with little programming effort.