Written by: Marty McGann, CEO at PCI
With the launch of Costpoint 8.2, Deltek has included Dela, the new AI assistant, in the platform. I wanted to share a little about how I see this benefiting our users now and in the future.
Before starting at PCI, I was a CFO for a growing DOD contractor. Today, I am not only a Deltek partner but also a customer, as we use Costpoint to run our operations at PCI. As we grow, I rely more and more on the data in Costpoint to review our business and assess how we are doing operationally.
What I have been doing over the last few months, in the spirit of the AI movement, is trying to pause before getting into the system and think about when and where AI can make things easier, faster, and better from a user experience and efficiency perspective.
As a result of this little project, I have found a few things to be helpful. Here are my thoughts:
- Teams/Email-based timesheets – I know this is a little on the fringes of AI, but rolling this out has drastically changed the timesheet landscape. We have a policy of completing timesheets by Monday for the prior week, and until we added this, it was hard, but it’s better now.
- We host a weekly Accounts Payable meeting to go over open accounts and approve payments. Instead of pulling reports, we now ask Dela what is due and when and base our AP process on the real-time output; with the embedded links, it lets us quickly jump to the places in the system we need to go should we have questions about amounts due.
- We are deploying a similar process within Accounts Receivable; we have a large volume of AR and periodically need to reach out to clients about past-due balances. Using Dela, we can identify past-due customers and even quickly get the correct contact person from the customer.
Leveraging AI is definitely a learning process, and I am happy to see that if we take time to pause our day, there are places throughout where we could benefit from a bit of AI assistance.
