Customer Success Story
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation

National Nonprofit organization cites 50 percent growth since implementing Deltek Enterprise^™ suite

The Challenge

The Washington, DC-based National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) is a private nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation of fish, wildlife and plants, as well as to the habitat on which they depend. With high-profile corporate and government relationships such as Walmart, Shell, Southern Company, Exxon-Mobil, the Department of Defense and the Department of State, NFWF supports more than 6,400 grants and leverages a staggering $261 million in federal funds, none of which is used for lobbying, advocacy or litigation. With a lean 80 employees, NFWF needed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution capable of efficiently streamlining its complex financial and project accounting processes, reporting and timekeeping needs.

“We previously operated on a client server product somewhat similar to the Deltek Enterprise suite,” said Dave Radomsky, CIO of NFWF. “However, there were a lot of holes within the system that created much inefficiency for our organization. Perhaps the most notable and defining difference was that the previous system was not project-focused and this was a big negative.”

According to Peter Bower, CFO of NFWF, tracking the organization's thousands of grants without a project-based ERP system resulted in a lot of wasted time and data integrity issues. For instance, he noted, management fees had to be tracked and entered manually via Excel spreadsheets, and more than 300 investment accounts had to be manually reconciled every month as well.

The Solution

Looking to simplify these manual processes and improve the quality of the organization's data, NFWF underwent a comprehensive evaluation process in late 2002 to find a new ERP system.

“Lawson, PeopleSoft, Great Plains and Solomon were all evaluated alongside Deltek,” said Jerry Clark, Director of Funding Source Administration. “However, Deltek's project-based focus was a big consideration and the driving factor in our decision to pick Deltek over the rest of its competitors.”

Bower added that both pricing and scalability were also key influences in the decision to purchase Deltek. Deltek's reputation, particularly in the government sector, was also highly respected by executives at NFWF.

“The fact that Deltek began and has steadily evolved in the government contracting industry was incredibly important in our decision-making process,” Bower said, “as well as the fact that Deltek is also a stable 20-year-old company.”

The Benefits

NFWF went live on the Deltek Enterprise suite, including the back-end accounting system Deltek Costpoint^®, in October 2003. Today the organization uses the suite to manage a staggering 2,000 active projects, utilizing its financial and project accounting, billing, purchasing, timekeeping and reporting in particular.

In addition, the organization implemented Deltek Time Collection as part of the Deltek Enterprise suite that same year, harnessing the automated timekeeping system to handle its labor distribution needs and consequently saving at least $2,000 a year in outsourcing costs.

“Our previous system had not had a module or application to handle timekeeping or labor,” Radomsky noted. “It meant we were paying an outside system to summarize time billed to each project, not to mention having to manually compile this data in order to get the information processed.”

According to Bower, Costpoint in particular has contributed to NFWF's growth by greatly improving its financial and project accounting processes.

“When we first began implementing Costpoint, we were a $135 million foundation,” Bower remarked. “Today, we are well above $200 million, and our accounting department is down one person — which means even with less staff, we have grown by 50 percent.

“With our previous system, it took an entire month for just one person in the accounting and funding department to reconcile our finances and close out,” he continued. “Now with Deltek, it takes six to seven business days. Deltek literally trimmed weeks off this process, making cash flow and billing simple, manageable and efficient.”

Bower and Radomsky also noted a drastic improvement in both the quality and timeliness of financial and project reports since implementing the Deltek suite.

“We're able to get this critical data into the hands of our managers by the 15th of every month now,” Radomsky said. “This process used to take about 45 days on average. The bottom line is, this data is helping our managers make important business decisions in a much timelier fashion, as well as offering more flexibility with its custom reporting features.”

“The accuracy of the data has made our auditing process much smoother and cleaner as well,” Bower noted.

According to Clark, the quality of this financial and project data goes beyond helping managers make better business decisions. In fact, this data directly impacts the attitude and morale of the staff at NFWF.

“Our employees realize the accuracy of the data they're dealing with, and as a result Costpoint has drastically improved morale,” he said. “Across all levels of the organization, from project managers to executives to operations personnel, there is simply a widespread trust in the software that makes everyone want to work harder at their jobs. It's as if these employees want to ensure their work matches the accuracy of the numbers that we're now able to generate and analyze.”