About PVBS : Success Stories

Case Study — EMW

Government Contractor with Projects around the Globe Selects Microsoft Dynamics NAV from PVBS to Ensure DCAA Compliancy

At-a-Glance

Company/Industry: EMW (Herndon, VA, www.emw.com) has been offering a wide range of professional services to Federal Government agencies since 1995. The company’s core competencies are in planning, engineering, implementing, training, managing or servicing best-of-breed systems, solutions and operational recommendations to help agencies exceed their mission objectives.

EMW has project management expertise across multiple technical and functional environments. They specialize in developing project plans, tracking performance, analyzing problems or inconsistencies, and improving efficiency and business processes for all types of information management and information security endeavors. EMW professionals are skilled in areas such as policy development, interagency coordination, management studies, budget formulation, performance metrics development, contract administration, quality assurance, and technical process analysis. They provide program support, procurement, supplier analysis and evaluation, RFP development, preparation of performance-based statements of work, and source evaluation support. Other areas of expertise include network operations management, physical and program security, contract support, human resources, and training.

Champion: As the company was preparing for a significant period of expansion, the company’s chief executive and chief operating officers knew that they required a financial management and project accounting solution that would withstand the rigors of eventual DCAA (Defense Contracting Audit Agency) audits. The company expected to start winning a large number of contracts around the world to service the Federal Government and wanted to ensure that their financial systems were well established way in advance of the expected DCAA audits on their cost-plus and other contracts. They were using a basic flat-file accounting application called Mind Your Own Business. It was in place for four years, but didn’t support DCAA compliance, as did the Dynamics NAV solution.

They also needed to integrate time sheets into the accounting solution and wanted a comprehensive automated solution that would eliminate the manual one they were currently employing. The COO said EMW wanted to ensure that the unique nature of its government project accounting requirements could be handled adequately and that the company’s accounting department could be held accountable for providing project management correct and timely data including project costs, time and expenses. Company management saw that the Dynamics NAV solution could give project managers the ability to get reports on a timely basis while making the accounting department more accountable to their needs. This meant they could get reports in time to act upon them and best service the government customer.

EMW is Microsoft certified and provides many Microsoft services for its customers; the CEO said that deploying a Microsoft financial management solution was very attractive to them.

Existing System that Needed to Be Replaced: Mind Your Own Business.

Critical Issues: EMW has project managers all around the world, including Bosnia, Oman, Belgium, Kyrgyzstan, and Iraq. Because of this, the requirement for a solution that handled multi-user, multicurrency transactions was a top priority. Right around the time when they were deciding which project accounting solution to purchase, Navision had just been purchased by Microsoft. Many of the company’s employees were experts in Microsoft technology and saw the potential of the solution to satisfy their government contracting financial requirements as well as reducing training time.

Senior management wanted to ensure that project managers had the information they needed in plenty of time to make the right decisions concerning their contracts. Customizable and flexible reporting capability to achieve this was a major need. Extracting project information from Dynamics NAV into Excel and sending project managers the resultant file is a process they have adopted to give them the project financial information they require. Some project managers are on highly secured military bases which limit the number of online applications they are permitted to access. The ability to generate Excel files from Dynamics NAV for the field project managers has been very useful.

EMW also needed to automate routine accounting functions. With its existing solution, manual entries had to be made in multiple places. Being able to enter information in one place and having it available throughout the accounting process, such as in invoicing and purchase order generation, was very important. This would streamline the company’s ability to deal with its customers.

Strategy: The COO views his organization as an internal customer of the financial departments. With Dynamics NAV, however, he’s been able to quickly generate reports on his own to get snapshots of the business, and plans to roll out this capability to the project management organization more comprehensively in the future. He said that his chief financial officer (CFO) counterpart has a similar vision on providing self-service capability to the managers in the field although they agree that security must be ensured and that certain data points must not be made available to project managers. The COO said there are certain things the financial side would like to mask and that both groups are coming to an agreement on what information will be made available to the field while ensuring privacy of personal employee data.

The COO said, “We can see how Dynamics NAV lets us do more with less. We haven’t had to expand staff to support the system even though the company is expanding and growing quickly. We are aware that there is much more than the system can offer us.”

The company has many on-going projects it needs to monitor. Some are time and materials, some fixed price, and others are cost plus. To monitor the progress of the jobs, they have a monthly review that describes the profitability of each job. Dynamics NAV helps them manage the business, especially the fixed price work they do, which can be more risky for them if not managed well. They recognize they can maximize profits if they bid the job properly. Dynamics NAV does a good job of tracking material, labor, and indirect costs associated with the projects which the project managers can manage daily. The company gives project managers the authority to make decisions and Dynamics NAV helps them see how they’re doing.

The Result: The Dynamics NAV solution achieved what EMW needed it to do when they received their first audit from the DCAA. According to the CEO, the DCAA auditors were not familiar with the solution at first and wanted to see how it generated reports, among other things. The DCAA auditors wanted to see how the solution and the internal processes worked together. The CEO said that his team easily succeeded in educating the DCAA auditors about the solution’s capabilities. DCAA asked for reports which the accounting team was able to easily do. The CEO said that the DCAA auditors looked at the company’s cost pools and saw the systems could effectively segregate indirect, direct, and other costs. The auditors were very concerned that EMW collected the data properly to bill the government for the cost plus contracts they had with them.

The accounting department has eight to nine standard reports it can send to the project line managers on an as needed basis, such as project job costing reports that show how they are doing and how costs being managed. The reports show how well the company is meeting its milestones. If there are disparities, the project managers in the field can press the client locally. The COO said that a lot of the projects are firm, fixed price, which requires the project manager to be well attuned to where he is relative to the cost of delivering the payable line item from the customer. They look for project planning at the CLIN (contract line item number) level which allows the project manager to see in near real time where they are in the project. With Dynamics NAV, they can deliver the information level project managers need to be more intelligent and then assign their people the right tasks.

The company will be looking into the built-in business analytics in the future.

The COO said the amount of detail the solution affords the company is tremendous. Much more detail is available to him and is much easier to get. For example the time keeping system allows him to see how much time is being spent on proposals versus billable work. He said that keeping track of those ratios is very useful to him.