In 2014, the enterprise software for operating systems across the desktops of a large Aerospace & Defense company was being upgraded from XP to Windows 7.  While the upgrade was beneficial from a company-wide technology perspective, it effectively made the company’s current Schedule Risk Assessment and Analysis tool – Primavera Risk Analytics (PRA / formerly known as Pertmaster) – obsolete. Team leaders were faced with a decision to either upgrade their current software or look at something brand new.  They decided to explore their available options.

Deltek Acumen Fuse was already the company’s tool of choice for basic schedule analytics, and team leaders wondered if there were additional products that could be integrated to provide a more seamless and efficient experience for their user base.  No matter what tool they chose, it had to meet three key criteria:

• Does it provide better use capability?
• Can it support U.S. government customers’ requirements for Earned Value? 
• Is it modern?

Acumen Risk, Deltek’s complementary solution to Acumen Fuse, quickly emerged as the ideal solution to meet the company’s needs.

Simplified, More Intuitive User Interface
Acumen Risk offers a clean, modern and intuitive user experience for project teams. This allows the tool to be deployed across a variety of programs and used by analysts with varying levels of expertise.

One example of the tool’s intuitive user experience is assigning min/max values on schedule risk.  While other tools require manual entry or human effort to understand where to import certain information, Acumen Risk offers slider bars that make assigning risk very simple – whether you are working on a small project or large projects that pull in thousands of pieces of data from outside sources. Acumen Risk also offers an integrated risk register, allowing users to easily identify, score, and track risk events in both current state and target or mitigated state.

Faster Earned Value Reporting
The processing time for reports with Acumen Risk is mere minutes compared to hours with the company’s previous tool.  No matter what the schedule size, from 50 to 50,000 lines, users can input data, hit go, and minutes later have a formalized, easy to understand report. This is valuable for not only complex Earned Value programs, but also smaller internal projects.  If users want to run an internal schedule risk using a Microsoft project schedule, Acumen Risk simply pulls in the data and immediately runs a report – there is no differentiation between the origination tools.

“What we found is that Acumen Risk fusing with Acumen Fuse—no pun intended—was the best way for us to move forward and deliver high-quality reports.  That has been really, really vital for us because we have a lot of very large schedules.” - A Functional Manager for Program Planning, Control and EVM

Vendor Support
Acumen Risk is fully supported by Deltek’s knowledgeable staff, including ad hoc requests for detailed explanations of calculations and algorithms provided through the tool.  Deltek also offers regular product trainings and a User Group community that can be tapped into for additional knowledge and lessons learned.

Helping Aerospace & Defense Companies Win in Program Execution
The value provided through Acumen Risk and Acumen Fuse is unmatched.  In fact, many of the company’s government customers have been so pleased with the results that they’ve explored purchasing their own licenses.  In a landscape characterized by complex contract requirements and the need to demonstrate execution excellence, Acumen is helping this Aerospace & Defense company improve customer confidence in the execution of its contract deliverables.

To see how other companies in the industry are similarly benefiting from Deltek Acumen, check out our on-demand webinar, Customer Perspectives: Aerospace & Defense.