AEC Software Isn’t Just for Accounting: How Everyone Benefits from the Right Technology

Seller/doers are charged with bringing in revenue—and that job never ends…never even takes a break. The key is a healthy pipeline, which is not easy in an industry that is so competitive. In this session, I’ll discuss proven strategies for improving win rates and cultivating a healthy pipeline, including how to:

• Put your firm’s relationships to work to uncover new opportunities and increase win rates.
• Leverage your firm’s experience and qualifications to create winning proposals
• Use pursuit intelligence and go/no-go decision support tools to make effective pursuit decisions and increase your bid-to-win ratio
• Gain and maintain a 360-degree view of your clients, relationships, pursuits, experience, and growth initiatives to find and win more work

AEC project management teams touch every revenue-producing engagement in the organization. They have the task of balancing project profitability with on-time and on-budget delivery. In this session, I’ll explore proven strategies for managing the entire project lifecycle for on-time and on-budget, high-quality project delivery, including how to:

• Develop more accurate project estimates and budgets by building the project plan before the bid is delivered
• Effectively plan and manage resources to drive on-time delivery
• Put project and budget controls back in the hands of your project managers
• Leverage real-time insights to drive better utilization and project margins
• Improve collaboration across project teams to work smarter

Accounting teams are arguably the backbone of any company—but especially with AEC firms because they control cash flow. Therefore, they must watch for places where cash can drain or be slowed or stopped. In this session, I’ll discuss strategies for optimizing your most valuable resource other than your employees—your cash—by showing you how to:

• Streamline time and expense capture and approval processes
• Increase timesheet accuracy and easily chase missing timesheets
• Automate the review and approval of client invoices to ensure accuracy prior to sending them
• Enable project managers and other key employees to help collect open invoices

AEC firms depend on smart, capable people. Keeping good talent was already difficult, and then the great resignation made it that much more difficult. In this session, I’ll show you how connectivity can strengthen your talent strategy by:

• Build a centralized, self-service enabled repository of your employees and their competencies and qualifications
• Ensure key employee data flows seamlessly across all areas of your business, including to marketing and project management
• Accurately track experience and qualifications to build strong resumes and put the right people on the right projects
• Refine your performance management practices to develop and grow your employees’ skills, experience, and training to keep them sharp and satisfied

AI, RPA, low-code/no-code…Where to start? IT teams in today’s AEC firms face big challenges. Cloud transformation is happening fast, the industry is adopting emerging technologies, and employees are demanding more sophisticated tools. In this session, I’ll discuss how you can drive better efficiencies, automation, and insights, including:

• Integrating systems and processes to reduce manual tasks and redundancies while increasing efficiencies
• Modernizing legacy applications, digitize manual processes, and drive automation with the Microsoft Power Platform
• Utilizing RPA technology to automate repetitive processes and focus on value-adding activities
• Leveraging Microsoft’s industry leading data and analytics solutions like Power BI to drive real-time visibility across the firm
• Simplifying your IT footprint and reduce your total cost of IT ownership (TCO)