Success Story
How Deep Water Point & Associates increased billing efficiency by 60% and pay 30% faster with Unanet
Deep Water Point and Associates is no stranger to challenges. With a mission to help government...
When you’re as active on the merger & acquisition (M&A) front as government contractor BlueHalo has been recently — it has acquired 10 companies in a less than two years — you expect to inherit a patchwork of disparate systems, processes and technologies. You also figure to encounter significant difficulty in integrating all those moving parts into a single digital environment where data and insight flow unimpeded to people across the business, when, where and how they need it
BlueHalo (www.bluehalo.com) is purpose-built to provide industry leading capabilities in the domains of space technology, space superiority, directed energy & counter UAS, autonomy, and cyber, SIGINT and intelligence solutions. The Company is an end-to-end lifecycle partner, delivering technical expertise from R&D through deployment, offering both products and services. BlueHalo seeks to deliver advanced engineering solutions to address the most complex needs for the national security and healthcare communities. BlueHalo was launched in 2020 with the merger of Aegis Technologies Group, Excivity, EMRC Heli, Applied Technologies Associates and Brilligent Solutions.
The company has over 1,300 employees located across the United States, with more than 500,000 square feet of facility space, including over 300,000 square feet of laboratory and manufacturing space. The company is majority-owned by Arlington Capital Partners (ACP), a leading private equity group based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that specializes in building highly innovative and disruptive companies in government-regulated and adjacent markets, including aerospace and defense, government services and technology, healthcare, and business services and software.
That’s exactly the challenge BlueHalo CFO Robert Richards took on when he joined the company in late 2020. Specifically, he was tasked to bring multiple legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems into a single, coherent, enterprise-wide whole, and to do so quickly, without disruption, to support the company as it integrated new employees, systems, customers, products, services and data on the fly.
But not just any generic, off-the-shelf ERP product would do. BlueHalo needed its solution to map directly to the company’s business processes, while also being flexible and scalable to keep pace with the company’s ambitions to become a billion dollar enterprise in short order. And perhaps most importantly, it needed to provide a superior user experience, with service and support to match the quality of the software itself.
With various ERP systems in use across the BlueHalo ecosystem, the company’s IT decision-making team had a unique opportunity to evaluate those systems side-by-side. Ultimately, they decided only one fit the bill: Unanet ERP GovCon.
Some were on a Deltek Costpoint system. Some were on Quickbooks. Others were on PROCAS, and Deltek GCS. And some were on Unanet ERP GovCon. What we needed was one core ERP system for the larger enterprise.
This wasn’t Richards' first rodeo. In fact, he had overseen a similar ERP consolidation effort
at his previous employer, a government contractor that, after a flurry of M&A activity, had integrated seven companies into one.
By the time Richards arrived at BlueHalo, the company already had selected Unanet ERP GovCon to serve as its digital financial backbone. His positive prior experience with Unanet ERP led him to immediately endorse that decision.
Unanet ERP GovCon went live within several months of Richards arriving at BlueHalo, in January 2021. Besides relying on the solution’s core project-based financials capabilities, with advanced analytics capabilities and real-time dashboards , KPIs and other critical information, the company has been utilizing a number of other features and functionalities within Unanet ERP GovCon, including:
The Unanet Subcontractor Portal for streamlined, automated subcontractor time
entry and data collection.
Unanet contract management to give the company visibility and control of everything from project funding to contract modifications and statements of work.
The Unanet Connect integrations marketplace for pre-built API connectors to enable Unanet ERP GovCon to integrate with other critical business software, including FlowTrac for managing the expanding product side of BlueHalo’s business.
Unanet is offering a better experience for the end user as well as better synchronization of all our data.
Successful (and fast) ERP implementations like the one orchestrated by BlueHalo don’t happen
by accident, but rather are the result of careful planning and sound decision-making. Here are
several factors that positioned BlueHalo for a positive outcome with Unanet ERP GovCon:
As tall an order as integrating 11 companies into one was, it became a straightforward exercise due to Unanet ERP GovCon’s scalability, flexibility and integration-readiness. Unanet ERP GovCon helped expedite a process that other, more rigid ERP products likely would have hampered.
BlueHalo could plan for and keep to an aggressive implementation timeline because it has a purpose-built ERP solution that maps directly to a government contractor’s project-based workflows, processes and systems.
Having a single source of data truth across the enterprise is key to consistently smart decision-making, and to maximizing the efficiencies of an ERP system.
An ERP solution is only as good as the support that stands behind that solution. Unanet’s “fantastic” multimedia resource base is a big part of why BlueHalo is seeing such strong user engagement and overall positive employee experience with Unanet ERP GovCon, according to Richards.
Our goal is to be a billion-dollar enterprise. With Unanet ERP GovCon, we feel like we have a system that will grow and scale with us. It’s a big win.