Valiant improves SCG’s accounts
receiveables by over 44%—under
30 days!

Valiant client SCG has been a government security contractor since 1994. Their primary line of business is providing security officers to the Federal government. They currently manage over 20 different collective bargaining agreements and over 1,000 security officers. SCG's Vice President, Michelle Calvert has a philosophy about having government contracts: "It's a serious business," she says." And you better do it right, because they will take action against people who don't."

• SCG's growth had consistently been double-digit. But unfortunately, the burdens of government compliance meant that every time they added a new contract, they had to increase their overhead expenditures a commensurate amount. As a result, their back office costs (HR, Billing and Payroll) were nearing double-digits as well, and they were losing the ability to be competitive in the marketplace. So, they needed to streamline their operations. (Since government contracts mandate pay levels and benefits, companies can't compete on those fixed costs, so it's crucial that they effectively manage overhead costs.)

• SCG chose Valiant because of their industry expertise and their relationship with Deltek. Calvert explained SCG's situation as follows: "We were doing payroll and scheduling manually. We looked for quite some time to find a solution that would streamline what field personnel were doing with what payroll was doing. We needed to integrate the payroll, billing, and scheduling components to reconcile our key business processes and keep in compliance with DCAA and SCA regulations with a system that could handle the complexities of what we were doing. By choosing the Valiant/Deltek solution, we found partners with the government experience we needed. It was the best of both worlds, because it was an integrated solution."

SCG's non-billable overtime costs were running between 8 and 10 percent. Now they're running about 3%. Calvert goes on, "Breaking that down hourly, that's 11,000 hours per months that we couldn't bill but had to pay for. Those hours saved paid for the system. In fact, we recouped our investment in less than one year.

Calvert describes some of the other advantages to switching to Valiant:

Mirgation. Calvert explains, "There was some concern on the part of SCG employees about migrating to the new system. There's always some hesitation when it comes to change, even if it's good change." To alleviate that concern, Valiant built in additional professional service hours upfront for training. Calvert goes on, "When we showed our people that this integration would work, you saw a light bulb go on and you saw a complete shift and they became a lot more responsive to it. They realized that this is an operational tool that could get pushed to the field."

Hosting. "Valiant hosts the application so it didn't require any investment on our part. We only have one IT person on staff, so the fact that Valiant could host it was definitely appealing to us."

Billing. "When we were doing manual timekeeping, there was a massive flood of timesheets twice a month. That was followed by a frenzy of activity to enter all those timesheets at the corporate office. Followed by another frenzy of activity to invoice all those hours. Now the system has moved to where we can look at the schedules on a weekly basis and prepare pro forma invoices so that when payroll is completely reconciled for the twice-a- month cycle, there's not this frenzy of activity, it's already reconciled." As a result, Calvert explains, "The turnover on our invoices is right around 25 days right now. Meaning out the door and paid. And usually, when you're working with the government, you're looking at 40-45 days."

The bottom line? The Valiant/Deltek system integration helped SCG reduce the turnover on their invoices from 40-45 days to 25 days-a 44% improvement!

If you'd like to learn more about how Valiant can help your company reduce back office expenses and accelerate invoice turnover, contact.