Ask an A/E back office about their ERP and you will hear the same sentence: the data is in there, we just cannot get it out. Vantagepoint's report builder is powerful, widely disliked, and expensive to operate, because in practice operating it means a consulting engagement every time the partners want a new cut.
Some of the pain is configuration debt: reports built years ago for questions nobody asks anymore, run because they run. That is worth an afternoon of pruning before any automation. The rest is structural: the partners' real questions cut across what the builder wants to do, so each new answer costs custom work. Configuration fixes the first kind once. Automation fixes the second kind permanently: extract the data on a schedule and shape it outside, where shaping is cheap.
Vantagepoint's data is reachable; that is not the constraint. The pattern is: pull the tables that matter on a schedule, land them somewhere ordinary, and build the partner-facing views there, in tools your own people can modify. The report the managing partner reads every Monday should not require a change order to adjust. Once extraction exists, new questions cost minutes.
Everything. This is not a migration, and your Deltek admin keeps their job. The system of record stays the system of record; it just stops being the place where reading the data is expensive. If a report is genuinely native, transactional, and working, leave it alone.
The extraction reads data, it does not modify the system, and it is built to notice schema changes rather than silently break. Upgrades become a check on the calendar, not a rebuild.
Same disease, same cure. The table names change; the pattern does not.
Sometimes that is the answer, and I will say so when it is. The evaluation is simple: price the module and its consulting tail against an extraction you own. Firms are usually surprised which way it comes out.
Bring the report you pay for twice. Thirty minutes, straight answer.
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