Buehler Engineering

Buehler Structural Engineers is a structural engineering firm focused on building design. Its staff of about 150, about 100 of them engineers, works across eight offices, mainly in California and Arizona. Projects range from small to relatively large, in sectors that include healthcare, aviation and education.

At Buehler, each office scheduled its engineers on its own spreadsheet, and each office did it a little differently. The weekly meeting that brought those spreadsheets together had grown large and unwieldy. Engineers were placed on a project and then moved to another, and nobody had a clear view of what was happening across the offices.

Before Mosaic, scheduling lived in a set of spreadsheets kept by different groups and offices. Each office took its own approach, so the firm-wide picture was hard to see. The cost showed up in staffing: an engineer would be assigned to a project, then shifted to another, or have a schedule upended by a busy week. Reil called the result a lot of inefficiency.

Buehler weighed two routes: building one spreadsheet that every office had to use, or adopting a tool that was already built for the job.

"Mosaic was unique. We didn't find anything else quite like it out there," Reil said.

What decided it was getting everyone onto one scheduling platform, with resources visible by availability or by project. Buehler made Harney its internal Mosaic lead. She handles training and is the staff's go-to resource, and she says the platform is easy to use and quick to train new employees on. When Buehler later brought another company into the firm, Mosaic helped bring that team on board. Reil says there is still more of the platform for the firm to grow into.

Office scheduling sessions, 75% shorter: about an hour each before, 15 minutes now. "When we got them off the spreadsheets and moved them into Mosaic, it's a 45 minute time saving," Harney said.

An estimated 650 staff hours a year back from one meeting: about 25 people attend Buehler's weekly firm-wide scheduling meeting, where each office's spreadsheet used to be worked through in turn. "They used to be over an hour. So an hour and 15 and they're probably 45 now," Reil said. Half an hour back for each of 25 people comes to about 12.5 hours a week, or an estimated 650 staff hours a year.

Cross-office staffing: when one office is overloaded and another is not, managers can see who is available and share the work, and Harney says that now happens more smoothly and more quickly.

Planning ahead of the meeting: Reil can tentatively place a project in Mosaic and see who fits it on his own, rather than working it out with everybody in the room.

Workload transparency: engineers can see their own commitments and raise it with a supervisor when they are overloaded. "Everybody understands what's out there, that you're not going to get another project squeezed in sideways on you because you're already full," Reil said.

With scheduling in one place, Buehler has a working view of every office and a shorter meeting to show for it. The firm's next step is to grow into more of the platform, and Reil's advice to other firms considering Mosaic is to commit fully from the start.