CESO

CESO is a national architecture and engineering firm with 16 offices across the country and ten technical disciplines under one roof. The firm came to Mosaic when Zach Freshner, then the civil engineering practice area leader, was hunting for a way to plan resources across a fast-growing business. He has owned the rollout since. Two years in, he was promoted to Vice President, Services, with every practice area leader reporting to him.

In early 2023 CESO was a roughly 250-person firm scaling fast. Their ERP handled accounting and project management. Everything else lived where someone had time to put it: spreadsheets, OneNote files, whatever a planner could open on a Monday.

The labor cost showed up in two places at once. Some engineers were grinding 50-hour weeks near deadlines; others on the other side of the building were under-booked. Without a shared view of who was committed to what, the imbalance stayed invisible until it surfaced in a schedule or a timesheet.

Behind the scenes, the firm was also restructuring. CESO was moving from a discipline-led org chart (everyone reporting up to their technical leader) to a client-sector model (everyone reporting up to the type of work they did). Two reorganizations were running at once: the operating model and the planning system. Both made resource visibility non-negotiable.

The selling point that closed the deal was the ERP integration. CESO wanted a planning surface its planners would actually use, with the financials flowing through from their system of record. Zach was direct about which factor carried more weight: "the biggest selling point for us was the connection to our ERP."

Mosaic became CESO's planning layer. Project managers can see where time is going while it is being spent, not at month-end billing. Practice area leaders can see across offices and disciplines without picking up the phone. The visibility shifted who could spot a problem and how fast: warning signs that used to surface at month-end now surface during the week the work is happening.

Across the teams that crossed CESO's adoption threshold, utilization increased by more than two points between 2024 and 2025. CESO and Mosaic now run the analysis quarterly, tracking the gain as the rollout extends across the rest of the firm.

Headcount grew substantially across the same window. CESO was around 250 employees at the original deal in 2023 and has roughly doubled since, with Mosaic absorbing the planning load as new offices and disciplines came online.

What CESO is not yet ready to claim

What Zach is unwilling to claim is the part Mosaic is most often asked about, profitability. "We think it's profitable, but we don't know to what extent. We know it's making us better aligned from a utilization standpoint." A firm of 510 is past the point where one person's confidence is the data. CESO is now running quarterly KPI analyses to ground that answer in numbers it can defend.

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Current use

Mosaic is the planning layer across all sixteen CESO offices. Zach's team ran a train-the-trainer rollout in 2025, with the trainee group writing the SOPs as they went. The firm is now executing a structured 45-day launch and 60-day adoption window for each new business unit. CESO has signed a three-year renewal with the enterprise platform, including API access and an isolated database. The next step, in Zach's words, is "to be tapped into the API and integrate all of our data and leveraging some of our internal solutions development teams to use it in a way that is broader than just Mosaic."