Davis Partnership Architects

Davis Partnership Architects is a Denver-based firm of roughly 140 people working across architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, lighting and wayfinding. Its projects span healthcare, higher education, civic and cultural work, commercial and multifamily housing, largely across the Rocky Mountain West. Caroline Nguyen leads the firm's finance function. Her background runs heavier on system integrations than most finance leaders', which shaped how Davis approached the search for a planning platform.

Every project at Davis had its own spreadsheet, built by the project manager who ran it, and there was no universal template. Hours were typically spread evenly across a phase, on the assumption that the work would even out over time, and when a deadline moved or someone was pulled onto another project mid-week, the plan often didn't move at all. Consolidating the files into a firm-wide view took enough manual effort that it usually didn't happen, and planning wasn't tied to the accounting system, so the numbers had to be reconciled before anyone could treat them as a trusted source.

That left the firm unable to answer the question it most needed answered. "The piece we really needed was the visibility of seeing that when we were accepting a contract, could we realistically make that fee schedule work. That was a number one need that we were trying to address."

The must-have for any platform was narrow and specific: show what a project had spent, what it still had planned, and how the two together compared to budget.

Davis evaluated three planning platforms, alongside the option of building standardised spreadsheet templates in-house. Two of them took a similar approach to the problem.

"Planifi and Deltek Vantagepoint Resource Planning look really identical. The striking point to this was it looked like a glorified spreadsheet."

The deeper problem was who those platforms had been built for. Davis needed architects entering and maintaining the plan, not accountants.

"These platforms were designed seemingly with the assumption that accountants would be entering this data. Architects do not work the same way as accountants, so these platforms did not make it enticing for them to work in."

Mosaic, an AI planning tool, kept project planning and staff workload in one place. On the other platforms the two were entered separately, which meant duplicate work and no reliable way to tell whether the two views agreed.

"We were surprised to see that Mosaic was the only option of the four options that we looked at that had that integrated, where you only had to enter it in one place."

Mosaic also integrates actual labor hours from Deltek, which remains the firm's system of record for financials. Spent time reaches the plan without being re-keyed, so the plan and the accounting system agree. When Davis asked for the budget variance report in a format their finance team could work with directly, Mosaic built the export and shipped it quickly. Mosaic also integrates actual labor hours from Deltek, which remains the firm's system of record for financials. Spent time reaches the plan without being re-keyed, so the plan and the accounting system agree.

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• Billed-vs-spent moved from 74% to 91% across seven months, as teams began tracking spend against budget in Mosaic as time was better utilized and more revenue was realized.
• A 17-point improvement, which Caroline describes as a $5 million positive impact on the firm's financials.
• Spend against planned time, visible against budget, in the current month rather than the last closed one, by department, without the manual work that used to make it too expensive to compile.
• Workload reports for staffing decisions, which the firm previously had no way to produce.

The $5 million impact results came from a firm still early in its rollout. This increase highlights the speed and level of improvement that is possible for firms and these results are not uncommon for firms on Mosaic. 

Roughly a third of Davis's team is planning in it today, and the firm intends to move planning from project managers to the project teams doing the work. When the whole firm plans in one place, workload, revenue and headcount become things Davis can forecast rather than estimate.

"I'm recommending Mosaic to a lot of people right now. I have connections with other CFOs and I have brought up Mosaic a lot."