Vocon
Vocon ran on three disconnected systems: Excel for work planning, Harvest Forecast for staffing, Unanet for project economics. None of them talked to each other. Consolidating onto Mosaic moved capacity planned from 49% to 94% in twelve months and let the firm hold utilization steady while the Architecture Billings Index fell.
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Vocon
's full story here.
Background
Vocon is an architecture and interior design firm headquartered in Cleveland, with offices in New York and Chicago. The firm runs about 244 employees, roughly 200 of them billable, and has been practicing for 38 years. The Mosaic rollout was led by Michelle Thomas, the firm's Operations Director, with Brandon Dorsey, Director of Technology, and Jacklynn Reynolds in operations.
The Challenge
Vocon ran on three systems that did not connect. Work planning lived in an Excel file. Staffing was tracked in Harvest Forecast. Financial performance sat in Unanet, the ERP. Thirty-six project managers projected their own work by hand, and the numbers ran an 8-10% delta from actuals.
Each system was correct on its own terms. They just could not talk to each other. A project manager could underprice a job, get pushed by the market to discount the fee, and never change the scope. The work plan absorbed the difference quietly, until the job closed.
Vocon had built custom tools inside Unanet to fill the gap, looked at the ERP's native resource modules and rejected them, and considered Harvest Forecast as the canonical staffing layer. Forecast would not connect to Unanet unless Vocon bought the entire Harvest suite. The firm's then-CFO began looking outside.
The Solution
Mosaic put the three systems on one canvas. Work planning, staffing, and the bill-rate side of Unanet now sync, with billable rates and fee schedules flowing through nightly. The integration scope expanded twice after launch, to remap the firm's portfolio structure from studio-based to project-manager-based, and to pull work address and department data continuously from Unanet.
The shift Vocon talks about is not the new dashboard. It is the new conversation cadence. When a project manager inputs a plan against a negotiated fee, the work plan turns red the moment it's oversold. The firm sees underselling before it becomes a write-off, not after. Staffing meetings haven't gotten shorter. They've gotten deeper.
The Results
The bigger story is consolidation. Vocon went from three disconnected systems to one, with capacity planned on Mosaic rising from 49% in 2024 to 94% in 2025. That's the indicator the operations team uses to track adoption depth, and it gave Vocon a firm-level forecasting view the prior toolchain made impossible.
Utilization moved alongside it. On the 124-person cohort that planned more than 75% of their capacity on Mosaic, utilization climbed from 77.3% in the pre-Mosaic baseline to 78.3% in 2025, translating to $449,000 in additional billable time over the year. A 1-point gain is modest in isolation, but the context matters: it came during one of the worst stretches the Architecture Billings Index has had in years. Vocon's operational discipline held while the market did not.
Conclusion
Vocon runs a weekly Mosaic sync, uses Mosaic's Gantt view in place of Microsoft Project, and treats the platform as the connective tissue between its Cleveland, New York, and Chicago studios. The firm is piloting Mosaic's AI assistant and expanding the Unanet integration as it builds toward what the leadership originally bought the tool to do: forecast pipeline and revenue at the firm level.
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