Mosaic Hub: Collaborative Construction Contracting

Construction is an artform. It creates beautiful places that inspire and captivate. But there is no single author. Thousands of people come together daily to create the physical foundations of our society: homes, offices, stores and schools. Construction is the art of collaboration, assembling people with different skill sets that speak different languages into a beautiful orchestra.

Because it brings so many people to work together, each with a different skill set, construction is complicated. Every project involves thousands of formal and informal commitments with vendors and trades which require countless bespoke steps and processes to complete.

Mistakes happen, more people are needed, scale is hard to achieve. These are the three things that impact costs in a free market, and construction is on the wrong side of each. How the industry manages its complexity has huge implications not only for the builders, but also on the entire real estate market, leading - directly and indirectly - to housing scarcity and unaffordability.

As the first elastic residential general contractor, Mosaic was founded on an innovative organizational approach to address the complexities of the industry. We’ve built a vertically-integrated software system that manages our construction services, creating an operation that otherwise does not exist in the industry today. At the core of what we do is Mosaic Hub, our internal ERP system for managing Contract Lifecycle for residential construction.

Hub is the way in which Mosaic contracts projects. A flexible but structured system, Hub lets us set up a project really quickly, track changes; monitor and compare historical progress against baselines and other projects; process invoices automatically; and give vendors line of sight for their upcoming cash flows. It’s also highly adaptable to fit the bespoke needs of every project. These capabilities help us tackle the industry’s pitfall of diminishing returns at scale.

There are three foundational features that make Hub an effective solution:

An innovation of Mosaic Hub is the Cost-based data model at its core. Cost Modeling is a novel way to manage construction data in which we describe a project as a set of Costs that need to be contracted, performed and paid. When the Cost Model is up to date all of construction’s routine processes and documentation such as budgets, schedules, pay applications, contract exhibits, change orders, etc. - can be derived and automatically generated from the model. We believe it will impact the construction world in a similar way as BIM has for design.

For us, structuring building data through Costs, rather than geometry, is a natural fit for a general contractor. After all that’s what we do - we contract trades to build projects, and we need to know who is doing what, when and where, as well as how much it will cost. Standardizing information through the lens of the actual labor and resources that go into building adds a lot of flexibility and predictability to the process.

Before field work starts, the entire construction process is already modeled using Cost Lines. Hub then manages those Costs Lines to drive day-to-day processes like payments, accounting, scheduling and approval workflows.

We’ve noticed that the more granular the details the more control Hub has over the project. But there is a tradeoff – more detail means more control and more automation, but it also means more lines to keep track of and a likelier chance of error. For the project types we build at Mosaic, we find that modeling anywhere between 20,000 to 40,000 Cost Lines provides a good balance between too much information and not enough.

Cost Models need to be updated frequently. Changes originate from many sources: a customer may require a unique workflow, a change during the design or construction phases emerge, supply chain challenges require re-routing the schedule. Whatever the source, changes and “one-offs” are an inevitable part of any construction process. Hub’s Software Development Kit (or SDK) allows the Cost Model to be updated programmatically using code. Leveraging code in the construction process enables advanced use cases while also saving time in responding to the “long tail” of issues that arise on a project.

The SDK allows users to write scripts that can access and update the Cost Model instead of making changes manually. This allows large data entry jobs to be automated. Hub’s SDK also allows the Cost Model to easily integrate with other property management systems, proprietary accounting systems, communication apps, and general productivity platforms (such as Slack and Asana)

Cost Modeling and SDK make Hub an effective and flexible system for managing construction. However, these abilities come at a cost. Hub's advanced capabilities require training and software literacy. To address these issues, Mosaic Hub includes an AI-based conversational interface that allows users across the project workflow to naturally communicate their requests, lowering the bar for data entry and keeping Hub more in-sync with real-time project status.

Mosaic's Hub AI leverages the technical advances in Large Language Models and is further trained on Mosaic's Cost Model and SDK. When you prompt Hub AI, your request is translated into SDK code. Hub then runs that code to generate the data needed for a response, a model update or a report. You can further use Hub AI for project data queries. For example, you can ask when an inspection was completed; how much we have paid a vendor; how many days are left on a project, to note a project weather delay, or draft a complete change order.

In addition to making Mosaic Hub easier to use, Hub AI unlocks new use cases that would not be possible otherwise. For example, our field superintendents can now: mark Cost Lines as completed, update a schedule, or generate weekly project updates just by communicating to Hub AI with a voice recording. As we continue to explore Hub AI we will see more field and office teams automating considerably more complex tasks.

Coordination is at the heart of construction. The challenges of coordination have stymied the construction industry resulting in execution mistakes, inflated staffing, and limited economies of scale.

Towards that end, we've built Hub – an ERP for orchestrating work through Contract Lifecycle Management.

We use Cost Lines to quickly and accurately setup a project. This is why we rarely start a job from scratch – our collective experience is shared across many projects, and risky tasks are flagged, helping us to minimize mistakes.

We’ve built an SDK to update Hub and accommodate for the bespoke nature of construction, and we’ve trained Hub AI to help field teams make meaningful updates to Hub with little to no software training. Both features lower the need for large teams which helps us reach efficiencies at scale.

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With Hub, we’re unlocking the first elastic GC service. Mosaic gives developers greater product flexibility while continuing to leverage the same trades, supply chains, building practices, municipal processes and lending requirements that we all know and trust; or, point-introduce new technologies and processes. Mosaic’s customers can now operate efficiently in multiple markets, offer differentiated product types and tap into diverse lending facilities.