Mercor Consulting :: Mercor Systems :: Mercor Commercial
The Mercor Group of Companies comprises three interrelated business streams, Mercor Consulting, Mercor Systems and Mercor Commercial.
Mercor Consulting is the core business stream. In Mercor Consulting our aim is to improve decisions, impact relationships and transform businesses. Mercor Systems is about designing and implementing leading edge management systems. In Mercor Systems our aim is to improve systems, impact processes and transform productivity. Mercor Commercial focuses on commercialising our products to deliver better business results for our customers. In Mercor Commercial our aim is to improve service, impact organisations and transform results.
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Mercor's vision is to build a sustainable leading edge business that everyone wants to work for, customers want to do business with and all would like to own.
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Mercor's mission is to provide effective, timely services that meet or exceed our customers requirements and operate as a competitive and profitable business, commercially managed and accountable within corporate performance targets.
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Our core values underpin the way that we conduct our business.
The Mercor business is governed by the following values and principles.
- Safety and the environment – We will conduct our business with a primary commitment to working safely, taking care of others and preserving the environment.
- Integrity and ethical behaviour – We will always operate in a manner that is honest, loyal, fair, reliable and professional.
- Leadership – We will be visionary and strategic in our business and will invest in individual development and provide recognition, encouragement and direction.
- Sustainability – We will ensure principles that support sustainable business practices are inherent in the products and services we provide.
- Value creation and client relationships – We will have a strong focus on adding value to our clients businesses and building powerful client relationships.
- Collaboration and teamwork – We will work in a collaborative team approach with all stakeholders to deliver excellence in all that we do.
- Innovation and creativity – We have a passion to be creative and inspire positive change and will challenge conventional thinking when warranted.
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Company Overview Continued:
In general, we are faced with complex, ambiguous problems, and we want to make our analysis job as easy as possible through good problem structuring. We want to use what we know about the problem to develop an initial hypothesis about what the problem and solution is, and then break that hypothesis down into sub issues that can be explored through subsequent data and analysis. A hypothesis-driven approach to problem structuring allows us to focus and simplify whenever possible.
We want to start with a broad set of issues to make sure we aren’t missing key aspects of the problem – we would rather be roughly right and comprehensive rather than precise but irrelevant. We then funnel the issues through a series of interviews, analysis and team discussions until we are able to clearly articulate the insights and “so what’s” from the analysis.
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Mercor is a practitioner of business analytics; we are analytical business consultants. Our business domain is in big companies and we call big companies our home.
Our key areas of interest are in:
Business problem solving rather than technical problem solving. Essentially, we are project managers that move from one problem to the next, bringing analytical rigor to decisions through a combination of business domain expertise, consulting skills and analytics skills; and Research and development roles focused on developing and refining products containing decision-support analytics for use by others in solving specific types of problems, oftentimes implemented through software, for example, performance management and measurement systems that underpin continuous improvement and the drive for business excellence.
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We are valued by our clients as much for our soft skills as for our technical skills and we differentiate ourselves from general project managers and management consultants through our expertise in business modelling, data analysis and advanced analytics as appropriate to our business problem domain.
Business analytics is now-days essential to supporting business strategy and maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace. As modern data centres and business intelligence tools collect and make broadly accessible large sets of data, managers need to tap into that data to gain insights and make better decisions. Mercor, using analytics, (the science of logical analysis), allows them to do this.
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Mercor is finding that there is a growing need for generalist problem-solvers to support executives and managers who want to make better, data-driven business decisions. This is the role of Mercor, the ‘analytical business consultant’.
Our bread and butter is in data analysis and data modelling however we complement these disciplines with a depth of analytical expertise drawing from our experience and backgrounds in business operations research, industrial engineering, statistics and economics to suit the type of business problem being addressed.
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We work across a wide variety of business types, including resources, infrastructure, property, energy and communications in the public and private sector. Our business domains include; strategy and planning, major projects, strategic procurement, governance and leadership, collaboration and teamwork and business excellence. We develop solutions in areas of contracting strategy, performance management and measurement, relationship contracting, alliances, and supply chain management, just to name a few.
Mercor's expertise in our business domains enables us to be an effective problem-solver. When working in a project mode and moving from one problem to the next, it is critical to have a strong foundation of business domain expertise, basic analytics and consulting skills.
In our role as consultant we are privileged to work with people, teams and organisations in a manner that gives us some influence over an individual, a group, or an organisation, but our role precludes us from having direct power to make changes or implement programs. Our primary consulting skills consist mainly of project management, collaboration and facilitation; communication; and problem-solving.
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Our problem-solving skills include both framing and problem structuring that should come before any significant modelling effort.Framing seeks clarity on the problem objectives, alternatives, constraints and uncertainties. Problem structuring is about understanding the full range of issues affecting a problem and then breaking the problem into smaller questions that can be answered through more targeted analysis.
Mercor’s focus on project management, facilitation and collaboration skills is important, since many assignments require us to bring together a team to tackle a problem together. Collaborating with a team, rather than working as a pair of hands or in a technical expert role, is essential to building broad commitment to a strategy. Also, our role is typically as a neutral third party which, places us in the best position to effectively plan and coordinate tasks, manage decision meetings, establish ownership and commitment, and plan implementation. When stakeholders from different functions, business units or areas need to all support a decision to ensure a high likelihood of implementation, our unbiased position is a valuable asset. Capitalising on that asset requires good project management and facilitation skills.
Communication skills are another set of soft skills that are critical to driving alignment on decisions and commitment to action. In Mercor we structure ideas and write presentations and reports that communicate the rationale behind the recommendations in a compelling fashion that management can easily understand.
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Identifying the right solution is only solving half of the business problem. The attitude of trust my recommendation because ‘I’m the expert’, or, ‘I’ve done the analysis’, does not inspire a lot of confidence from decision makers. A good presentation or report is not about the analysis process; it is about sharing insights and building intuition behind the conclusions.
To have commitment to action, decision-makers need to convince themselves that they have the right solution. Our analytical approach allows us to cut through all the problem complexity and noise and point management towards the few key facts and data they need in order to make a quality decision. In the end, the decision should be easy, no matter how complex the problem was at the start.
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