Improve Systems :: Impact Processes :: Transform Productivity
Mercor Systems is the business stream that focuses on the design, development and implementation of business management systems that support the work carried out in Mercor Consulting. Our most significant undertakings have been in the areas performance management and measurement, organisational health, health of strategic relationships, and benchmarking. Our aim in Mercor Systems is to improve systems, impact processes and thereby transform productivity.
Performance Management Systems:
An integrated and well applied performance management system creates the opportunities for improving and optimizing organisational competiveness and sustainable business outcomes.
Performance management systems work within the context of strategic planning and a concerted leadership approach is required to mobalise.
Mercor can assist in developing the appropriate performance measurement process model for your organisation.
The challenge is to establish a consistent and trustworthy process that will assist management to make informed and strategic decisions based on sound objective evidence; that is, ‘providing the right tools for making the right decisions’.
Performance management systems measure the success of the overall business objectives, corporate strategies, plans and values and how well they are achieved. Mercor has identified the key development objectives, when designing performance management systems as shown below:
- Objective 1 Executive management endorses and drives the process
- Objective 2 Determine critical success factors upfront
- Objective 3 Develop measurement systems that can be utilised in other parts of the business
- Objective 4 Manage the cultural-shift and ‘buy-in’
- Objective 5 Foster a culture of continual improvement and innovation
- Objective 6 Improve integrity of recorded data through clearly defined mechanisms
- Objective 7 Appropriate the resources needed to map out and maintain the process
- Objective 8 Incorporate the flexibility for future enhancements and improvements
- Objective 9 Continue to facilitate change that leads to new levels of business excellence in delivery
Mercor has the skill set, capabilities and ability to mobilise the required resources to:
- Deliver the entire process from strategy-to-metric and implement and integrate these into existing management systems;
- Provide cost effective solutions to build and incorporate the system, in collaboration with the client, in a systematic and iterative fashion, growing with the business; or to develop the system in a pre-defined timeframe; and
- Deliver a robust online performance measurement framework that can be constructed from scratch or customised from anywhere and at any time.
Back to top
Performance Benchmarking creates peer comparisons of performance outcomes. Our systems incorporate business excellence principles and can be used to set the cornerstone for discovering new opportunities, improve existing processes, remove unnecessary ones, and create new products and services.
These systems typically measure the sustainability components of the organisation. They comprise process measurement and outcome measurement; , ‘lead’ as well as ‘lag’ elements, providing for balanced strategic approach to performance management and improvement.
The key objectives for developing a benchmarking application are to:
- Improve competitiveness and achieve business excellence
- Measure internally and comparing externally
- Seek continual improvement over time
- Determine improved models of delivery
- Go beyond ‘business as usual’
- Demonstrate that true ‘value for money’ outcomes are being achieved
Mercor and its strategic partners manage the entire process that delivers leading edge benchmarking and performance management tools that use the latest in web technology.
Back to top
Mercor has worked with clients to extend the application of performance management systems to use as an assessment tool and part of the selection criteria for proponent selection in high profile competitive alliances. This allows the client organisation to determine, test and ‘educate’ the prospective alliance partner against its core sustainability principles. Will they fit into the organisation’s culture?
Back to top
Mercor is developing an enterprise management system for occupational safety and health to improve and drive change in organisational culture; a safety management system that will have the power to drive organisational change and establish common safety expectations and language. Executive management will have dashboard views to enable them to drill down to departmental level performance in real time, anywhere in the organisation to view safety results.
Back to top
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting and performance scorecards are extremely beneficial when a mid sized performance measurement solution is sought, for example, where an alliance or an organisation with multiple alliances needs to capture data, trend it, and report on KPIs. Most Alliances have KPIs that affect their remuneration under the Alliance Agreement (risk and reward regime).
Other KPIs are used simply to track project status and performance or measure sentiment in constructs such as alignment and trust. These applications are feature rich and are custom designed to suit the particular requirements of the client. The objective is to establish a web based application to electronically record data and to have the results presented graphically.
The benefits of an online performance management application are as follows:
- Allow more people to easily enter and review information
- Automatic generation of performance comparisons and project level monitoring and/or monthly reporting for management review
- The KPI reporting mechanism is a cost effective solution for monitoring and tracking vital information
Back to top
Decision Analytics:
Mercor Systems develops the modelling solutions for the business processes, whether they are for strategic business decisions, supply chain processes, risk assessments, change management initiatives, or multi criteria decision analyses, using VBA scripting and data analytics.
It is our business to solve complex business problem scenarios by offering advanced consulting skills and industry expertise. Analytical tools are developed and used to assist decision makers to make strategic and sustainable business decisions and at the same time to maintain their organisation's competitive edge.
Mercor Systems can develop and customise the right business tools to suit the requirements of the business and user requirements.
Back to top
Back to Homepage
Health Checks:
Complimentary to the performance management systems that Mercor develops, are sustainability relationship health check surveys. The health check surveys serve as a lead indicator and barometer for the state of affairs in a business or a project at a particular point in time. These surveys capture the underlying perceptions and guide strategic planning and decision-making. Surveys are typically used to evaluate the views, and or perceptions of the respondents with respect to a system or process.
The Mercor health check survey tool follows a robust process that identifies the key success elements to measure and comprehensively report on the outcomes.
The process involves; planning, designing, implementation, deployment, analysis and reporting. The inputs to the survey design are done in a facilitated workshop environment where the key issues and concerns are identified, and constructs are developed. The survey is then designed and customised for its specific target group. Surveys are then deployed, results collated, analysed and reported on.
Mercor provides the latest in technology and online hosting therefore maximising the benefit to its clients by making the survey process easy and cost effective. Survey data is collated and handled with strict confidentiality. Surveys can also be done off-line or manually and then imported.
The survey results are collated into a comprehensive survey report that contains graphical, comparative and trend data, if required.
Mercor is able to provide analysis to a level of detail using a range of statistical analysis techniques. Survey results may also provide input to KPI data or comparisons for industry or organisational benchmarks, etc.
Health check surveys seek to answer questions such as:
- Are the improvement initiatives filtering through?
- How well is the alliance developing and achieving its objectives?
- What are the current issues and concerns?
- Is our culture where we want it to be?
- Trending analysis is a useful indicator of the impact of a system or process over a time period. Is there a positive or a negative trend?
More complex thematic surveys can be designed to measure strategic elements where the ‘whole of organisation’ is considered.
Back to top
Performance Management Systems (Continued):
Sustainability encompasses the strategies and practices that aim to meet the needs of stakeholders today while seeking to protect, support and enhance the human and natural resources that will be needed in the future.
The underlying philosophy of performance management systems should be to drive towards sustained business excellence over the long term. Any performance measurement system must have continual improvement initiatives built into it so that the potential for improvement is self-evident. As improvement is achieved, the performance measurement scales can be continually adjusted and upgraded so that there is always room for further improvement. It permits the continual raising of the bar on performance. The ‘Business Excellence Framework’ provides a solid basis on which to measure key areas of performance and eliminate much of the subjectivity that is often present in performance measurement systems. The methods of performance measurement should provide for a good mix of lead and lag indicators for performance. The performance management systems that Mercor develops are not simply measurement tools, but they deliver enhanced value to a business or project as they are management tools aligned to the business or project goals and objectives. They comprise management processes.
Mercor has developed in collaboration with its clients, extensive performance management systems to measure, report on and improve business and project performance.
Two significant enterprise level performance management systems were rolled out in the last three years, namely; the Water Scores Benchmarking application linking the Water Corporation of Western Australia’s capital delivery program to its sustainability approach, and the RoadScores performance measurement system that links key performance elements to actual financial outcomes in the risk and reward arrangement for the Term Network Contracts between Main Roads Western Australia and Downer EDI Works.
Back to top
Measuring performance that is linked to a financial outcome is generally used in the context of an alliance or a relationship style contract where the financial outcomes are expressed as risk and reward payments.
One of the objectives in developing a performance measurement system is to develop a system that will always motivate the right behaviour. Any system must therefore always provide opportunity for reward. The Mercor philosophy is to provide consistent opportunity for rewards, and to ensure that the opportunities for reward do not diminish with achievement of targets or time. Such a system will continue to develop and drive the right behaviour by continuing to provide organisational and personal motivation.
Being excellent requires the full commitment of the organisation’s leadership and embracing the underlying philosophy, and a set of principles on which the organisation bases its behaviours, activities and initiatives. When the organisation puts them into practice, it makes sustainable excellence possible. To create confidence that the results can be sustained, there must also be objective evidence of what the organisation does and how it does it. There must be evidence that what it does is soundly based, systematic and continuously reviewed and improved.
Key system attributes of such a performance management system are as follows:
- High measure of accuracy and integrity of calculations;
- Strong user authentication and access privileges; and
- The ability to create the entire framework online by an administrative user, that is to construct, configure and customise new and multiple management frameworks.
Back to top