Mercury
Educating Clients with Fleet Management Efficiency and IT Expertise

Brad Kelley, Senior Vice President and CIO at Mercury Associates (the largest independent fleet consulting firm in North America), believes in combining technology know-how and hands-on approach to truly understand the capabilities and limitations of a solution beyond the marketing sizzle. “In consulting engagements I am often involved in the design, planning, implementation, and testing of new solutions for our clients,” he explains. This not only reflects in the success rate of Mercury with their clients, but also digs into his expertise in the company maintaining a deeper working knowledge of enterprise technologies.

Mercury’s proficiency in rendering fleet operations, logistics and technology expertise is engaged for retrieving the real-time information that is required for transparency and the cost-effective management of vehicles and equipment. “For past two decades, logistics organizations have implemented ERP systems and purpose built technologies to better manage specific subsets of their operation. But these systems have served mostly to collect information, and provide standard management reporting and operational support,” asserts Kelley. The company serves its clients through its fleetcentric solutions, helping them evaluate, acquire, and integrate these solutions into their existing business systems. Mercury also provides application hosting services. This approach allows the firm to have continuous, hands-on exposure to new solutions.

At the base of Mercury’s services is its business consulting services, which is augmented by its technology, analytics and business intelligence capabilities. The company frequently evaluates operational business processes and aggregates data from fleet, fuel, GPS, and financial systems to address the clients’ fleet management-related challenges and identify opportunities. Mercury’s operational and technical expertise are ideally aligned with the client need. “We don’t provide cookie cutter consultative advice or solutions to our clients. Instead, we provide recommendations that are implementable and are tailored to address their ‘real world’ challenges,” extols Kelley. In addition to assisting businesses and government entities with improving their operations and leveraging technology, Mercury is often tapped to assists tech companies with enhancing their solutions.

Kelley explains “we are routinely engaged by industry leaders and technology providers to evaluate new technologies, recommend improvements to existing solutions, assess potential markets, and provide subject matter expertise in many of their implementations”. The company’s industry and technical knowledge is also highly sought by generalist consulting firms and system integrators that lack the fleet and logistics capabilities.

We provide recommendations to our clients that are implementable and are tailored to address the ‘real world’ challenges of their organization

Mercury also serves public and private organizations worldwide through its global partnership program, which is designed to align the company’s fleet and technical expertise with local firms. The company has recently collaborated with a local firm in Dubai, to offer a GPSbased, Oracle routing and scheduling solution for student transportation. It addressed the requirements of local laws necessitating students to be picked up at their front door, assigned seating for boys and girls who cannot ride together, and for younger students that are accompanied by a guardian.

Mercury provides honed managerial skills to harness technological sophistication and perform dexterous routine and specialized analysis for clients. The company is uniquely poised to provide high-level adhoc studies and ongoing management support to its clients. “The combination of rising technological complexities and declining technical expertise pose a serious challenge to many organizations that have been largely selfreliant in the past in managing their fleets. Through our efforts, we expect the trend towards more management analysis and support to shape the foreseeable future for technological advancements,” Kelley concludes.