Patrick Naef, head of Mercator and divisional senior vice president, Emirates Group IT.
So, in effect, you never sign off on a project entirely?
Absolutely; every customer is different and every customer has legacies that we need to integrate with.
How closely does your team work with each client?
There is typically a pretty long sales cycle involved with the process, where you are already working very closely with a potential customer to understand their needs, so by the moment we sign the contract, we know already what they need and how to approach it. In the case of Swiss World Cargo, we knew exactly which areas needed further development and customisation and how we would go about implementing it. Our team works onsite with the customer and we don’t take on the contract and then return to Dubai to develop it here.
We had people travelling around the world visiting Swiss World Cargo offices, because at that time in the US, they had very specific requirements for customs.
And, at that time, Emirates wasn’t operating to Brazil so we had to comply with Brazilian customs rules and send our people there to understand local requirements. So, after a few weeks, there’s a very close-knit operating team where it’s almost impossible to tell who works for Mercator and who works for the client.
Why should clients sign up for your solutions rather than the others available on the market?
Having worked for other airlines before I joined this company, I was really impressed by the tight integration of our suite of products. That’s because we have a strategy of developing a lot of these systems in-house rather than trying to get a patchwork of acquired or bought products. In other airlines, you just pick and choose and try and integrate it all. That’s quite unique and I don’t think I’ve seen that tight integration anywhere else in the market.
I guess that’s one of the compelling selling propositions that maybe we haven’t been so good at getting across to the market. In the past, we were very much focused on selling individual systems but we have now changed the approach a bit and tend to go for where can we add value to an airline by providing a whole raft of solutions rather than just individual systems.
How compliant is SkyChain with the e-freight concept?
I’m no e-freight specialist, but we compared the e-freight compliance of SkyChain with IATA’s standards and we are far, far advanced on the requirements that IATA provides. Our head of SkyCargo, Ram Menen, is one of the industry’s e-freight champions and has been very passionate about spreading the word about this project. I guess what we can offer is probably the most e-freight advanced system in the whole industry.
What are the unique selling points of Mercator’s solutions?
If I look at our pipeline for the future, we’ve never had such a healthy and promising outlook as we do now. As one of the very few IT providers for the airline industry that is actually part of an airline group, there aren’t many companies that have almost unlimited access to industry know-how. Around 20 years ago, every airline had their own IT dept, but these got bought out, or sold to venture capitalists. Besides us, maybe Lufthansa has a similar set-up, but after that I’d struggle to find another provider that has the type of access we have.
Most other companies are desperate to find an airline to try out their launch product in and very often I see these fail. We see this all the time, particularly in the cargo area; I don’t know how many millions have been sunk in this way. Whatever we sell to the market, clients know that it has been developed in conjunction with SkyCargo, so when a customer buys that solution, they know that it’s proven and has been tested with one of the fastest-growing airlines in the world.
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