Mengu
Business Information Specialist Consultant, New York Office
Education
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
B.S. in Industrial Engineering, 2002
Activities at UW-Madison: Board member of IIE and SUBE
Memories of UW-Madison: One of the best qualities of the UW campus, in my opinion, is the way it coincides with the city of Madison without a clear border that divides the two. In the four years I lived in Madison, I felt constantly surrounded by some sort of positive energy coming from a diverse, young and intelligent crowd interacting with each other and having fun.
Hometown
Istanbul, Turkey
ZS Career Path
Business Information Specialist Associate (Evanston office), 2002
Business Information Specialist Associate Consultant, 2004
- Moved to New York to open the New York office, 2005
Business Information Specialist Consultant, 2006
On the work
“Recently, I was a part of a project team that helps one of our clients, a large pharmaceutical company, to adjust the size and structure of their sales organization every year based on their forecast of the market place over the next four years.
"We started our analysis by studying every product in our client's portfolio individually. Our goal was to understand the reaction of physicians to different levels of promotion. To be able to look at this relation using different segmentation schemes, I wrote flexible database queries that related large amounts of historical prescription data to sales activity data collected by reps. Before we did any kind of analysis, it was also my responsibility to avoid any inconsistencies in the data, such as a rep mistakenly entering the same sales call twice, or leaving fields empty, etc. Finally, we combined all of our findings from individual products into a singular model that allowed us to run simulations with different sales force configurations and make recommendations based on the insights and synergies we are able to uncover during these simulations.
"The fact that our client keeps repeating this rigorous and time-consuming project year after year with ZS tells me how much they value our findings."
On ZS values
Get It Right: “After six months of working at ZS, I was put on a small project team that consisted of a principal, a consultant and an associate (me). My job on the team was to run an optimization model and that was the first time that I was working on a model with so many inputs and parameters all by myself. Despite all my efforts to keep track of every parameter, sure enough I had overlooked one of them and we did not catch this error until our meeting with the client. My teammate and I were devastated and were expecting a confrontation with our principal, a la Donald Trump in the boardroom of 'the Apprentice'. I will never forget what our principal told us that day: 'Guys, I'd like to think of the trust and the goodwill of our clients like a bank. We work hard all year around to put as much as we can in. And sometimes we take some out. Let's make sure to get this right and start putting things back in.'”