MercyCare: Turning "best-effort" reporting into a trusted, governed data foundation

A not-for-profit that invests ahead of the curve to prove every number

MercyCare is a Western Australian not-for-profit provider of aged care, child care, disability and community services, operating in one of the country's most heavily regulated human services sectors.

Like every residential aged care operator, MercyCare reports to government each quarter on care minutes — the mix and volume of nursing and care staff hours delivered against a mandated target. Getting this right isn't just a compliance box to tick: it's core to the trust MercyCare has built with the people it cares for.

MercyCare's reporting had always met its obligations, built on a combination of an established on-premise data warehouse and rigorous manual validation by finance and reporting teams. But Armin Adineh, Head of Information Technology at MercyCare, could see further down the road than most: the organisation was growing, its data needs were becoming more complex, and the infrastructure that had served MercyCare well for years wouldn't scale with it.

Rather than wait for that gap to become a problem, Armin made the case to invest early.

Getting ahead of scale, not catching up to crisis

The opportunity was as much organisational as technical. MercyCare's existing SQL Server architecture had done its job, but as data needs grew across finance, HR and operations, teams increasingly built their own local models and reports to get the assurance they needed quickly. It worked — but it meant effort was duplicated, and there was room to bring everyone onto one shared, trusted source of truth.

Care-minute reporting was a clear place to start. The quarterly process was manual and thorough, giving MercyCare confidence in what it submitted - but it offered no real-time visibility over the course of the quarter.

Armin saw the chance to go further: build a platform that gave operations and executives continuous visibility, not just a point-in-time compliance snapshot.

As Armin puts it:

"Having visibility over our care minutes ensures we can proactively support the people that depend on us with the right level of care."

There was no single crisis that forced MercyCare's hand - this was a considered, forward-looking decision. Leaders across the business recognised that bringing everyone onto a single, governed source of data would multiply the value each team was already generating.

With the backing of MercyCare's CFO, Armin engaged Mechanical Rock to design and build a modern, governed data platform for the whole organisation.

Three priorities anchored the work:

1. Select and build a governed, validated data platform, following a proper market assessment and best technology fit.
2. Strengthen the foundations by moving three core systems - finance, payroll, and time-and-attendance - onto modern SaaS/cloud platforms.
3. Elevate MercyCare's highest-stakes compliance reporting - care minutes and workforce data - from rigorous manual process to real-time automation.

Choosing Snowflake, and bringing in the right delivery partner

MercyCare did its homework before Mechanical Rock came on board, running a market assessment across Snowflake, AWS and Microsoft Fabric. It chose Snowflake because peer government and not-for-profit organisations were already running it successfully.

Translating that platform choice into a well-built implementation took the right delivery partner. MercyCare's first delivery engagement didn't land the way it hoped, so a project manager brought in to reset the initiative made the connection to Mechanical Rock, who embedded directly inside MercyCare's own team rather than delivering at arm's length.

Armin describes the shift:

"Sean and Tom from Mechanical Rock came in and understood the level of maturity the team was at in our data journey and were flexible enough to adapt so we could learn as we went and prioritise as we went. They truly worked as partners, not only focusing on project delivery but ensuring we also focused on future-proofing the data in place."

Rather than chasing a perfect architecture up front, the team prioritised getting something working in front of the business quickly, then iterating.

"These data platforms don't get perfect architecture in the first round," Armin explains. "If we went for perfection, we'd be talking about it for two years... we were pushing to get something out the other end as fast as possible, so we could show what the data could do so the services could 'see the possibilities'."

Speed didn't come at the expense of capability building. The teams worked closely together to build out the three layers behind a modern data platform -ingest, engineer and model - and Armin brought that understanding to MercyCare's executive leadership team, turning data from an IT-only conversation into a journey the whole business could follow.

Building infrastructure the business could trust from day one

To deliver value quickly, Mechanical Rock brought MercyCare's key data sources under central visibility, with clear ownership and accountability assigned to each one.

A DataOps CI/CD pipeline was used to deploy Snowflake objects and build the data ingestion framework, pulling data in from finance, HR and productivity management systems, with monitoring in place to catch issues early.

Data was organised into clear stages, from raw intake through to clean, business-ready information, so every number could be traced back to its source. The flow of data through the platform was automated, with built-in checks and recovery strategies such as Time Travel and cloning within a retention window, plus safeguards to support safe testing, deployment and rollback of any change. Consistent naming across the platform also made it easy for MercyCare's own team to navigate and maintain, once Mechanical Rock had stepped back.

Armin sums up the payoff:

"We know that the data going from the system into a report is following that process... it has passed stages... that it's validated and can be trusted."

Turning trusted data into everyday decisions

Elevating trust in the numbers was central to this layer of the build. Checks were built in to catch data issues early such as missing or incomplete records before they reached a report. Access was controlled by role and kept to the minimum needed, and sensitive data was protected through restricted access and masking.

Day-to-day reporting workloads were kept separate from data processing, so performance stayed reliable as usage grew. Platform costs were monitored with automated controls to manage spend, and end-to-end data lineage tracking was built out so every figure could be traced back through every stage it passed through.

Once the data was in a usable state, the final step was making it useful to the people who needed it. Dashboards and reporting were delivered, with analysts able to explore the data directly. A shared, business-friendly layer gave consistent reporting definitions across finance, HR and operations, so everyone worked from the same numbers. Business teams were trained to work confidently with data themselves, extending the platform's impact well beyond the engagement itself.

"We now waste much less time trying to figure out what we're even looking at," Armin said. "We've got consistent patterns of ingestion and architecture, which speed up the delivery side... we now have a platform where you can get to the data quite fast and start to prototype and validate with the business, way faster than what we would have been able to do before."

A culture that rose to meet the platform

The cultural shift has been just as significant as the technical one. The business now asks how data moves through the pipeline, not just what the final number says - and demand for reporting has grown, a strong signal of confidence in what the platform delivers.

That momentum has translated into real, ongoing investment.

"It wasn't possible if we didn't get buy-in from the exec level, so the CFO was a massive champion," Armin reflected. "We went to the Executive Leadership Group, and they could see the value, so we got very, very good support from the business... they trusted us to see where we were going, and they could see the vision with us."

The engagement has since been extended twice, and MercyCare is now exploring what a strong data foundation makes possible next - including how artificial intelligence can be applied.

On the partnership with Mechanical Rock, Armin shares:

"They've been very visible on site and empowering our team to learn and expand. If I have any problem, they're quick to offer support. It feels like they've merged with our team, and we're working towards one shared goal for MercyCare."

Looking back over six months of delivery, Armin was direct about the momentum: "I think the team is in a much better place now to start building stuff in the future than it was six months ago."

From confident reporting to real-time proof

For an aged care provider, a governed data platform isn't just an IT upgrade, it's the difference between confidently reporting the care residents receive each quarter, and having that assurance visible in real time, every day. MercyCare's investment in getting ahead of its own growth has given the organisation exactly that foundation to build on.

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