A Center of Competence (CoC) is a specialized client service capability designed to deliver specific parts of a client engagement.
A CoC typically consists of three defining features. First, our experts are members with deep domain expertise gained through their educational background and relevant industry experience, e.g., purchasing and supply management. CoC analysts might be MBAs (operations) with purchasing industry experience. Second, knowledge-backed services include standardized, stand-alone service offerings for specific parts of an engagement, leveraging McKinsey proprietary methods and data, e.g., structured diagnostics to identify the opportunity size and levers at the start of an engagement. Third, our sustainable innovation includes enduring institutional capabilities that continuously refine existing approaches and develop new offerings in a cost-effective manner, e.g., our credit risk modeling methodology, which was first developed in 2004 and has seen continuous evolution, is now viewed as a world-class way to build highly predictive models.
Today there are more than 15 CoCs, staffed by nearly 200 members, across many of the core service lines of our functional practices. These include groups in: Operations, Marketing, Corporate Finance, Risk, Organization, Sustainability & Resource Productivity, and Business Technology.
The CoC are able to create distinctive impact across a range of services, including benchmarking, diagnostics, and modeling, as well as specialized support to client teams.