USA Post-merger integration (PMI) advice
Integration is the last step in an M&A process that has already been through many months of strategic planning, analysis, due diligence and negotiation. After all the hard work and disruption, and significant amounts of time and money spent in acquiring the right business for your strategy, it can all be put at risk if integration is poorly executed.
Post-acquisition integration requires a huge amount of effort and co-ordination, and as such often doesn’t go to plan. This can risk:
- Your ability to achieve the objectives of the deal and synergies
- Draining management time and project resource
- Additional funding requests, covenant breaches and a lack of confidence in delivery of forecasts
- Negative impacts on culture, talent and customers
- Implementing a variety of temporary solutions that are not fit for purpose
It is important that integration plans are properly customised to deliver the objectives and value enhancers that warranted the acquisition in the first place. It sounds obvious, but we find many groups apply off-the-shelf plans and generic best practices that tend to overemphasise process and ignore the unique aspects of the deal. We focus on ensuring the value behind the deal rationale is achieved, and that the integration is enduring and properly embedded.
Through Partner-led delivery, we also advise on performance and activities required against the 100-day plan. In the hectic days and weeks after the deal is done, leaders face a daunting list of responsibilities, often flying blind due to a lack of live information. Critical tasks can get deprioritised against seemingly urgent but low risk activity, cultural changes and strategy can be forgotten. With wide-ranging industry experience, we bring additional bandwidth to identify root causes of delays and issues and work to bring performance back on track. It is important for leaders to be able to focus on strategic issues.
This investment in additional support can be the difference between success and failure to achieve the deal rationale and implement key cultural changes in those critical weeks post-acquisition. It can also materially accelerate the achievement of synergies and capture strategic benefits before competitors have the chance to react.
Experience and success stories:
- Integration projects aligning processes and procedures (including within a complex regulated group)
- Synergy achievement including office closure and other operational projects that were blocked or delayed
- Delivering asset-based lending facilities to better fund working capital cycles without utilising investor cash
- Using technology and data analysis to stratify elements of working capital to improve the net position
- Resolving cash draining acquisitions, reworking 13-week cash flow forecasts and identifying readily available improvement opportunities
- Integrating forecasting models into one tool to align inputs, better able to be actualised and sensitised at a Group level
- Implementing live dashboards to track delivery of KPIs, with drill-downs and performance tracking by the team
- Resolution projects including data cleansing/alignment, backlog clearance – caused by a lack of integration process and management
- Cultural and strategic consolidation, improved staff engagement