Managing M&A: Automation or Integration?

Companies engaging in, or having completed merger and acquisition (M&A) activities find themselves in unique positions with technology and business integrations. We can presume that all companies have Line of Business (LOB) systems like payroll, other financial systems, customer-facing systems, operations systems, security systems, etc., all of which are potentially redundant after the transaction is complete.

M&A activities compel companies to review the audiences who use these systems, system deployment, maintenance and a variety of other factors to decide which will prevail and which will be decommissioned. This is further complicated by considering license renewals, the calendar (especially important for payroll and financial systems), budget cycles, hardware deployment and more.

Charter Global addresses these complexities with our Automation or Integration (AoI) offering, designed specifically to address the strategy and intricacies posed by M&A, new LOB deployments and the resulting integrations.

Integration Complexities in Mergers and Acquisitions

M&A activities cause organizations to address the complexity of introducing additional Line of Business (LOB) applications into their environment. Incoming LOBs create a functionality overlap, where similar LOBs duplicate existing business functions across multiple user audiences. Case in point: a payroll system. Users from the acquired entity interact with their payroll system every month, but post-merger, the business cannot manage organization-wide payroll without some integration effort. Overlapping functions across business audiences create the need for a transition, where a company must decide between integrating live systems, migrating the incoming system to the company standard, or some other hybrid strategy. In addition, any new LOBs introduced to an organization present a similar challenge, requiring some level of data-sharing capabilities before a more extensive, system integration.

Understanding Automation or Integration

The Charter Global Automation or Integration (AoI) offering is targeted to help businesses manage LOB redundancies, whether through M&A or from the introduction of new LOBs, requiring integration with incumbent systems. Our approach leverages both strategy and practical execution to help companies efficiently manage and streamline data sharing across LOB applications.

Beyond business use cases and audiences, our AoI engagements take several other factors into account, including licensing, subscription renewal, calendar dependencies, transition timelines, system life cycles and more. We analyze the environment and provide strategic recommendations and project execution to optimize the transition to business benefit. We hold strategy sessions to ensure transparency across the organization, identifying and prioritizing systems and timelines. Licenses, subscriptions and the calendar are included in these sessions as they typically have a timeline impact. We set up a project plan to ensure business continuity is maintained while the transition is in progress and execute alongside organization stakeholders.

Automation or Integration Business Benefits

AoI delivers strategic advantages for businesses by:

• Reducing the impact and lost productivity incurred as a result of M&A activities.
• Reducing the level of effort placed on the combined IT resources to manage integrations.
• Softening the impact on staff who rely on incoming and incumbent systems.
• Managing the integration, automation and sunsetting activities.
• Ensuring business continuity throughout the process.

We can ensure the best outcomes for M&A-driven integration activities.

An AoI engagement starts with our Opportunity Assessment, which is a short call to understand scope and perform initial prioritization. We expand this to include:

• AoI Strategy Sessions.
• Systems, Audiences, Business Considerations Inventory
• Prioritization and Timelines.
• Project Scoping and Planning.
• Execution phase: Integrate for long-term, automate for short-term.

We also manage data retention, offboarding users, and sunsetting outgoing LOB applications and systems as part of our engagement.

Contact us for more information about our Automation or Integration offering.