Post merger integration

Situation

The take over or merger and integration of a company is a particular challenge by itself, since most companies do not have much experience with a situation like this. Often both parties claim for themselves to have the better procedures and models (organization, processes, KPIs etc.). Even with the insight, that the company, that was subject to be acquired, has better processes, an aligned process model based on best practices often fails due to the change resistance of the buying company. This is true especially if the acquired company is reasonably smaller and covers only a part of the business portfolio of the buying company. In addition former competitors often struggle to establish quickly of a sudden good collaboration amongst all employees as company cultures can often be quite different. A lot of issues need to be addressed…

In our case a global service company for aircraft spare parts and maintenance services was taken over and had to be integrated into a larger aircraft manufacturer. Our client had to harmonize all relevant processes in order to standardize the systems finally. It was important to involve both parties in equal measure and also to build a sponsor team with representatives from both companies.

Approach

A large group workshop was set up to make binding decisions on harmonized processes across both companies. During  the preparation process models of both companies were analyzed and documented. The project team identified the differences and along with a series of small workshops made proposals for harmonization. In these workshops employees from both parties were equally present and established a common framework to assess benefits and investments for their proposals.

Also IT-experts were involved early to investigate the potential impacts on the leading system and to alert about limitations and feasibility issues. About 100 participants joined the 3 day large group workshop to discuss the proposals of the project team and to work on adaptations or even complete new ideas. The iterations made it clearer how the future processes best fit together. Many things were obvious, but finally the sponsors decided on unresolved issues. Apart from sound solutions the workshop created a lot of process competence amongst all people, especially at interfaces of functional units

Result

At the end 9 core processes were aligned and decided for the joint operation. In addition the teams finalized a governance model with joint KPI’s, a draft plan for implementation and some immediate communication measures.