Getting you up to speed on integration thinking, strategy, process, best practice. It is always possible to improve your integration process and make fewer mistakes in the next one. This could improve profit by many millions or tens of millions of pounds. Click here to download pdf
Our days will cover:
Session 1: Integration Strategy
Understand the company strategy, deal strategy and integration strategy, how they all interact and follow from each other. Looking at:
Session 3: Integration Management Office
Looking at the high level synergies and turning them into a high level 100 day plan and then moving into a details planning phase
Session 5: Efficiencies
There is always a lot of politics involved in mergers, who gets what job, budget, where does the power sit. Looking for efficiencies has a number of facets. There will also be duplication or overlap across the merging organisations, these can provide the largest efficiencies. All efficiencies need to be logged for cost vs benefit and easy of delivery, together with plans made to deliver them, governance put in place to ensure good decision making on which to move forward on and when. The Synergies to be captured and ensure the financials of the deal are a success.
People, people, people! Plan the organisational structure, power, culture capability, pay and pension. The people will deliver the integration and the business. What will we do with and to them? How will they feel? We need to ensure we get the right people in the new organisation, get them on our side and move the whole new entity in the right direction. This all takes a lot of planning
Session 10: Communications
Many people understand that communications is critical to success in M&A, but few understand what they are going to be communicating and how to do this effectively.
Session 12: Other Functions
An opportunity to go through all the other functions and have group discussion with learnings:
Key Discussion points during the course
How can you get the most value out of your deal? What are the stages of a successful integration? How do you achieve the announced synergies? How do you estimate the costs? When do you start planning the programme? Who needs to be involved in the integration, and when? Which business areas are impacted? What tools and techniques do we use for structuring integration planning, delivery and tracking? How should you balance the programme against business as usual? What lessons have we learnt about avoiding the pitfalls? How to we maintain morale? How can we restru
Session 2: Synergy
Synergy projects identified by function, divisions, businesses and countries are reviewed by the IMO, then consolidated into a high level plan. Individual business cases need to be prepared with delivery plans developed and approved. A robust and accurate tracking and reporting process
Session 4: Governance
The structure of the integration needs to be agreed and put in place, resourced and maintained. Without good guidance, direction and decision making the planning will not go well and delivery will be poor and slow.
Session 6: Day 1
A key stepping stone to ensuring that an integration delivers maximum value and minimum disruption.
Session 7: IT
Data is needed to run the integration, make decisions and run the business. How will we collect it? How do the people fit in? Data and information are usually key components in decision making, especially when it comes to sales forces, customer retention and revenue increase. We need to move rapidly on somethings and extract them from the normal speed of IT integration.
Session 9: Finance
Looking at finance across the whole company, helping all the other functions and parts of the deal, together with a good look at how to design, set up and run the new finance function.
Session 11: Sales & Marketing
To successfully deliver any deal, we need to understand the product base and how it links with customers and profitability. Review all data and make rapid changes where needed, often ready to deliver Day 1, certainly with communications around these areas. We have just paid a large amount of money in purchasing a company for its customers, don’t lose any, start learning how to plan and move rapidly, ensuring no sales or profit dip.
Additional M&A Items
Session 13: Due Diligence
Brief session on how to run due diligence, why we do it, what it might contain. The whole day will be perforated with integration items that we need to think about during due diligence.
Session 14: Valuation
There will be a discussion around the strategy of valuation
Session 15: M&A Game
There will be a game where teams decide on M&A strategy, value the company and run through a negotiation