Post-merger integration (PMI)

Post-acquisition integration requires effort and coordination. It often doesn’t go to plan, with painful consequences:

• Hampering your ability to achieve the deal objectives and synergies
• Draining management time and project resources
• Causing additional funding requests, covenant breaches and a lack of confidence in the delivery of forecasts
• Negatively impacting company culture, talent and customers
• Prompting temporary solutions that are not fit for purpose

Integration plans must be properly customised to deliver the objectives and value enhancers that warranted the acquisition in the first place. Yet many groups apply off-the-shelf plans and generic best practices that tend to overemphasise the process and ignore the unique aspects of the deal. We focus on achieving the value behind the deal and on an enduring and properly embedded integration.

Our partner-led delivery also advises on performance and activities against the 100-day plan. In the hectic days and weeks after a deal is done, leaders face daunting responsibilities and often fly blind due to a lack of live information. Critical tasks can get deprioritised against seemingly urgent but low risk activity. Cultural changes and strategy are forgotten.

With wide-ranging industry experience, our experts bring additional bandwidth to identify the root causes of delays and other issues and work to bring performance back on track. We let leaders focus on strategic issues.

Investing in additional support can be the difference between success and failure in achieving the deal rationale. It can also materially accelerate synergies and capture strategic benefits before competitors can react.

• Integration projects aligning processes and procedures (including within a complex regulated group)
• Achieving synergies, including office closures and other operational projects that were blocked or delayed
• Delivering asset-based lending facilities to better fund working capital cycles without using 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 the delivery of KPIs, with drill-downs and performance tracking by the team
• Resolution projects, including data cleansing/alignment and backlog clearance
• Cultural and strategic consolidation with improved staff engagement