Businesses looking at M and A post-Covid-19 need to keep integration in mind
Recent months have been dominated by “cash conservatism”, as businesses have retrenched and protected their assets; yet economists and analysts expect the aftermath of Covid-19 to result in a surge of M&As, with deal premiums likely to be reduced and previously unavailable assets now coming up for sale as businesses look for external financing.
Carrying out a merger or acquisition in a downturn is a bold move, which may yet yield great results – unless businesses allow integration to become an afterthought. Successful M&A are dependent on an integration process between the company’s IT ecosystems, and inadequate integration will consume vast resources whilst creating a patchwork IT ecosystem with disparate silos and applications.
Mike Kiersey, principal technologist at Boomi, comments:
“At a time when M&A has the potential to become increasingly strategic, a clear post-merger integration plan becomes vital to maintain business-critical applications, IT systems and data. Both companies involved need to understand the importance of a harmonised infrastructure, and the severe implications of a failure to integrate two different systems.
Business integration needs to be swift, broken down into manageable chunks and with seamless application and data integration for all services. In this way, data points become more accessible and clear, united by a master data management solution able to cross departmental and geographic borders in an agile yet controlled manner.
At the crux of M&A success lies a strategy able to make the data accessible and provide the correct governance. For a fully successful merger, both parties will need to be able to access raw data from a single platform, based on which the company can decide which innovation approach to take for customers, partners and employees moving forward.
