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We have the right people, tools, and experience to help you integrate a target successfully and enhance M&A deal value. Our M&A integration professionals can help with standing up the integration management office, synergy identification, operating model design, change management and functional integration.
We can help you develop integration strategies and an improved operating model to create more value – whether you’re looking to integrate an established business or digital company, including a startup. Our clients include large cap and middle market organisations, as well as private equity funds.
We conduct diligence in the following areas to enable you to choose the right target at the right price.
How do we prioritise, sequence and govern cross-functional activities?
How can we use the IMO to drive the integration, including operating models, organisation design, synergies and (where applicable) transaction service agreement management?
How should we develop an integration plan based on your specific goals?
What is the timeline for capturing value?
Is a clean team needed to accelerate value capture?
How will our business run when merged with another company?
What is our target-state operating model that will guide integration planning?
How will we identify, assess and track critical Day One tasks early on to confirm a smooth transition?
How do you govern activities and identify milestones within separate yet interdependent business functions?
How do you achieve a seamless and efficient transition to a target operating model?
How can we avoid a culture clash during a merger?
Which key executives and members of management must be retained?
How can we align leaders and employees to create a seamless onboarding experience and impactful communications?
Are our salesforce incentives aligned with our strategy and customer needs?
Are we getting the desired return on investment for our sales and marketing spend, and do we have the right balance by channel?
How well do we understand customer priorities, and what are we doing to address them?
Is our pricing strategy delivering sustained profitability?
EY M&A integration services when acquiring digital companies
Special considerations for digital companies, including digital startups
We help traditional companies accelerate and improve the integration of digital companies, including digital startups, by focusing on talent, product and commercial strategies that are unique to digital deals. These companies create customer value through the use of digital technology, and focus on capturing, storing and processing data. They incorporate a technology lens into everything they do to better serve stakeholders. Considerations include:
The missing puzzle piece when acquiring technology companies is often the retention of the nimble-and-talented team that drove the development of what could be a new generation of products and services.
Talent questions to consider:
What will be your new organisational and governance structure for separate, partially integrated or fully integrated companies?
What should be the strategy to retain and incentivise talent?
How will you align the total rewards strategy between organisations?
Which elements of the target’s culture and policies should be maintained?
How are ways of working maintained to accelerate growth?
Companies must be able to integrate the target into an existing product line, test the product and market fit, and understand technology needs and required investments.
Product questions to consider:
How will you bring leaders and technologists together for product/pipeline integration?
What will be your strategy for technology integration?
What will be your joint product development strategy?
How will you retain the target’s unique practices and tools?
Acquirers need to re-evaluate the combined customer value proposition, prepare the legacy organisation for new selling models, and potentially revamp their customer experience and go-to-market models.
Commercial questions to consider:
Where can the target provide differentiation, and where can the acquirer provide scale?
How will you adopt the target’s go-to-market capabilities in a digital, omnichannel ecosystem?
How will you enhance customer experience and engagement?
How will you organise the target’s operating model to support the new business model?
Discover M&A advisory services from EY when you buy and integrate. We help enable strategic growth through integrated mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and alliances.
Our Strategy Consulting teams, help CEOs achieve maximum value for stakeholders by designing strategies that improve profitability and long-term value.
EY corporate finance consultants combine deep financial and capital markets experience with advanced decision support capabilities and analytics to help the CFO drive sustainable value for all stakeholders.
