Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and Acquisitions are a quintessential element of enterprise growth in the 21st century. To remain competitive and continuously achieve high growth, companies find it highly challenging to grow organically alone. Businesses constantly look at opportunities where their company’s limited advantages can be supplemented by advantages of another company and that is why, businesses explore options of combining the advantages through strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

While many companies have adopted M&A as part of their strategy arsenal, several of them still struggle to successfully merge the operations of the two companies. There are multiple hindrances faced by integration teams during a merger. It includes multi-disciplinary approach with high levels of synchronization and large inter-dependencies, strategy needs to be converted into tactical, measurable and accountable steps, cultural differences are often undermined and there is a huge element of over-confidence on the ability of the team to manage and achieve results.

Our approach and value proposition

Fifth Chrome practitioners have earned their experience by going through multiple business-cycles of M&A integration. We understand that integrations have multi-disciplinary complexities, we look for what synchronization levers and cultural harmonization measures are required for a successful execution of an integration. Fifth Chrome brings in years of experience in successfully implementing tactical steps of integration and achieving harmonization between merging companies.

What solutions

Fifth Chrome offers several service packages in mergers and integration:

M&A – Operational due-diligence (DD):

  • M&A teams normally focus on Financial and Risk management strengths of a deal. Operational strengths are often under-estimated resulting in disjointed operations, value not generated or worse, failed integration.
  • We work with other Due-diligence teams and conduct a pre-merger current-state assessment in the pre-deal stage.

Post-Merger Integration Leadership Training and Workshops:

  • Injecting a sense-of-urgency, awareness of complexity, attention to interdependencies and mobilization of program and operations leadership team.
  • 2-3 day training/workshop comprehensively covers role of integration management office, governance and operating rhythm, workstream setups and scope (HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, etc.), issues and risk management, synergies framework and change management and communication primer.

Integration Diagnostics and Readiness:

  • Many M&A integrations fail and a significant number of the failures is caused by the under estimation of the effort, complexity and level of up-front preparation that is required to drive an integration.
  • Our teams map and assess the organizational capability and readiness required to take on an integration program.

Post-Merger Integration Execution:

  • Apart from setting up integration governance office and drive mobilization for integration, the integration program itself needs full-fledged program management
  • We have seasoned practitioners who have led multiple integration projects and can be made available for integrations.

100-day planning and mobilization (Integration Planning & Design):

  • Most critical part of an integration is the first 100-days after the merger is announced. This stage includes creating a blue-print of the integration including activities, resourcing, governance and control.
  • We help in creating Integration Management Office, Governance Operating Rhythm, work-streams programs (8-12), we conduct Mobilization workshops, Risk & Issue Management, Budget and Synergies Financial dashboards, create Communication Framework.

Capacity and Capability Assessment (C&CA):

  • Right type and level of resourcing is critical to success of any integration. C&CA cells provide a framework on which the current level of capacity, capability, availability, incentivization, performance objectives and impact of competing priorities are assessed.
  • We provide a comprehensive assessment that allows identification of key gaps up-front and perform a compare-and-contrast on options to fill the gap

Change Management and Communication:

  • Integration by nature is transformational in nature that involves radical changes. It is imperative that robust change management process is incorporated in an integration program to navigate through employee and culture management, system changes, leadership engagement and most importantly, communication.
  • Communication includes steering committee meetings, leadership updates, employee announcements, town-halls, awareness trainings and newsletters with local language support.

Case studies: made available on request

  • Western Europe people and financial service provider and its acquisitions in Eastern Europe
  • Designing of M&A Integration playbook for a Global chemicals company
  • Separation work stream management for an Global industrial company
  • Integration design for a Dutch technology company
  • Merger of 2 European transformation companies
  • Internal business mergers for a Fortune 500 company

How to engage us

Best way to start is to organize a 2-hour on-line “PMI awareness” interactive session or half a day on-site complimentary “PMI awareness” sessions with one of our experts. Based on the sessions, we hold collaborative discussions and potential solutions for our clients. The recommendations can be acted upon by solely your team, by 3rd party, by Fifth Chrome or a combination there of.