When three Fortune-500 companies joined together to create a single $19 billion enterprise data storage solutions provider, it was up to the mergers and acquisitions team to deal with the most challenging component of the transition. They needed to devise a plan for integrating the three thousand applications and IT systems from its three multi-billion dollar organizations. Dealing with a large amount of extremely sensitive information is not only extremely risky, but also laborious and stressful. When creating an integration plan, it is important to consider important questions about ERP/CRM/HR/BI and other systems:

1. Which systems from the acquired company are retained?
2. Which systems are migrated over to the parent company’s systems?
3. What is the integration strategy for connecting retained systems to the parent company’s IT systems?
4. What is the data migration strategy for the replaced systems?

Once a plan has been laid out, the team can then start the integration process which can take months to years depending on the complexity of the acquired company. During this time, there will be a constant flow of data from the acquired company to the parent company. The parent company may require the reports to be in a specific format. Analysts must manually extract and transform the reports themselves to ensure consistency.  Given the insatiable demand for data during integration, the M&A project teams must look into solutions that will help reduce laborious tasks and maintain the team’s focus on the core M&A project. Automating the data extraction, data transformation, and creation of reports from the acquired company’s BI platform is a low hanging fruit that can reduce a significant amount of manual labor and help the team focus on critical M&A tasks.

Find out more about minimizing M&A risk through automation when OBIEE is the BI platform in either the parent or acquired companies.

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