Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are all about synergies. But they are also enormous undertakings that place huge stress on already stretched teams. The same can be said for demergers when organizations choose to separate their operations or make changes to their existing infrastructure. In all instances, organizations are redesigning their architecture to serve their future needs. During each process, businesses strive for efficiency to ensure they are delivering value at the earliest opportunity.
The rise in M&A activity
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in customers experiencing acquisitions and mergers, especially within the CPG industry. As a way to foster innovation and boost efficiency, more and more market players are recognizing the value of joining forces and fueling their respective talent and expertise into one powerhouse.
SAP sits at the heart of many business infrastructures. During an M&A, integrating the acquired company’s systems with the existing SAP landscape is crucial to achieving operational efficiency and unlocking cost savings. Equally, separating systems in a demerger requires a seamless transition, otherwise the individual parties could experience major disruption in a time of strategic activity.
However, integrating or splitting SAP systems can be a significant challenge, especially without proper change management practices. Here’s where a set of standardized SAP processes play a vital role.
Several key trends have fueled this rise in activity:
- Securing new business opportunities
- Improving market resilience
- Attracting new investment
- Demonstrating sought after capabilities
- Capitalizing on market changes
Why you should consider an SAP Global Template
As we know, companies often engage in M&A to restructure their businesses and streamline operations to cope with changing economic dynamics. However, integrating a newly acquired company or making major changes to infrastructure during a demerger can be challenging, especially for larger organizations with complex landscapes.
These companies typically make the acquired business more profitable by identifying back-office synergies and merging with their own standard processes. This is especially important for organizations with multiple companies or brands underneath their banner.
A standardized global SAP template offers a platform to leverage economies of scale quickly. Without one, it becomes much more challenging to manage N+1 landscapes when incorporating the other company. Handling change manually can cause delays, business disruptions and costly errors, not to mention when you throw added complexity into the mix of an existing migration project that the original company may be undertaking, like from SAP ECC to S/4HANA.
See our SAP Global Templates guide for more information.
How Basis Technologies can help you automate key processes
Yes, creating SAP global standards and managing change during a merger or acquisition can be complex, but you don’t have to do it alone. Automating key processes like transport sequencing and conflict identification eliminates manual effort and risk. This tackles a major source of errors and delays, leading to a faster, safer, and more cost-effective approach to SAP integration during M&A. With accelerated IT integration and centralized change management, businesses can focus on more strategic priorities – like ensuring the whole M&A process progresses without significant disruption.
For example, Basis Technologies’ solutions provide businesses with enhanced visibility into how changes to their infrastructure will impact the broader enterprise. This helps them identify potential hazards, minimizing the risk of unnecessary operational disruption and costly delays. They ensure that changes for the original business are managed seamlessly alongside the acquisition integration project, providing agility, risk reduction and efficiency. The scalable nature of these solutions also delivers value in any landscape configuration, whether simple or complex, on ECC or S/4HANA. They also help lay the foundation for adding more systems as the business grows.
Real-world example: How UCT handled SAP during M&A
UCT’s global expansion and acquisitions strategy was previously hindered by risky and inefficient manual SAP change processes – limiting their ability to scale their SAP landscape.
Automation through ActiveControl from Basis Technologies accelerated the delivery of change for UCT by removing manual effort and associated risk, enabling the business to safely deploy innovation on demand to support the business’ growth. The technology also prepared UCT to effortlessly scale their SAP environment to add additional landscapes and applications during acquisitions.
ActiveControl’s Merge functionality helped them manage and synchronize multiple development tracks so they could safely and efficiently consolidate their many separate ERP landscapes into a unified environment to support a more agile organization.
Want to see how ActiveControl orchestrates complex processes with automation to ensure dependencies are the first priority? Watch this 4-minute video.
