I took the title of this post from a recent article in Industry Week Manufacturing: Manufacturing Merger Success: The Sales Force Integration Imperative subtitled: “A powerful driver underlying B2B M&A outcomes is the degree to which sales forces are successfully integrated.”  This is a very good article by Michael B. Moorman.  While he focuses his attention on the Sales Force, the integration risks that frequently undermine the degree of merger success as identified by a study from his firm applies across the board.  We have seen them all before.  Moorman’s keys to success also transcend sales to be true within the whole organization,  Issues that we would describe slightly differently are:

• inappropriate downsizing
• poor customer interface
• loss of key personnel
• lack of attention of the immediate needs
• “us” versus “them” rather than a New Identity
• Dualities instead of synergies
• poor timing of implementation – in fact in our view at 1-Focus – to little too late.

For the past couple of years I have been reading articles that be-cries the need to get Informatics involved early in the M&A discussion.  Lately, this has spread to other groups as well.  Besides the mention of the Sales Force, I saw a demand to consider procurement in SourceWire last week.  ”PROCUREMENT CAN BRIDGE THE CULTURAL GAP IN COMPANY MERGERS”  Well that’s a pretty big affirmation. I don’t mean to sound glib.  You can actually download the White Paper “Bridging the gap: How procurement can add value in a post-merger situation” here.

Procurement impacts across all areas of an organisation and it is here that opportunities can be found to unlock synergies on both sides of the merger.

But again I say – what doesn’t?  Instead of looking at each function separately and pointing out how critical each is the success of any merger, we need to think systemically.  All systems are connected and unless we find meaningful ways to collaborate and develop bottom-up processes of including ALL aspects of the organization, we will not be as successful as we can be.

So what really is the Integration Imperative? Well it isn’t just one thing. We have identified five critical factors but a good place to start would be to review our White Paper which can be read here.