Tuesday May 17, 2022

In Part 1 of our series on the Secrets to a Successful Merger or Acquisition, we looked at the importance of collaboration automation and integration on ensuring a positive user experience and unlocking productivity benefits. In Part 2, we explained how collaboration automation and integration is crucial to supporting revenue synergies anticipated in the M&A transaction. This final blog post explores how collaboration automation supports achieving cost synergies by providing UC technology rationalization and integration, and the benefits that this brings to the business as a whole.

Post-Merger Integration

According to LeanIX, post-merger integration (PMI) is the process of unifying two entities and their assets, people, tasks, and resources in a manner that creates the most value for the future of the enterprise by realizing efficiencies and synergies.

Inevitably, with any merger or acquisition, the new company will have multiple and overlapping tools that are used by various parts of the business. In order to maintain productivity, it’s vital that the PMI strategy respects the importance of some tools to certain departments, and manages any technology transition or consolidation in a sensitive and thoughtful way, with decisions being made based on data gathered from the business.

Being able to analyze the usage, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and adoption rates of your collaboration estate is an excellent starting point.

The VOSS Answer

VOSS Insights gives actionable intelligence into the PMI, providing valuable insight into employee collaboration and performance. It enables you to visualize and actively manage the performance and quality of your collaboration tools, highlighting where consolidation or rationalization might take place, and the areas where you might save money.

Let’s not forget, the hardware, the IT stack, the collaboration platform, and the operational costs are running in duplicate, so these areas are targets for cost rationalization. The quicker your new organization rationalizes its technology, the quicker it will start making the savings that were part of the justification for the merger or acquisition in the first place. And, the sooner you identify where consolidation and rationalization can take place, the sooner you can start on your integration strategy.

However, a PMI cannot happen overnight. In the meantime, automation technology can help you manage multiple technologies from a single pane of glass. This is where VOSS Automate steps in.

VOSS Automate

VOSS Automate is perfect for organizations going through a merger or acquisition. It provides an automation and orchestration platform that acts as a single point of integration for your newly acquired collaboration platform with your existing collaboration estate, giving you a single pane of glass view of both systems.

Ultimately, to achieve the planned cost synergies, the acquired collaboration platform needs to be rationalized and merged with the existing collaboration capabilities. VOSS Migrate can be used to help you seamlessly and efficiently migrate users to the selected platform chosen as the rationalized end point, delivering significant cost savings on both removing duplicate technology costs and duplicate staff costs to maintain multiple platforms.

At its core, VOSS Automate automates collaboration related business processes to reduce effort/time and increase accuracy and quality – such automation obviously can also significantly contribute to achieving planned cost synergies. For example, it introduces zero-touch workflows and business processes that allow you to manage multiple technologies from a single point of control.

In this way, you are in the driving seat in terms of not only managing the integration of the potentially duplicated collaboration platforms, but you have tools to support migrations away from any redundant platforms, but most importantly, you have the tools to support your ongoing digital transformation strategies.

Next Steps

If you are planning for a merger or acquisition, or are currently engaged in a post merger implementation (PMI), an effective collaboration strategy will not only improve the employee integration and retention, it will also significantly support you reaching your revenue and cost synergy targets! To find out more about how VOSS can help with your M&A activity, please get in touch.