Case Study: Post-Merger Consolidation of Business Systems

Situation

When a company makes an acquisition or merges with another company, it’s likely there will be different business systems, presenting a range of integration challenges often taking years to fully overcome. If these challenges are handled effectively, though, it will ultimately result in net efficiencies and cost savings across the enterprise.

Prisio has been doing work for a major US-based entertainment company, streamlining their financial processes and systems, including billing, revenue management, credit and collections. The company then acquired another media company for over $1B to extend their global media and entertainment footprint. The target company was headquartered in the UK, and managed a number of operations in multiple different countries, spanning Western and Central Europe, Latin America and the USA.

This presented a number of challenges for consolidation, including, cultural, language, legal, and regulatory. Each country had its own jurisdictions, requirements, and regulations. In addition, while the acquiring company ran on Oracle for Finance and Procurement, with a single chart of accounts, the target firm had multiple business application systems with different charts of accounts in different countries.

Objective

The company formed a special team to address these issues. Based on the successful work Prisio had done prior with their US-based teams, they engaged Prisio to create a comprehensive plan to systematically merge and consolidate all of the business systems, across all of the newly acquired global operations.

Initially, the short-term goal was to perform a detailed assessment of the various financial business applications. Ultimately, the long-term goal was to create a unified Global Chart of Accounts, with a single fully-integrated business application globally.

Actions

The initial assessment was intended to be a precursor to the integration, migration and implementation initiative. Prisio worked with the company’s financial teams to perform and deliver the following:
  • Detailed assessment of the current financial business applications footprint
  • Roadmap and high-level plan to integrate the target companies into the existing Oracle applications
  • Scope of Work for the integration and implementation of the target company systems
  • Assessment report, which included:
    • Current financial business applications footprint
    • Identification of the detailed scope (Applications, Geography, Conversions and Interfaces) for the integration
    • Overall approach for the Integration initiative
    • High Level project and resource plans
By utilizing the depth and global experience of the Prisio team, the assessment was able to be completed in a rapid 6-week time period.
  • Kickoff
    • Develop questionnaire
    • Plan and schedule for detailed meetings
    • Initial kickoff meeting

  • Data Collection
    • Gathering data from the target firm
    • Creating a current application system architecture
    • Identifying current external system integrations
    • Creating a current CEMLI (Customizations & Enhancement) catalog

  • Data Analysis
    • Draft assessment report
    • Conduct additional Q&A as needed

  • Report
    • Complete assessment report
    • Report Presentation
Based on the data and analysis from the assessments, Prisio travelled to meet with global teams to lead and participate in Global Chart of Accounts re-engineering, standardization of Financials, Billing and Procurement processes, and execute the rollout and migration of regional business applications.

Results

After the assessments and regional rollouts completed, the company was able to reduce costs significantly in a number of ways:

  • Significant savings on licenses, business application management and maintenance, and server infrastructure
  • Consolidation of application support services with staff savings, such as DBA, data center support staff, and infrastructure managers
  • Creation of shared service offerings for Financials, Billing and Procure to pay areas with staff savings
  • Reduction of worldwide financial close cycles
  • Improved world-wide financial reporting in a single chart of accounts
  • Creation of a “Streamline Template” to integrate and migrate future acquisitions in the consolidated Oracle business system
  • Migration of master data (Customers, Suppliers, Assets) and open transactions data (Supplier Invoices, Customer Invoices, GL Balances, Purchase Orders)
  • Regional integrations (banking for SEPA, BACS and numerous third party)
The entire 2.5 year project completed successfully, including testing, cutover, user training, go-live, and support. The net result was a single global system, with standardized global business processes, a single global chart of accounts for financial reporting, and a single business application.

Have a technology challenge?
We’d love to solve it.

CONTACT US

Stay informed

Be the first to know about special offers and technology updates that can help you grow your business.

Facebook Linkedin
© 2024 Prisio     All rights reserved.