Company acquisitions require extensive planning, including identifying and evaluating potential targets, negotiating and closing deals, and integrating acquired businesses. This template covers all of these key focus areas.
Successful integration requires careful planning for organizational structure, finances, roles and responsibilities, and culture. Use this template to document your plan and monitor progress.
Data Migration
It’s critical to analyze what is to be migrated from legacy systems to the target application system. During this phase, it is often necessary to identify data quality issues that must be addressed prior to the start of build. It is also important to establish and formally document the migration acceptance criteria at this point in time so that key data stakeholders can use these tolerance limits to make decisions about system cutover.
Creating an interface design specification for any migration elements that require a different approach than the standard application database is an essential step in this phase. During this phase, it is also important to focus on pruning data that is historical or surplus to requirements. It’s often far more cost-effective to map out a migration using specifications rather than jumping straight into coding, as it will be easier to re-design the logic if significant issues are discovered. This can save significant time and money.
Data Protection
Companies pursue M&A for many reasons, but all of them come down to synergy – the idea that when two entities merge, they will be more powerful or competitive than they would have been on their own. In addition to financial evaluation, you also need to assess company culture. This template takes you through a multi-step culture analysis, measuring strategic orientation, communication, training and development, planning, teamwork, and more.
M&A involves a lot of moving parts, and it’s important that everyone involved understands their role from the outset. This chart lets you list each deliverable, its description, the criterion for acceptance, and the party responsible. You can refer to this chart throughout integration to ensure that no deliverable gets overlooked.
Data Security
Whether it’s a bank dealing with massive amounts of personal and financial data or a one-man business storing the contact details of its customers on a mobile phone, all businesses today deal in information. As a result, data security is an important consideration when assessing prospective acquisition candidates.
As a result, the evaluation process should include a thorough analysis of the candidate’s data protection measures. This will provide the M&A counsel with a diagnostic picture of how the target protects its critical data systems and repositories from hacking and other threats.
It will also identify how the seller manages third-party vendors and any agreements that may affect the sharing of personal information. This will help to avoid assuming liability for any breaches that occur after the transaction closes. To this end, the M&A team should also consider requesting copies of any documentation of the existing security framework for how the company collects and stores its information.