A corporate merger or acquisition scenario is usually a mixed bag—there's excitement, high stress, low sleep, long work days, and a nail-biting finish!

Once an M&A deal is signed, it brings in a renewed sense of purpose, higher aspirations and new growth targets. There's also some agonizing over how to manage the big changes that inevitably happen when one company buys or merges with another company.

Expect M&A activity to ramp up in the coming months!

According to a PwC report, global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) hit new highs in 2021. The announced deals exceeded 62,000 globally in 2021, up an unprecedented 24% from 2020. The combined scenario of low operating costs, lower regulation and taxes, and ever-lower interest rates over the past decade helped companies achieve year-on-year earnings growth via M&As. And all indications point to another supercharged year ahead!

"Industry disruptions and huge opportunities from digitization and technology, combined with the availability of capital, create a foundation for continued record M&A activity. We should expect new and thriving companies to be leading the charge on acquisitions, not just big tech players." 

—Marc Suidan (Global Technology, Media & Telecommunications Deals Leader, Principal, PwC US)

According to research by Deloitte, companies choose to pursue M&A deals for several reasons: 

• Technology acquisition (20%)

• Expanding a customer base in existing markets (19%)

• Increasing or diversifying product offerings and services (16%)

Other reasons also include:

• Entering a new regional market

• Acquiring talent

• Investing in specific technological capabilities

M&As impact not just the business and its finances but also the technologies that they will use.

How do you prepare for the big changes that a merger or acquisition brings? It's a significant transition involving people, processes, systems and most importantly—data, which is the fuel on which the modern enterprise runs. CIOs must prepare to implement large-scale changes to existing IT infrastructure and adapt to changes in technology platforms.

The risks of merging technology landscapes: How do you migrate your data?

When a company buys or merges with another company, it also acquires a ton of different types of data and processes. One of the biggest risks in post-M&A transitions is complex data migration and lack of harmonization. If not managed well, you could end up with additional technical debt and maybe even potential penalties from Transition Service Agreements. 

These challenges can affect your overall project goals and make the transition process complex, costly and time-consuming. That's why determining which business systems (e.g. ERPs, accounting systems, HR software) and data sets to migrate or integrate as part of the transition becomes more critical than ever to ensure business continuity.

Revolution Data Systems provides you with a post-M&A transition plan to mitigate these risks:

Consulting services

Our business process consultants guide your teams in managing newly acquired information. We help you map the technology landscapes of both entities, identify overlaps or inconsistencies and plan for system integrations, data migration process, decommissioning of legacy applications and new technology acquisitions and implementations.

Digitization services

Scanning legacy paper files and integrating them into existing systems is essential during a merger or transition. You must keep information from both entities easily accessible over distributed locations and different teams. Document management is a key consideration to ensure every employee can access the data they need to function smoothly.

Moving data to new target systems

Your data must move securely with you when you move offices! Data also gets acquired when you acquire another company (or are acquired by a larger entity). We have highly skilled teams for data migration projects and application support to help you transition. 

Talk to an RDS consultant to know more.

With OpenText AppEnhancer, we offer you a single platform with unlimited applications for your business. It gives you the power to create robust applications that meet your organization's content needs. It connects employees, clients and partners with content they need in any process. What's more, it easily integrates with your existing applications to capture, store, retrieve and manage documents. In short, AppEnhancer likely ticks all the checkboxes on your transition list.

Aspects to address when you transfer data

Here are some key considerations in planning a data migration strategy for organizations post-M&A.

Build an execution plan

Data migrations and carve-outs are among the most complex tasks in executing a merger or acquisition. So, it is mission-critical that your M&A plan prioritizes details of how to migrate your data and does not just focus on client-facing business processes.

Some of the critical questions the CIO needs to ask:

• Do we need to integrate acquired business systems like ERP into our existing systems?

• Do we need to identify and carve out data from these systems? Or does the acquired/acquiring company already use the same systems?

• Are there regulatory issues to be considered that could stall or delay the process? Are there any potential TSA (Transition Service Agreements) compliance risks to be considered?

• When do we need the data migration or carve-out to be completed?

Talk to RDS digital transformation consultants for a tailored plan for your transition.

Maximize the role of automation in your data migration plan

Take the opportunity of this transition to automate labor-intensive and repetitive processes. It ensures that large-volume menial tasks are executed quickly and painlessly while leaving the more complex choices to be done manually. Automation enables IT teams to allocate and prioritize their resources to perform even the most challenging migration plans. Automation also frees decision-makers to focus on tasks that most require their experience, insights and judgment. 

Speak with RDS automation experts today.

Finally, before you transition or migrate your data, check off these critical points: 

• Identify and prioritize which data sets and associated master information to migrate.

• Review and translate your data into appropriate formats, including pulling data out of legacy systems.

• Plan to extract data from unstructured formats so that they are easy to retrieve, regardless of how they were generated.

• Evaluate the security levels to protect data in an end-to-end manner, encrypting information wherever necessary and limiting the number of hands that handle the data.

Talk to our business process automation experts, who will be able to carve out data migration strategies to translate and manage the data and information in a structured and secure manner.

RDS has highly experienced document management and data capture consultants, data migration services, data integration experts, application maintenance teams and support & training services to help you transition smoothly into 3rd party systems.

Contact RDS to migrate your data and systems successfully and make the best out of your M&A transition for a brand new start!