Digital M&A Series: Part IV – Digital Playbook for Accelerated Integration

With 60,000+ M&A deals and ~6Trn USD in value, global M&A activity was at an all-time high during 2021 despite the pandemic. M&A activities are likely to gather more momentum and continue to stay as one of the primary growth drivers in the foreseeable future. However, the historical pain points around finding the right targets, doing extensive due diligence, and integrating businesses continue to make it a challenging activity. Unsuccessful integrations or missing critical steps can delay the entire transaction resulting in loss of time and resources and ultimately prohibits the acquiring firms from achieving a competitive advantage.

Firms using acquisitions as a core growth strategy need an efficient and scalable M&A model. An integration playbook can help build a scalable model for firms to integrate target companies quickly and preserve value leakages. A well-defined playbook is based on time-tested frameworks and methodologies. It offers a structured mechanism to identify and define program priorities, scope, complexities, resource needs, and timelines for deal execution. It is an accelerator that helps companies in executing a smooth transaction in a time critical deal.

Once the playbook is created, future transactions can be managed efficiently based on the learnings from the previous transactions along with the tools and templates created. This reduces dependencies on people and partners involved in the integration process. It is important to continuously update the integration model and adapt evolving best practices. Over the years, the M&A playbooks have evolved from being planning tools to execution accelerators. We have tried to summarize this evolution by mapping them to three archetypes.

Playbook Archetypes:

Table 1: Playbook Archetypes

Infosys has developed customizable industry specific integration planners and multiple accelerators across the advanced archetypes. In this paper, we have focused on the first archetype and the description in subsequent sections is limited to it.

Playbook in the M&A Lifecycle

Before we explain the details of utilizing a playbook, it is imperative to view the phases involved during an M&A integration project

Figure 1: Typical M&A lifecycle

A playbook plays its role in the strategy phase to structure and accelarate the overall program execution by providing predefined activities, dependencies and estimation models to kickstart the process.

Infosys Proprietary Playbook

Infosys has a proprietary playbook on M&A integration. This playbook helps in turning over the planning phase at a faster rate. It entails Day 0 and Day 1 planning, prioritization of tasks, maintaining cross functional dependencies, guidelines and ready to use templates and checklist for due diligence. The below diagram shows the various elements involved in a playbook.

Figure 2: Multiple sources are utlized as on input to the playbook to achieve the outcomes shown on the right

Inside a Playbook

Due diligence: In this phase, the potential deal is verified from commercial, and operational (including IT) standpoint. It results in making more informed decisions about the deal. The observations from due diligence are used for future planning and roadmap creation.

• For instance, in a diligence process, it is observed that the seller company does not have a disaster recovery data center, and the buyer company will have to include these observations in its future planning and account for a data center. This helps the buyer company analyze the deal and plan accordingly

Questionnaire: It consists of a set of questions whose answers are used as an input to the playbook tool for identifying the scope, planning resources and budgeting.

• For enterprise asset management (maintenance department), it seeks information like “provide a high-level structure of maintenance organization”, “resource costing and metrics for cost allocation” etc.

Resource/effort analyzer: Every department (HR, finance, supply chain, IT infra etc.) is interviewed on its people, process, technology, and metrics usage.

• For the finance team, questions like “FTEs required to support general accounting function” gives the current FTE structure

All these elements are assessed along with cross functional dependencies to evaluate the scope and complexity. The Infosys playbook also covers an exhaustive list of activities across IT and key business functions including but not limited to finance, supply chain, HR, manufacturing, security, IT- infrastructure, IT – applications, change management, cross workstream management. These activities are categorized under each phase of the M&A lifecycle starting from Day 0 until the end of execution.

The playbook enables us to assign the task priorities along with the responsibilities through RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) matrix among the business, IT, consulting, 3^rd party vendors and other key units. It also has a pre-built set of cross functional dependencies based on prior experiences in the similar domain and provides flexibility to add or modify them.

A playbook also contains a set of templates, framework and project guidelines that channelizes the integration execution. The list of sample template is listed below:

Playbook Outcome

• Detailed project activities
• Resource estimation
• Budget estimation
• Projected timelines

To understand this, let’s consider an example for HR process stream. The first task under HR would be to understand the organizational structure. This playbook would list all the level 1 task and level 2 sub-tasks under the organizational structure. This pre-defined task list enables the team in early planning. All the cross-functional dependencies are also clearly mentioned. Once this is established, the activities are marked based on its stage of execution i.e., Day 0, Day 1, Day 30, Day 60, and Day 90+. A responsibility matrix (RACI) is created for easy assignment of the sub-tasks. A playbook also contains a set of templates and frameworks which enables seamless delivery of these sub-tasks.

Key benefits of a playbook

·        Significant time reduction (~40%) in planning phase

·        Provides a clear sequencing of tasks without missing any critical task/step

·        Prediction of resources and budget

·        Enables the company to execute multiple integrations at the same time without compromising on quality

A playbook is a great tool to remain competitive in the market. It gives an additional edge by providing key accelerators to reduce time and manage efforts. These playbooks act as an anchor for the subsequent deals for the parent organization however the predictability of the model can vary based on the complexity of integration(s).

Read more from this series:

Part 1: Research and development considerations during mergers and acquisitions

Part 2: Integrating smart manufacturing and digital supply chain

Part 3: Managing IT infrastructure separation during divestiture