Merger and Acquisition – A Large Energy Firm
The client is one of the largest producers of oil, natural gas, electricity, and ethanol in North America. The client acquired another large Oil & Gas company. The client wanted to strengthen its portfolio, improve operational efficiency and increase sustainable revenue growth by this acquisition. It was business critical that all the data is consolidated and managed correctly to create a workable, sustainable structure for the newly merged company, and so that the information is streamlined, efficient and authoritative. The challenges were not limited to consolidation of data, but also to completely understand the business value of the data that needed to be migrated or integrated from one system to another. Goal was to have a common ERP (SAP) system across the new enterprise, a comprehensive data platform and different multi-cloud and legacy systems integrated. The client was also considering making a change in its physical world by modernizing its core assets using digital applications. Given the client was about to embark on a Digital Transformation journey, they wanted transformation to progress from integrating diverse data, analyzing and visualizing data using new-age computers and platforms to augmented decision-making without any business discontinuity.
Key Challenges
- 50-60% of the initiatives intended to capture synergies from M&A activity are strongly related to IT so it is very important to get it right
- Migrating data after a merger or acquisition (M&A) is a major challenge for the companies concerned. There were so many data factors to consider after an M & A: the two systems being merged were incompatible; the quality of data was inconsistent, problematic and out of date; data was stored in multiple locations, and there were data compliance issues
- Data and business processes from both SAP systems, multiple applications in cloud and several legacy systems were to be merged in order to have a uniform process and a single view of data across the organization
- Huge volume of unstructured data generated by Digital Applications
Benefits
- A common SAP system was deployed which had relevant data such as customers, products, pricing etc. from previous SAP and legacy systems
- Secure, scalable information management platform that can allow for the secure sharing and exchange of data and content between business departments and companies
- Data platform was able to identify, capture, manage and distribute data, structured and unstructured, from almost any source
- Single view of data across the organization
- Advanced analytics capabilities with Real-time analytics for both short and long-term reporting predictive analytics for operational and business optimization
- Ability to get actionable insights in a timely manner by using business intelligence reporting and big data analytics
- Joint venture and later merger was approved by the regulatory authorities
- Overall business efficiency increased by 30% through standardization, consolidation, and simplification
- Increased productivity.
Implementation Highlights
- Identified the relevant data and its business value from the client and the acquired firm
- Designed and developed a master data repository
- Streamlined the business processes. Cleansed, completed, enriched data and then migrated it to a common SAP system
- Extended traditional data warehouse by building a data lake using Hadoop and HANA to leverage big data capabilities for comprehensive and predictive analytics
- Data from multi-cloud applications, SAP, and legacy systems was standardized, and then fed along with unstructured data from several digital applications to the “Data Lake” in batch as well as real time manner for reporting and analytics
- Achieved these goals within a relatively tight time frame
- Managed data synchronization and dependency