Maestro Addresses Complex Mergers or Divestitures for Companies Using Salesforce
Driven by a rapidly evolving marketplace, abundant investment capital, a pile of private equity cash, a strong stock market and (still) cheap debt, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity grew 82% in 2021 over 2020. And this M&A explosion continues in 2022, along with a significant rise in divestitures.
Merging the operations of two companies is a complex undertaking. No two companies do anything the same way, and integrating sales, consolidating operations, and combining customer and partner data is complicated. It’s no easier in a divestiture: Un-merging data assets is complex and creates a myriad of risks across the shared systems.
At ForeFront, we know how painful this can be. In fact, in recent years we’ve been involved in some of the most complex mergers, acquisitions and divestitures on the Salesforce platform.
We recently completed a divestiture project for a Fortune 500 multinational industrial conglomerate – an organizational split made particularly challenging by several factors, including comingled data across its many brands and more than 30 million records.
The client realized that the consulting firms and investment banks that provide M&A advisory have limited expertise in technology “blueprinting,” and mostly depend on longtime partners and legacy IT services providers that offer a traditional approach to integration. So they came to ForeFront for a different solution utilizing Salesforce.
Here’s why: Salesforce cloud technology supports and enhances value creation by accelerating the completion of the merger or divestiture and, most important, gives the combined or spun-off companies the ability to implement their cloud transformation as part of the transaction.
At ForeFront, we see this transform-while-merging strategy becoming more widely used, and believe it can help merged, acquired or divested companies gain momentum post-transaction.
Besides taking this innovative approach to the divestiture project – and leveraging our Salesforce and integration expertise – we utilized Maestro, a ForeFront-developed Salesforce DevOps tool with complex configuration data extract, mapping, deprecation and migration, and other sophisticated governance capabilities. Maestro helped us deliver a shorter path to success for the client by enabling, automating and accelerating complex split-org tasks, and by managing and reducing their divestiture risks.
