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Bringing a merger, acquisition, or divestment program to successful completion involves navigating many challenges. One of these is coordinating activity across different IT systems and organizations. Another is migrating internal and external users while avoiding delay and customer-facing disruption. The Cutover platform brings clarity to a complex process and reduces risk.
A significant amount of change involving multiple IT systems and vast numbers of users always has a high risk potential. Between 70 and 90% of M&As fail. Poor planning and program management is a major reason for failure in these critical business activities.
Plan
Plan and rehearse critical activities to reduce risk and optimize flows of work, helping to achieve more in the short time windows available. Go from relying on others to keep you informed to having an accurate long-term view of all future activity.
Orchestrate
Streamline the entire program, aligning teams and technology for effective execution. Keep a close watch on deadlines, notify users automatically to begin tasks, and make live adjustments to the program schedule as needed.
Analyze
Increase transparency and post-event evaluation thanks to Cutover’s detailed performance analysis data. Extract useful insights to optimize future activity and build them into templates to ensure every M&A and divestment runs more smoothly than the last. The comprehensive audit trail is also ideal for regulatory compliance.
Two major hotel chains underwent a merger that involved 100 million external users and 300,000 internal users, 17 systems, 458 releases, 20 million lines of code and $140 million spent on software development.
Problem
The client brought in a third-party consulting firm to shape and support the change in systems implementation as well as a cutover strategy for all the impacted IT systems within their reservations and loyalty business units. For such a complex initiative, a powerful, collaborative tool was required to bring together all the data and tasks in one place. The client asked the consulting team for the most innovative and market-leading solution for orchestrating human and machine activities and making the event observable to the huge number of stakeholders. They chose Cutover.
Solution
The hotel chain initially started the merger with many manual processes and technical automation and adopted Cutover eight weeks before the first major go live. Cutover enabled them to properly prepare for and manage the complex set of interdependent technology changes by providing a comprehensive event orchestration capability which enabled greater control. All tasks were managed down to the second and progress could be continuously monitored by stakeholders with task orchestration and reporting automated via Cutover. Cutover eliminated the manual processes and provided incident governance, creating immediate value.
Some of the events in the merger involved up to 500 people and they enjoyed using Cutover to rehearse events, which helped to continuously improve and refine plans which had previously not been possible. The visibility into processes and comprehensive audit trail allowed teams to better understand progress during the extremely complex event. Many users and those running the event commented that the merger could not have gone as smoothly without Cutover.
Outcome
The cutover activities were simulated multiple times, and the actual cutover weekend was a huge success. The biggest benefit was continuous improvement: all tasks, releases and communications were logged in real time for analysis and improvement and to provide evidence to responsible executives.
