The VITA™ Advantage - Mergers and Acquisitions
Mergers & Acquisitions for ERP - Overview
Businesses involved in M&A activities face critical technology choices regarding platforms, networking and applications. They cannot afford to repeat old enterprise resource planning (ERP) mistakes, or to make new mistakes based on any misunderstanding of SOA’s capabilities. It is easy to understand market confusion (and subsequent disappointment) about SOA-based technologies, when SOA is so often inaccurately cast as a breakthrough architecture promising salvation for out-moded and unwieldy systems, instead of as an enabler or an architectural façade, which are more accurate descriptions.
SOA technology delivers its real value in allowing the market’s best-of-breed solutions to integrate effectively into strong and agile architectures like Agresso’s VITA.
Agresso customers, characterized as “Businesses Living in Change” (BLINC™), have a better choice. When facing M&A activities they can
- either to move data from their acquired/merged businesses completely into Agresso’s VITA; or
- leverage Agresso’s integration capabilities – which also use SOA – to add in any non-Agresso applications that they wish to retain.
M&A advantages
Ultimately, Agresso customers gain a three-fold business advantage, when faced with a merger or acquisition scenario:
Mergers & Acquisitions - Advantage 1
VITA™ M&A advantage #1: Iterative ERP conversion – the agility factor
Many reasons are cited in the press for disasters occurring in ERP installation and conversion projects, but it’s not unusual to see the ERP vendor blame the buyer for not clearly defining their business requirements. Worse still, this excuse is often corroborated internally and even some industry analysts accept it as a justifiable reason for failure.
Instead of businesses having to specify precisely and finally, the data structures, reporting methodologies and analytic components that they wish to keep from the merged companies – at the outset of the new merger – shouldn’t they be allowed to:
1. Start with initial assumptions and expand on them, as their understanding of those assumptions evolves?
2. Change their minds even during or after the conversion process, because of (for example):
- a changing business requirement?
- an honest mistake?
- new processes or management thinking?
The Agresso VITA architecture is adaptable. It is forgiving. It allows merged companies to pursue strategies of continuous business process improvements – without re-implementation costs or business disruption. It is also intelligent enough, at the outset, to import only the data needed from replaced ERP systems – avoiding the more typical implementation step of moving “everything” and then laboriously weeding out redundant processes and data.
These features even offer benefits to highly experienced IT heads, who have managed multiple ERP deployments. When converting merged/acquired (non-Agresso) ERP solutions over to Agresso Business World, they state that they are consistently well under their budget and timescale estimates. Agresso customers often report that doing M&A conversions (from non-Agresso solutions over to Agresso) takes much less money and time than they originally believed – as much as 50-70 percent less than internal cost projections and with completion timescales 30-50 percent faster than they have experienced with other leading ERP solutions.