Ensuring M&A success remains laborious, costly and elusive. It doesn’t have to be. Kepler’s bottoms-up, data-enabled approach enables firms to unlock value faster.

Every M&A team needs a well thought out value creation plan, as an extension of the enterprise strategy roadmap. This helps ensure that you are not chasing deals on the market even if they do not take you in the direction of your business strategy. Being opportunistic can sometimes get in the way of winning in the marketplace. Kepler’s teams are able to quickly explore various options, benchmark capabilities, uncover whitespace in the market, and present winning strategies.

Kepler Cannon has a track record of successfully pinpointing attractive acquisition targets through its AI-enabled prospecting tool. This tool quickly:

• Constructs a bespoke database of acquisition targets

• Benchmarks acquisition targets against each other

• Uncovers information instrumental in determining a target’s suitability

Firms that partner, JV, spin-off and acquire frequently, need a ready-to-go data room. Collating raw data such as financials, Accounts Payable extracts, HR databases, is not sufficient. This data needs to be enriched and reorganized into plug-and-play data cubes on total-cost of ownership, requirements for each role in the organization, flexibility of large contracts etc. Without Kepler Cannon’s data extraction, cleanup, enrichment, validation and integration capabilities, these data rooms can often be superficial, inconsistent and  may portray you or the deal as weak. Kepler Cannon has a proven methodology to create multi-layered, third-party neutral data rooms to facilitate deals with high confident.

When forming joint ventures or acquiring businesses with synergies, it is critical to have an informed plan for each critical person, and the organization overall. Some of the key questions that need to be answered upfront include:

• Who is critical to the success of a spin-off/carve-out vs. the business that stays behind?

• Who is required to stay in their current role or location due to a government, client, broker or regulatory mandate?

• For individuals wearing multiple hats, does their workload need to be reallocated/re-aligned?

• How should you benefit from the flexibility of any contract/temporary personnel?

• How can you minimize cross-department / location / organization dependencies as you reorganize?

Such intelligence and planning helps make early decisions on and role changes, succession planning, compensation and other cost management, attrition planning, and staff (de)augmentation.

Kepler Cannon’s data-oriented approach enables leaders to make such decisions quickly, and with confidence. We enrich traditional HR databases with bushiness, performance, and synergy intelligence to suggest go-forward workforce strategies for simplicity, scale, quick decisions and agility. Our workforce planning tools help quickly assess the impact of changes to the deal structure, organization, post merger/separation plans etc.

Vendor agreements remain the least disruptive part of an integration, and usually the one that reliably generate tangible synergies.  However, untangling vendor agreements requires long lead times and the journey starts 1-2 years before any significant M&A activity.  Additionally, nuances such as minimum commitments, auto-renewals, payment/rebate schedules, fungibility or lack there of buyers etc.  require a bottoms-up, data driven, scenario planning and modularization of agreements.

Leveraging our AI tools, Kepler Cannon consultants are able to ingest a plethora of vendor agreements and quickly suggest strategies to modularize contracts with minimum friction to prepare for future M&A activity.

Post deal, similar algorithms help uncover and implement strategies to gain from the newfound economies of scale and integration funding.

Most large organizations suffer from an expensive tech stack with duplication and overlaps. These issues are well known but hard to solve without a significant hit to your P&L. A clever M&A strategy can solve this problem effectively while helping you modernize your tech stack.

Kepler’s bottoms-up data (and TCO)-enabled approach has proven to be the best for short and medium term tech integration. It balances impact to your total cost of ownership, with customer impact, while exploiting all available synergies across your ecosystem. It really is a balancing act! But one that you can win at.

As they say, the devil is in the details. Most M&A synergy targets remain unrealized. For you to realize value, it needs to be estimated bottoms up.  This requires understanding how the economics of individual business capabilities are evolving, and can scale. Kepler has a proven value realization framework from its work on tech transformations and client value engineering, that have proven effective with M&A integrations as well.  Data, once again, continues to illluminate the path forward.