Mergers and acquisitions are complicated. If you’ve ever taken part in one, you know that getting both companies on the same page can be both messy and time consuming. In many cases there isn’t an adequate system in place to pave a smooth road so that both companies can transition in a quick and efficient manner. This leaves open the possibility for lot of potential headaches and miscommunications, not to mention lost revenue. Avoiding these pitfalls requires the implementation of a standardized artwork and labeling process that all new employees can adapt to and follow.
After all, when you’re purchasing a company, you’re purchasing their packaging, artwork, logos and assets because that’s where you’re going to profit the most. So it doesn’t make sense for a company to acquire another company without having software that will allow them both to distribute assets company wide. The new employees should be able to have a Digital Asset Library (DAL) where they can immediately begin to access files so that employees from both companies can begin collaborating efficiently.
Maybe the most important part of the merger and acquisition process from a marketing standpoint is brand harmonization which can be accomplished with Brand Lifecycle Management software (BLM). Keeping brand-wide consistency is understandably difficult when two companies and their employees merge. But when you lose brand consistency, you lose familiarity, authenticity and the trust of consumers. Fortunately, this otherwise complex task can be streamlined fairly easily, but it requires a BLM that offers an enterprise-wide solution to harmonize workflow and offer a DAL to keep all of your assets organized in a centralized database.
So what if there was a system capable of making life easier for both companies as they’re planning on merging? Try to picture an ideal software solution for such an occasion. Ideally it would be in place before the acquisition even took place. Maybe it would be a system that wouldn’t leave important tasks like developing uniform workflow processes as a secondary consideration. This would give you the foresight to help you plan ahead so you can anticipate and hurdle obstacles or even avoid them entirely.
This kind of system would let you route the new company into a new standardized process and immediately get employees using pre-developed templates within the new BLM once the acquisition took place. And preparing new employees so that they could use the new BLM immediately would greatly reduce the probability of error and confusion caused by having to use multiple systems, if not eliminate it completely. On a human level, it would give the employees that you’ve just acquired a feeling that they’re a part of your company and not simply acquirees. Keep in mind that you’re integrating a lot of people from the acquired company and that includes its graphic designers, printers, their entire supply chain, basically. When you’ve got a lot of people coming together, making expectations clear and opening up lines of communication is a win for everyone.
A BLM should be able to provide you with a glimpse of what to expect in the coming months and years after the acquisition took place. Based on your historical data and process templates it would be easy for you to estimate how long it would take you to implement mass labeling changes. For example, it could give you visibility over thousands of public facing SKUs, which would give you valuable insight.
You’d be gaining a huge advantage by offering the acquired company the ability to quickly upload their key assets into the system. This will help you set up strategies about what key graphic art changes need to be executed within the next ninety days, six months, one year, etc. You’d have an BLM that would be an extremely effective tool during a time that tends to be extremely chaotic.
One of the most dramatically growing BLMs on the market today is BLUE Software. Without BLUE’s robust capabilities, you might know that you’re inheriting a marketing team, but there would be any number of variables that you would be missing. Further, you would lack the visibility to drive efficiencies out of the artwork and labeling process. BLUE gives you that visibility as well as the ability to streamline the complicated task of absorbing a company of equal size or smaller by bringing in an effective set of processes and offering your new team members better capabilities. We’ve done exactly this for companies like Astra Zeneca, Shire, Smuckers, Unilever and more.
Find out more about what BLUE’s Brand Lifecycle Management Software can do for you.
