Corp Dev Leaders:
If You Are Running Your M&A Process on Spreadsheets You are Working Too Hard and Taking Too Much Risk.
Multiple analyst studies have uncovered six behaviors of the most successful M&A programs.
Successful programs:
- Are likelier than others to have M&A strategies aligned with their corporate strategies.
- Set go/no-go criteria for each stage of a deal.
- Gather information about revenue and cost synergies at several points in the M&A process.
- Dedicate more time to aligning people, getting buy-in, and developing measurements during an integration.
- Have clear, accountable owners for each phase of the M&A process.
- Use playbooks to codify and leverage knowledge gained from previous M&A deals
You Can’t Achieve These Best Practices with Spreadsheet-based “solutions”
- Data, documents and processes live in multiple places with unclear access rules rather than in one centralized, secure location
- End-to-end visibility, analysis and reporting is limited to individual phases of the deal life cycle rather than offering a holistic, end-to-end perspective.
- Risk and issue management are siloed, and accountability often blurred, resulting in delays
- Tracking actual delivered deal synergy against a deal thesis is difficult
- Capturing and leveraging knowledge gained from previous deals depends on individual initiative rather than being supported by effective tools and standard processes
- Providing auditors with the information they require to approve a deal is time consuming and chaotic
Midaxo’s Cloud for Corporate Development enables these successful behaviors with its purpose-built, unified platform that covers the full deal lifecycle.
Midaxo Cloud enables these best practices in a single, unified platform that makes it easy for any company to achieve success. And its built-in integration with spreadsheets, email, collaboration tools, portals, data sources, and other technologies offers the easiest path for spreadsheet-centric teams to evolve toward a better solution at their own pace while still working with the tools they are using today.
Midaxo Cloud Enables:
Best Practice #1: Align M&A Strategies with Corporate Strategies
Midaxo Cloud helps M&A teams ensure consistency in establishing and enforcing the optimal deal criteria linked to their M&A initiatives and company strategy.
- Initiatives capture a company’s M&A strategy and can are tracked across the entire deal lifecycle, from Target Sourcing to Due Diligence and onto post-merger Integration.
- The Discover capability supports utilizing 3rd party data sources to find potential targets
- Deal Scoring highlights and dynamically updates opportunities that rank highest against a company’s specific selection criteria
Best Practice #2: Establish Go / No Go Criteria at Each Stage of a Deal
Leverage Midaxo Cloud’s single repository for data, content and processes, expert playbooks and project audit capabilities to make well-informed Go / No Go decisions across the full deal life cycle.
- Single Source of Truth for data, content and processes across the entire deal life cycle simplifies cross-stage Go/No Go criteria.
- Best Practice Playbooks store company’s proceses, stages, criteria, actions and criteria for movement from one stage to the next for consistent application to any project
- Project audit capabilities allow for tracking the project journey through the stages including providing the date and person for each stage move.
Best Practice #3: Gather Information About Revenue and Cost Synergies at Several Points in the M&A Process
At each deal stage Midaxo Cloud makes it easy to review and assess deal status using agreed-upon goals, updated information and clear accountability.
- Synergy Tracking Initiatives capture discrete elements of a company’s M&A strategy so they can be assigned to responsible individuals, updated and tracked, ensuring accountability across the entire deal lifecycle.
- Playbooks allow these Initiatives to be standardized and applied to all projects.
- Analytics and 3rd Party Integrations use workflow automation and auto updating to enable these Initiatives to be automatically updated based on internal or external sources.
- Best Practice Reporting displays and reports on this information from multiple places within the platform.
Best Practice #4: Align People, Get Buy-in, Develop Measurements During an Integration
Midaxo Cloud’s playbook, synergy tracking and collaboration capabilities, plus its integration with the tools you are using today, reduce integration risk and accelerate success.
- Playbooks enable team members to collaborate on best practices activities and tailor measurements, checklists, task trees, documents, and responsibilities to their specific needs.
- Synergy Tracking Initiatives align discrete elements of a company’s M&A strategy with measurable project activities so they can be shared and tracked with clear ownership.
- Single Source of Truth for data, content and processes across the entire deal life cycle makes collaboration easy.
- Real-time Integration with 3rd party workgroup tools such as MS Teams or Slack further simplifies collaboration, allowing team members to work with the applications they already use.
Best Practice #5: Use Playbooks
Midaxo Cloud’s best-in-class playbooks get teams up and running quickly, reduce risk, accelerate synergy delivery and support continual M&A improvement.
- Comprehensive, Industry leading Playbooks provide best-in-class project cover page fields; project documents; issues & risks; check lists; task trees; dependencies; task documents; responsibilities; and user permissions.
- Integrate Your Own Playbooks: A team’s own playbooks can be combined with Midaxo-provided playbooks. The resulting playbook can be applied to a new project or as an extension to an existing one.
- Bulk and Auto Enrichment can be turned on once a playbook is applied to a project.
Best Practice #6: Assign Clear, Accountable Owners for Each Phase of the M&A Process
Midaxo Cloud’s personal dashboards, accountability assignment architecture and best practice recommendations enable teams to deliver every deal like their best deal.
- Single Source of Truth Across the Full Deal Life Cycle ensures projects, check list items, documents, tasks, issues, risks, initiatives, comments, and questions can all be assigned to specific people for accountability across the complete deal life cycle.
- Playbooks define the best practice approach to these assignments for easy, repeatable use on new projects and continual improvement
- Personal Dashboards allow people to see a consolidated list of their to-dos (e.g., CRM to-do; action due; issues) and follow-up with one click action.
- Customizable Analytics and Reporting provides easy drill down into project and people status.
Midaxo Cloud has been providing Corp Dev teams with these tools to succeed for over a decade.
Midaxo has created an end-to-end “Cloud for Corporate Development” that spans target sourcing, due diligence and post-merger integration.
Our single solution approach enables:
- Easier, more effective compliance
- Enterprise-quality data and document security
- Simple but secure collaboration across pipeline development, due diligence and post-merger integration
Our End-to-End Visibility give you real time insights and analytics into:
- Deal status
- Issues and risk
- Value realization
- Individual accountability for specific activities
- Audit trails
Our purpose-built platform delivers:
- Continuous improvement via customizable best practice playbooks
- Early action on risks and issues via our end-to-end visibility
- Individual accountability for value realization
There is no tool that compares to Midaxo in terms of ease of use and user-friendly interface. I would definitely recommend Midaxo and suggest investing the right amount of time to configure it to your practice for the best leverage of a great platform.”
VP and Associate General Counsel
Corporate M&A and Ventures
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Corp Dev leaders from PE-owned companies to Global 500 enterprises look to Midaxo for the insights they need to maximize the return on their Corporate Development investments while reducing risk.
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