M&A Services
Streamlining the integration of complex healthcare acquisitions
The Client
An $8B healthcare company and leading provider of both physician-led, outsourced medical services with over 34,000 employees and affiliated clinicians; and, medical transport services providing and managing community-based medical transportation with over 29,000 employees.
The Challenge
The company had historically grown through acquisition; however, lacked a structured approach and formal oversight when integrating acquired companies. When the number of acquisitions began to grow at an accelerated rate, the company required a formal Integration Management Office (IMO) and comprehensive playbook with tools and templates to efficiently and effectively integrate the number of acquisitions moving through the Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) pipeline. The functional areas of responsibiliy for “boots-on-the-ground” integration work had fatigued and experienced resource constraints as a result of competing priorities in leading enterprise-wide initiatives while maintaining daily operations.
The Approach
Dietrich was literally “building the plane while flying it,” providing active oversight on multiple integrations across three divisions and simultaneously building the infrastructure to support a repeatable, scalable process. Due to the complexity and criticality of integration success, a separate Dietrich Team of IT specialists collaborated with the IMO to address IT specific operational and organizational issues and develop parallel processes, tools and templates. Specifically, we:
- Assessed the culture to determine sources of integration/initiative fatigue and resource bandwidth constraints.
- Established an overall integration approach, IMO structure and governance.
- Developed an M&A Hand-off Checklist to ensure the availability of critical information required to successfully plan and execute the integration.
- Leveraged the Dietrich Integration Playbook to create a set of client-specific tools and templates to enable IMO oversight of various sized acquisitions across all businesses.
- Organized integration activities by functional work groups and assisted them in identifying their respective milestones, critical tasks, timelines and interdependencies to support ownership and a repeatable process.
- Utilized a standard, disciplined oversight process focused on execution to assist in moving to an institutionalized integration culture.
- Developed a comprehensive communication plan to assist with change management.
- Documented comprehensive end-to-end current state system and process maps for critical functions identifying handoffs and accountabilities.
- Initiated and facilitated cross-functional solution development sessions to address unique process and technology requirements for each acquisition.
- Utilized a disciplined approach to identify, capture and report synergies.
- Conducted After-Action Reviews after each integration to continually refine the process.
The Result
Dietrich quickly delivered an integration playbook and provided hands-on oversight to 13 integrations, many concurrent, across three divisions. The approach successfully integrated acquisitions varying in size from less than 100 employees to over 5,000. Additionally, the client was supported in working with M&A to engage the IMO earlier and formalize a “hand-off” process. Finally, with Dietrich’s focus on knowledge transfer and internal sustainability, the client has been able to effectively and efficiently assimilate acquisitions.