Quality in Action: Integrating Business Model Changes
Get the picture: three out of five acquisitions fail. Then, why do them? Answer: they are a viable shortcut to growth. This anecdote covers integration, change, process improvement, and marketing & sales. A fabulously successful distribution model made a sizeable acquisition. The investment thesis was marketing channel diversification. The diversification was achieved in spades, but unintended consequences followed. The advent of a new marketing channel also dramatically changed the way new customers were processed. While the company had been able to historically predict waves of new customers relative to marketing campaigns, the acquired business unit afforded the fulfillment engine no such insight. Over night, a bottleneck emerged in the new customer processing that was intolerable to management, and impractical for customers. The solution lay in mapping what was actually happening in the fulfillment process to identify the points of bottleneck. This was followed by both changing the process and reallocating fulfillment resources. The ingredients were there for resolution: passionate employees, leaders with a bias for action, a customer satisfaction culture, recognition that status quo was unacceptable, and a willingness to engage an external resource who could safely ask tough questions to get to root causes quickly. In practical terms, the internal subject matter experts resolved the problem quickly by being supported with facilitation, a process, and tools that fit the situation. In three weeks, execution went from chaotic to copasetic.