I must say that sometimes M&A transitions are a pain in the *** for HR and HRIT practitioners.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite rare in my experience that a merger will be a pure 50\/50%, more often than not one of the merger partners is getting a tiny fraction more than 50% and so can govern the decisions within the deal.\u00a0 Additionally, mergers often deal with business systems and sales synergies first, financial systems second, and anything else that is not HR.\u00a0 Pretty much, HR comes last, but while often considered a tactical decision, our stuff is far from tactical.<\/p>\n
Especially with domestic M&A, the tactical decision is often about how to merge payrolls in the quickest and most efficient manner.\u00a0 I\u2019ll hazard a guess that if there are 2 organizations and one is on PeopleSoft and the other on ADP outsourced, the organizations that only focus on the tactical will more often than not put the entire population on ADP.\u00a0 ADP has a pretty incredible ability to get large organizations onto a single domestic payroll quickly and effectively.\u00a0 However, mergers often fail to look at the impacts of the HCM and talent systems which are critical.\u00a0 If you were to combine core HCM and Talent systems, then the combined organization might actually have a different perspective on how to merge payroll data.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m totally ok with in-house HCM with outsourced payrolls and benefits by the way, but taking the easy solution often does not account for strategic long term systems design.<\/p>\n
When we get to global organizations, it\u2019s often more complex.\u00a0 Many global organizations will simply take whichever system the acquirer already has.\u00a0 Once again, this is more of a function that HR is last in line rather than what is best for HR.\u00a0 Systems integrators in M&A are looking at the core business solutions and really could care less about HR.\u00a0 A couple of the decision criteria here should be about who is more integrated to start with, and who has the more powerful system.\u00a0 We should be looking at long term systems planning instead of short term gains for the combined business (but M&A is often about short term shareholder gains unfortunately).\u00a0 We should also be looking at long term integration possibilities and who has the roadmap that gets the combined organization there sooner.\u00a0 Integration is not just about systems that contain the whole global population, but also about achieving process standardization across multiple divisional organizations and systems such as talent acquisition, talent management and HCM.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a tough call of who should win the HCM battle in M&A, but all too often it\u2019s not even a valid decision point as M&A system integrators (consultants usually) don\u2019t put enough thoughtful analysis into HR.\u00a0 At the end of the day it\u2019s about synergies, not easy and tactical wins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I must say that sometimes M&A transitions are a pain in the *** for HR and HRIT practitioners.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite rare in my experience that a merger will be a pure 50\/50%, more often than not one of the merger…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,40,47,48,8,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-change-management","category-enterprise-solutions","category-governance","category-hr-service-delivery","category-strategies","category-hr-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1143"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1211,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}