When Merck merged with Schering-Plough, McKinsey were engaged to define the strategy to realize synergies as a result of this merger. In EMEA, the task of implementing this post-merger Integration strategy was assigned to the Regional HO based Business Partner. I was engaged to support her on this assignment.

I was tasked to initiate, plan and run a 3-day workshop to de-brief all 40+ EMEA IT countries on the Integration plan, timelines, scope of work, milestones and expected deliverables – creating mini project plan templates for Large, mid-size and small countries.

Thereafter, the task was to track and monitor the implement of post M&A Integration Strategy

I created the implementation scope based on country specific parameters, aligned milestones across business units and created the strategy execution framework.

Then, I reached out to the countries and took their inputs on expected involvement and created a change framework.

This exercise helped me to create content for the 3-day workshop where I explained the roles and responsibilities assigned to country leads and updated them with the governance structure and communications cadence.

I assigned the regional data governance and remediation team, regional process approval group and an Architecture board to review and approve legacy-to-Cloud migration of all CRM and related applications.

Capabilities were mapped to target application modules and published with a migration path for most common sources.

I worked with end-user computing teams for migrating all users to Active Directory, data teams for migrating data from Data Centres being sunset, local and regional IT/Business teams for updating processes (SOP’s) and training material.

Vendor resources, Internal teams and 3rd parties were able to collaborate with the right Business Units based on the capabilities being migrated over.

The Integration completed on time and within budget. We were able to on-board all countries on the new Cloud CRM platform.

The end-result was the realization of M&A synergies which were reported in the company annual investor updates.