Introduction
Competition in the business world has forced several companies to adopt various strategies. Such business strategies include mergers and acquisitions. The companies coming into a partnership should formulate policies in order for the partnership to be successful. Well-conducted mergers lead to market growth, build complementary strengths, and eliminate potential inefficiencies. Since this process involves human resources, it is impossible to anticipate its success based solely on balance sheets via tangible factors like headcounts, market shares, and infrastructure, among others. It is for this reason that meetings between both teams become a crucial element in the process because what eventually matters is what is in the hearts and minds of the people and the culture that they decide to build while making progress.
Strategy for conducting meetings in merger/acquisition
Bearing in mind that these are two distinct entities coming together as one, the recommended strategy should involve scheduling of separate meetings with each team and then bringing all teams together. Such meetings will formulate and look into the objectives of each partner. These meetings will produce a report of intent outlining each team’s position and desires with respect to the merger. The separate meetings have several advantages. First, it will provide the involved teams with the opportunity to discuss projected deliberations informally and in confidence before making any further progress. Secondly, the teams will have a chance to separately discuss the jurisdiction, legal and other issues such as the scope of information to be presented and competition considerations. They will also prepare teams for the forthcoming investigations by identifying crucial issues at an early stage. Further, these meetings will lay a better foundation for all teams meeting to be conducted next because there will be an excellent understanding of the pertinent issues resulting in more conversant discussions on the transaction rationale and function of the merger in question. However, the cons associated with these meetings is that they consume a lot of time, particularly in complex cases that require subsequent meetings, thus delaying transactions for the companies involved (DG Competition, 2004).
The next step is bringing all teams together in one meeting under this strategy. The aim of these meetings will be to enhance intelligibility in handling daily merger issues and particularly ensuring good communication between the merging companies. It will also provide ample opportunity for the involved companies to conduct frank and open discussions and ensure that their standpoints are known throughout the merging process.
The importance of these meetings is that they contribute to both efficiency and quality of the decision-making process since there are transparency and good communication. They also provide a round-table through which information is mutually exchanged by the merging companies. Further, it is in these meetings that a non disclosure agreement will be signed by both companies to maintain confidentiality should the deal fail and incomplete declarations are eliminated. Finally, teams get a chance to deliver additional comments, thus facilitating coordination. However, a third party is required to ensure that each company’s rights and all legal issues are observed, hence incurring additional costs.
With this strategy, both companies will be guided, co-operation and understanding on business and legal matters will be fostered and built upon, the efficiency of research will be enhanced, high level of transparency and certainty in the merger review process will be ensured and the available short time for merger procedures will be made efficient and productive as much as possible for the companies and parties involved.
Venues for the meetings
Internal meetings scheduled separately with each team should be held in places where strict confidence is upheld and, at the same time, where real-time feedback to members present and represented is ensured. Therefore, the appropriate venue for internal meetings should be on each team’s company premises. This is because each team member will be selected from involved companies, and they are expected to guide integration. When held at the company’s premises, consistent communication will take place while employees receive on-time feedback and problems handled as they arise. Also, the employees will feel connected to the process, and the course will be adjusted easily as needed. It will also favor teams that are stacked in a hierarchical approach according to areas or levels of responsibility like a senior team comprising of several teams broken into units (Knilans, 2009).
Meetings with all teams at the same time should on the other hand be conducted at commission’s premises where agreements are signed down or alternatively by videoconferencing or telephony if appropriate. This is because discussions in these meetings are voluntary part of merging process and should be conducted without prejudice to the investigation and handling of issues. In addition, mutual benefits for the companies involved can only materialize if discussions are conducted in a co-operative and open environment where all crucial issues are discussed in a constructive manner. Further, such venues will ensure that discussions proceed in accordance with each team’s areas of concern and as per agreed agenda, as well as accommodating information exchanges and discussions throughout the process as appropriate (DG Competition, 2004).
Information that members of each team should bring to the meetings
Members of each team should bring in fully and openly disclosed information that relate to all possible competition considerations and affected markets, even if they consider themselves not affected and take a specific view to issues like market definition. Such information will ensure early testing of alternatives or other team’s positions on the issue in question. It will also minimize surprise submissions and avoid requests for extra information at late stages of the process.
In addition, the team members should also bring internal documents like reports, studies, surveys and analysis evaluating the proposed merger, economic rationale for the merger, competition significance and market environment where each issue will take place. These documents will provide information that will lead to early and conversant merger views as well as its prospective competitive impact, thus allowing fruitful deliberations and finalizations. These should be brought as early as possible.
Further, where appropriate, members of the teams should forward in the meetings any elements showing that the merger will result in efficiency gains and feel that such elements should be considered for the purposes of merger competitive evaluation. Since such elements comprise of claims that are likely to initiate further and extended analysis, members should be encouraged to present them possibly early to ensure that both companies and any other involved party has adequate time to appropriately put those elements into account in relation to the proposed merger. Both companies should not omit any part of the specified information. Omission, if any, should be done following detailed discussion and agreement.
Questions to ask IT people
The crucial questions to ask IT people are: What information systems and technologies were they using? Can both companies’ information systems and technologies be integrated and if so, how? Does the merger require upgrading informational systems and technologies or new ones? What functionalities or added value shall be upgraded or new information systems and technologies bring to the merger? How will all owners understand the new systems? By answering these questions, cost and complexity of IT environment will be reduced, redundant software and hardware will be eliminated, services will be consolidated and IT corporate standards will be enforced.
Questions to ask manufacturing people
Among the key questions that manufacturing people should be asked are: How will they deliver on the value they promised their customers in terms of timely and quality products while simultaneously maintaining their wheels on the business? How will they successfully integrate manufacturing operations while keeping their focus on customers? This will help in determining if the manufacturing people will employ a rigorously integrated manufacturing process.
Questions to ask distribution people
For this group it will be good to ask: How shall they restructure their distribution channel after consolidation? How shall they distribute the increased stock, use bigger fleets like Lorries or vans? What strategy shall they employ to minimize distribution cost and increase earnings?
Questions to ask marketing people
Marketing people on the other hand should respond to: What new marketing strategies shall they adopt? What will be their new brand name? Shall target customers change and how shall they target additional customers? Is there a new market definition? Such questions will lead to informed regarding market size, marketing strategies to be adopted and brand name to market under.
Most crucial roles to the success of the consulting engagement requiring most time/effort
In relation to this particular project, information gathering and analyzing are the most crucial roles of consulting team members to the success of the consulting engagement and will require most time and efforts.
Information gathering facilitates development of suitable antitrust strategy for the merger. In this particular project, it will entail tremendous costs in terms of time and efforts. This is because broadly speaking there are two types of information gathering to be conducted here namely; market power effects and efficiencies. Good understanding of scope and nature of competitive interaction to be created is required. Further, more time is needed in order to ensure that the information provided is not destructive, forged or making invalid evidence. Information must also provide actual and possible overlaps and competitive effects. It therefore requires more time.
Information analyzing in this particular project must identify, prevent and provide a remedy to those factors that are likely to downturn the merger and acquisition significantly. The aim of merging is reduction of costs, production of higher quality products, increase investments on innovation and efficiency. To achieve this goal, detailed information analysis is required. It needs substantially more time and effort because exclusive focus on identifying, preventing and remedying anticompetitive factors is required. Economic and legal issues pertaining to this merger must be analyzed to uncover all potential threats, and thus extra effort is needed.
References
DG Competition, (2004). Best practices on the conduct of EC merger control proceedings. Web.
Knilans, G. (2009). Mergers and acquisitions: Best practices for successful integration. Web.