CETI EA Forum on M&A

The CETI/TechColumbus Enterprise Architecture CIO Forum will be held on Wednesday Sept. 19th from 11:30 - 1 pm. The topic is on EA Considerations in Support of Mergers and Acquisitions. Brent Stutz (at Cardinal Health) has kindly offered to host this session, which will be put together by Marty Luffy (Installed Building Products), David Pike (Nationwide), Brent Stutz (Cardinal) and Rajiv Ramnath (CETI).

Final attendee list (and regrets) are below.

• Acceptances:
1. Chris Ashcraft, JPM Chase
2. Tim Bender, HNB
   
3. Thomas Bihari, Nationwide Insurance
   
4. David Bourke, Bostech, CETI
5. Gary Boy, Installed Building Products
   
6. Scot Burdette, ICC Ohio, CETI
   
7. Paul Carlson, City of Columbus
8. Dave Cromleigh, Wendy's
9. Dinesh Dalwaddi, Nationwide
10. Gouri Das, McGraw-Hill
    
11. Greg Deckler, CETI
    
12. Dan Eckstein, Worthington Industries
13. Brian Elliott, JPM Chase
    
14. Ron Frissora, MI Homes
15. Diane Griffin, State Auto
16. Al Hamid, IBM, CETI
17. Dave Hammond, Cardinal Health
18. Greg Hines, CETI
19. Florian Kirchoff, Qwest
20. John Kratz, ICC Ohio, CETI
    
21. Dheeraj Kulshrestha, Flairsoft Inc. CETI
22. Marty Luffy, Installed Building Products, Presenter
    
23. Igor Malkiman, Qwest, CETI
    
24. Angelo Mazzocco, Progressive Medical
25. Dale Miller, Ohio Health
    
26. Ron Morgan, Franklin University
27. Gene Oliver, OCLC
    
28. Dan Pachko, Worthington Industries
29. David Pike, Nationwide Insurance, Presenter
    
30. Kristen Puckett, Bostech, CETI
    
31. John Shaffer, McGraw-Hill Education
32. Mike Skaggs, Worthington Industries
    
33. Brent Stutz, Cardinal Industries, Presenter
    
34. John Thomas, Priseworks Inc., CETI
    
35. Dan Vermeire, HNB
36. Tom Vonderbrink, Cardinal Health
37. Shobna Varma, CETI
    
38. George Walter, OCLC
39. Joe Wasil, MWC
    
40. Bill Wehmer, Worthington Industries
41. Sadeepa Wijesekara, Worthington Industries
    
• Regrets:
1. Herb Berger, Abercrombie and Fitch
2. Jim Bush, Bob Evans
   
3. Jeff Clouse, State of Ohio, Dept. of Public Service
4. Mike Fulton, Proctor and Gamble
5. Carl Gerber, Tween Brands
6. Anand Jami, Nationwide Insurance
7. Carl Jaeckel, Abercrombie and Fitch
8. Greg Leach,  LCS
   
9. Dean Lohiser, Gap
10. Al Pappas, CETI
    

• Cardinal Health: During a Merger and Acquisition, Cardinal Health can significantly lower operating costs by standardizing certain systems that will allow us to better leverage purchasing power, technical talent and existing infrastructure.  The complex nature of integrating business systems and the impact it can have on the business is another reason to standardize the Merger and Acquisition strategy.  It is important that the IT goalsare established and communicated to the acquired organization as soon as possible.  This will ensure that proper expectations are set and adequate funding is available through the merger reserve to achieve the desired results.
• In a business as complex as Cardinal Health's there is no single cookie cutter approach that will consistently provide the desired results.  For example the business plan associated with activity around our core distribution business might have a goal of capturing 50-60% of the acquired companies IT overhead as savings.  Given that we have a significant infrastructure already in-place to support this type of business this would not be an unrealistic target.  It would assume adherence to Cardinal Health's standards, architecture, reduction of head count, one set of applications and a common management structure.

• Nationwide: Nationwide has a Merger and Acquisition Lifecycle encompassing "doing the deal" and "integrating the companies."  The 9 key steps include IT engagement along the lifecyle with critical decision points.  Absolute areas of integration include data centers, voice and data networks, eMail, Human Resources systems, and contract administration/purchasing.  Additional IT business model decisions consider web hosting, desktop services, IT service desk, and document services.  The business model for each deal may require a flexible unique approach to ensure Nationwide maximizes the investment.
• Installed Building Products: Installed Building Products has an integration methodology that is focused on the culture of the organization being acquired and attune to keeping the employees of the acquired company as part of the team. Because we typically treat our acquired operations as individual P & L centers, we are very careful during the integration to manage the relationship with our new employees.  However, even given that approach, we do engage with the new organizations management team shortly after the acquisition and begin the planning for the changes that are required for us to integrate the payroll, financial and materials & equipment purchasing processes.  This typically requires integration of the WAN, e-mail systems, computing domains, data centers, desktop services, and operating applications.  Although we attempt to standardize the approach in order to allow us to productively support the entire corporation over the long-term, we always seem to have exceptions to the rule for each individual acquisition based on the needs of the business.