A holistic and leading practice merger and acquisition (M&A) integration and divestiture framework. It has been matured and battle tested on major cross-border transactions and builds on deep experience and extensive research.It has been developed to maximize value creation, accelerate growth and manage but encapsulate complexity.

1. Merger & Acquisition,
Integration and Divestiture
Dettica’s consultants are specialists and experts in
merger and acquisition integration and divestiture. We
embed competitive advantage and accelerated growth
through high performance consulting.

2. M&A Services l Accelerating Growth
1
Information overload? Can’t see the wood for the trees?
What’s going wrong? How can we do better?
Our M&A Capability
• We have a proven
capability in successfully
leading major cross-border
acquisition integrations
and divestitures with
transaction value
exceeding £3 billion US;
• Our proprietary approach
is holistic, systematic,
rigorous and can greatly
accelerate delivery and
provide real value;
• Our consultants are all
specialists in M&A with
extensive consulting and
delivery experience;
• We can show you what
“great” looks like and
make the difference
between a poor deal
outcome and a highly
successful one.
Many Questions, Unified Answer
The prevailing guidance on merger and
acquisition integration and divestiture
revolves around an exhausting list of
prescriptive heuristics, checklists and
disparate processes. This guidance
combined at times with somewhat
limited best practice experience,
typically shapes your current delivery
approach and includes:
• Setting up an integration
office;
• Identifying and capturing
synergies;
• Communicating to
stakeholders;
• Protecting the base business;
• Consolidating processes,
locations and positions;
• Managing cultural change;
• Maintaining integration
momentum and;
• Preparing for new post-
integration value-creation
opportunities.
Required competencies include
technology and business integration,
organisation restructuring, financial and
management accounting, employment
law and regulations, tax, compliance
and operational performance
improvement et al.
There’s no getting away from it, M&A
integrations and divestitures are
complex challenges that involve a vast
array of interdependent interventions,
many with elaborate “ripple” effects.
With continued and underwhelming
long term performance still being
reported for too many transactions, the
question arises, is there a better
approach? We believe there is, one
which is based on the following
fundamental principles:
1. Holistic & Value Led:
Consideration of all business
model interventions and their
interrelationships required to
deliver the predicted value;
2. Systematic: The right
interventions at the right time,
by the right people with the
right competencies;
3. Rigorous: Attention to detail
aligned to the level of delivery
complexity;
4. Accelerating: Reusing proven
and highly effective tools and
techniques that will speed up
delivery;
5. Minimises the time and effort
required from key business
resources;
6. Recognises and manages
complexity, yet presents
simplicity and clarity to the
business;
7. Emphasises practicality, but is
built on extensive lessons
learnt, solid research and
leading practice.
We can next explore some of these
principles in a little more detail….

3. M&A Services l Accelerating Growth
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Focus on Value
• We enable you to focus on
value creation and
preservation;
• We can facilitate the
identification of synergy value
using our value creation maps;
• Our approach aligns
leadership and optimally
shapes delivery;
• We ensure you have the
awareness and self-knowledge,
critical for success;
• We encapsulate complexity,
help remove barriers and
execute the right levers to
achieve accelerated growth.
Value Focus
In line with many experienced and
successful serial acquirers, a bi-
focal 'championing' structure is
implemented for each acquisition.
A champion responsible for the
coordination of the acquisition
integration interventions and a
business champion who owns the
key business decisions and drives
the operations and P&L of the
acquired business.
As required, we can drive the
integration, encapsulating much of
the complexity. This allows you to
focus on business value
preservation and creation, which is
particularly critical at the beginning
of integration when the leadership
feels overwhelmed in finding
answers to a plethora of questions,
such as “what have we bought?”
and “how will we integrate and
create value?”.
Corporate DNA
In our experience, we often see
acquirers struggling with their
integration approach and their
ability to manage the associated
complexity. They also lack the
required competencies and have
severely constrained capacity. The
outcome unfortunately is too
familiar.
So what is the seemingly etheric
force that steers acquirers into this
situation? More often than not, the
answer is a cultural one. Not the
cultural misalignment between the
acquirer and acquired
organisations. Rather, the ingrained
culture of the acquiring
organisation, its DNA if you like.
This corporate DNA exerts
immense vertical pressure for an
aligned delivery approach. Its
overall effect is to severely limit
self-awareness and your ability to:
• Identify significant gaps
in your own capabilities;
• Discover where your
estimates of your own
capabilities are inflated or
out of date;
• Recognise complexity
and handle it
appropriately;
• See how your normally
effective habits may be
counterproductive in an
integration context;
• To be open to
improvement and
learning;
• See what “got you to
today”, may not be
enough to “get you to
tomorrow”;
• Recognize improvement
opportunities that have
been there all along (i.e.,
'unfreezing'
opportunities).
The ability to adapt and evolve is
increasingly critical to corporate
performance and maintaining
competitive edge. These
capabilities apply to both organic
and inorganic growth and should
already be suitably positioned on
the leadership’s radar.
Fundamentally, self-awareness is
the key that unlocks improvement
and challenges the influence of
corporate DNA. Does your
corporate DNA, mandate an
inappropriate approach to M&A
integrations and divestitures?….
Corporate DNA

4. M&A Services l Accelerating Growth
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Does your corporate DNA, mandate an inappropriate
approach to M&A integrations and divestitures?
Destroying Value
Any delivery approach can destroy
value if applied in an inappropriate
context. For example, many
successful organisational cultures
adopt a “just do it” or low discpline
approach inline with a fast paced,
lean corporate environment. The
natural tendency is therefore to adopt
a similar approach to delivering
complex M&A integrations or
divestitures. We believe this approach
is misguided, for the following
reasons:
• System change involving
high levels of complex and
tightly coupled
dependencies are not well
suited to low formality,
interative approaches;
• Agile delivery practices
require a high degree of
collaboration across all
impacted functions and
organisations;
• Less prescriptive
approaches require a highly
experienced integration
team and a mature
integration model;
• Co-location of integration
team members is required to
help mitigate the reduction
in solution design formality
and foster communication
and collaboration;
• Changing complex
functionality and business
rules requires great attention
to detail and formal design.
Creating Value
Creating M&A value is highly correlated
with adopting a suitable approach to
integration, rather than one aligned with
the ingrained corporate culture. This
means adopting an approach to
integration which strikes the right
balance between speed and rigour. As
obvious as this appears, the natural
tendency is for acquirers to
underestimate the associated challenges
and destroy value rather than create it. So
how do we get this balance right?
• Embed a holistic delivery
approach;
• Dynamically align rigour with
complexity;
• Balance business learning
needs and capacity, with
delivery acceleration and
overall speed;
• Encapsulate the “nuts and
bolts” integration complexity
from the business;
• Enable the leadership to focus
on the value creation vision and
translation into action;
• Deploy a small, highly capable
integration team that has the
drive and energy to deliver high
quality work under pressure and
manage great complexity. A
team that can reach for the right
tools and expertly utilise
them….
The complexity of the
M&A integration is
almost always vastly
underestimated in the
beginning.
An inappropriate
integration approach is a
key contributor to
integration failure. Don’t
turn a blind eye to the
influence of corporate
DNA.

5. M&A Services l Accelerating Growth
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Merger &
The Right Tools
All too often, the approach is to reach
for the generic project, programme &
portfolio methodologies and tools and
leverage a generic change approach.
To test whether this is appropriate,
consider the following M&A specific
requirements and challenges:
• Due-Diligence;
• Corporate and
integration/carve-out strategy;
• Value identification and
synergy tracking;
• An understanding of dis-
synergies and value
destruction;
• Integration/separation
blueprinting and delivery
planning for Day 1 & Day 2;
• Holistic framework for
integrating multiple
organisations and cultures;
• An awareness of the legal,
compliance and commercial
aspects, in particular for cross-
border transactions;
• Managing enterprise wide
change, restructuring and
transformation involving
multiple organisations;
• Alignment of multiple
outsourced partners and
vendors and their delivery
methodologies and commercial
frameworks;
• A governance and delivery
framework that can scale to the
highest level of complexity.
The Right People
In assessing whether a client has access
to the right competencies and skills,
consider the following:
• Integration due-diligence;
• Integration governance & best
practice;
• Integration strategy and
translation into actionable and
coordinated activities;
• Synergy value identification ,
evaluation and tracking;
• Functional blueprinting and
integration/separation planning;
• Enterprise change and
transformation management;
• Operational & cultural
performance improvement;
• Managing the people issues;
• Major organisational
restructuring.
The pace of integrating an acquisition or
separation in a divestiture cannot
accommodate a steep learning curve. It
will also punish an oversimplified or
inappropriate delivery approach. We can
help you overcome these challenges,
though this may require casting aside the
influence of corporate DNA. However,
this may only take place if preceded by a
rapid uplift in self-awareness and full
leadership support.
The lesser challenge, believe it or not, is
then to turn our attention to the cultural
challenges involved in integrating the
acquired organisation….
Partnering with Dettica
means that you are supported
by experts that specialise in
M&A have decades of
consulting experience at the
highest level and will
relentlessly drive integration.

6. M&A Services l Accelerating Growth
5
Establishing the performance culture
Creating a Performance Culture
A significant amount of attention in
the M&A community concerns
resolving cultural barriers to value
creation. The recommended solution
typically involves executing an
alignment strategy. However, there is
a major problem with this approach:
An intense integration pressure makes
it difficult to find the time and mental
space to learn about an acquired
organisation in more than a shallow
level and a cultural transformation can
take years.
So what’s a realistic approach and one
that can be exercised in typical
integration timescales?
The key here is to focus on
establishing the 'performance culture',
that is, those cultural features that are
most relevant for how the new
company will create value.
This approach involves identifying
performance gaps and aligning and
positioning the required interventions
within the overall integration planning
and execution. Sounds simple right? Not
quite:
Identifying the performance gaps is
relatively straight forward, however
identifying, aligning and coordinating the
right interventions can be highly
challenging and outcomes can be hard to
predict.
In the absence of an effective solution to
this problem, many acquirers polarise
their approach, either by adopting a
passive or aggressive combination of
interventions.
To overcome this, we needed to
leverage some innovative, cutting-edge
tools, based on extensive research and a
deep understanding of the challenges. We
have systematically aligned these tools
to work seamlessly and from
blueprinting through to value realisation.
This collective toolset looks at
operational performance from a holistic
perspective and maps out where
interventions should be applied and how
they contribute overall to the performance
improvement objectives.
Our aim has always been to build an
approach and toolset that is truly effective
and which can be practically
implemented by a relatively small team in
highly compressed delivery timescales.
An approach which strikes an optimum
balance between conflicting priorities
requires high levels of expertise and a
highly considered but adaptive toolset.
One which can offer:
• Speed & Control;
• Efficiency & Rigour;
• Predictability & Agility;
• Value Creation
&Competitive Edge.
Realising the performance targets
associated with an acquisition or
divestiture is never easy. But leveraging
the right interventions at the right time
has been shown to generate
disproportionate gains.
We have created innovative,
cutting-edge tools, that take
a holistic perspective and
from blueprinting to value
realisation.
have been systematically
designed to work together

7. M&A Services l Accelerating Growth
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About us
Dettica has extensive experience
managing complex, global M&A
integrations and divestitures with
transaction values exceeding $3
billion US.
Dettica is a specialist in the
provision of merger, acquisition and
divestiture services. All of our
consultants possess decades of top-
tier consulting experience and are
experts in their respective
disciplines.
We have developed a proprietary
approach to M&A integration and
divestiture that is proven and
aligned with our clients’ needs. It
has been matured and battle tested
and builds on deep experience and
extensive research.
Our delivery approach is based on
the deployment of a small but
highly capable team that will
address specific and highly
specialised capability gaps.
Dettica enables its clients to
achieve accelerated growth and
focus on business value creation,
rather than the “nuts and bolts”
delivery mechanics.
We can help identify and manage
risks, spanning the end to end
transaction lifecycle, including
accurate valuations, realistic value
creation targets and those associated
with enterprise-wide change and
transformation involving multiple
organisations and corporate shared
services.
We truly believe our services give
clients an invaluable source of real
competitive advantage.
As a client of Dettica, you will be
our first priority and we will always
act in your best interest. We
consistently go “the extra mile” and
fully understand the commitment
and drive required to achieve a
successful outcome.
We deliver our services globally
and are culturally sensitive. We
understand the value of agility and
speed and the need to embed
discipline and structure where
required.
We have uniquely positioned
ourselves by really listening to our
clients and providing exceptional
services that deliver real value.
By engaging us, you will have the
opportunity to see and experience
what “great” looks and feels like in
execution, in your circumstances,
your environment, on your
transaction, rather than a brief
training intervention and an
accompanying integration manual
that is predicated on loosely
coupled heuristics.
If you are currently concerned
about your corporate M&A
integration or divestiture capability
or an imminent transaction, it would
be our great pleasure to assist you.
For your convenience a link is
provided to our contact form and an
e-mail address for further enquiries.
Alternatively you may wish to visit
us at www.dettica.co.uk.
Copyright © 2015 Dettica Consulting & Training Ltd All rights reserved.
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