Managing integrations is tough work – and few have shown the capability to do so successfully. Among the 700 largest deals in recent years, over 80 percent failed to produce shareholder benefits, and over half these transactions destroyed company value.

While many studies have explained why mergers and acquisitions often fail, Best Practices LLC has identified the specific practices that distinguish many of the world’s top integrators. Our M&A Integration Advantage assessment service can help you take the first step toward world-class integration by comparing your current state with those that have found a high level of success.

By interviewing scores of M&A integration executives, our team has identified hundreds of integration best practices from successful M&A companies such as Cisco Systems, GE Capital, Citigroup, AOL TimeWarner, Intel, Viacom, Verizon, and more than 100 other industry leaders. The extensive insight shared by these leading executives is analyzed and converted into a detailed question set based on their world-class practices.

The first step of the assessment is for our analysts to interview your own executives and integration team members – capturing your current M&A integration tactics. We then compare your practices to those exhibited by world-class organizations – uncovering new strategies, tactics, and systems to optimize your M&A activities.

Through this M&A Integration Advantage Assessment, our firm can help your company successfully realize the full value of future integrations. The assessment tool enables a gap analysis of your current integration approach on five critical dimensions: pre-deal business development, integration planning, cultural combination, customer contact (sales, marketing, and service), and technological integration.

Best Practices LLC analysts identify the most critical improvement opportunities for enhancing shareholder value and improving the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of the integration process. Key deliverables include:

• An integration assessment PowerPoint presentation delivered on-site, highlighting all the major improvement opportunities identified in the assessment
• A copy of the latest edition of “Merger and Acquisition Integration Excellence: Creating Growth and Value Through Corporate Combinations,” further detailing world-class M&A integration practices
• Access to our Best Practice Database, which enables executives to stay abreast of the latest best practices identified by our research team in the areas of M&A and many other key business topics.