Research On Post-merger Integration Of Enterprises' Business Processes

When M&A brings enterprises some advantages such as dramatically expanded scale, it also easily leads to the conflicts on culture, business process and organizational structure, etc, between the two entities. These conflicts may prohibit the enterprises from achieving synergy and even lead them to engender negative effect. In attempt to ensure the two independent entities to operate more effectively and the resources to be used more reasonably after M&A, it is advisable to integrate and reengineer the business process to make it adaptive to the enterprise's development and the environment's transformation. Post-merger integration of business processes refers to the process of analyzing, optimizing, designing and implementing the business process under the circumstances that many changes have occurred in enterprise's size, resources structure and managerial pattern.Post-merger integration of business processes aims at improving customers' satisfaction, improving operational efficiency and competitive ability, mitigating the conflicts which arise in the process of M&A and accomplish the synergy. During the integration process, these ten principles should be carried out: value-creating, focusing on customers, giving attention to suppliers and other stakeholders' interests, using the tool of IT technology, striving to obtain the attention and support of top leaders, keeping communication timely, comprehensive and pertinent, implementing gradually and lay preferential emphasis on key processes, attaching importance to systematization of integration, continual improvement and paying attention to the applicability of the integration patterns and methods. In the process of the integration, enterprises can adopt these methods: Elimination, Engrafting, Integration, Simplifying, IT Improvement.Among numerous decisive variables that describes the business process integration patterns, this thesis selects the scope and the extent of integration as the two main variables to plot out integration patterns on the principle of significance and feasibility. The integration patterns are as follows: entirely-transplantation, entirely-establishment, partly-transplantation, partly-establishment and preservation. When the enterprises select the patterns, they should consider the following factors: M&A types, the relevancy of the two entities' business, the discrepancy between the two in size and power, the discrepancy between the two in business processes' efficiency, the business strategy after M&A and the organizational structure after M&A, etc.On the basis of this, this thesis takes manufacturing industry as an example to research post-merger integration of key business processes. The selection of key business processes is influenced by many factors such as business environment, developing strategy, marketing feature, production and sale feature. And nowadays manufacturing enterprises' key business processes comprise R&D process, Purchasing process, Sale process, After Service process, Financing and Investment process, Knowledge Management process. Every process has its principles and methods to integrate under the guidance of different integration patterns.Furthermore, institution, information system and enterprise culture have indispensable effects on the success of business process integration, and they compose the supportive system for process integration. Among them, institution integration is the powerful guarantee, information system integration is the effective tool, and culture integration is the persistent impetus.