Acquisition / Performance
Situation
Acquisition, at the bar of the Commercial Court, of a French distribution company by a listed European group.
Establishment of multi-site operations to ensure national coverage.
Traditional culture, organisation based on habits with little room for change.
Objectives
To restore financial balance as quickly as possible and provide the company with a high-performance organisation to ensure its development while preserving staff motivation and the business.
Tasks
In order to successfully integrate and turn around the acquisition, our Transition Manager has:
- Broadly communicating the group’s short and medium term objectives
- Defined and imposed the “new rules of the game” by instilling a strong results-oriented culture
- Developed immediate action plans on key drivers:
- Margin: pricing practices, profitability per product/customer
- Costs: lean organisation
- Cash: optimisation of WCR
- Matching skills with needs by industry/position
- Deployed an information system with the necessary control tools
- Considered the organisational/staffing mix that will be required in the long term in light of productivity improvements
Results
In eighteen months, our Transition Manager specialised in turnarounds enabled the company to return to profit and to overhaul the organisation to ensure the development expected by the shareholder. The “stressing” of the organisation, which was necessary to bring about the change, was carried out without a crisis and relied on the key managers sharing the new vision.
