Business Driver

The affinity program management subsidiary of one of the world’s leading risk advisory firms had recently completed a $70 million acquisition of an independent marketing company, which specialized in creating private-label membership benefit plans for discounted products and services, protection benefits, and retail services throughout North America. Seeking to quickly integrate the acquisition as a new line of business to promote to their custom insurance and risk management program client base of professional associations and corporations, the CIO asked Trexin to help them quickly and efficiently integrate the IT infrastructure of the acquired company with the larger enterprise.

Approach

Although M&A cost-saving synergies were not a significant factor in this acquisition, Trexin began with a detailed review of the target business outcomes and worked top-down to fully document a detailed set of business requirements deemed necessary to fully solution IT infrastructure integration from the perspective of stakeholders across both organizations. This set of business requirements was then translated into a detailed project plan, which included both employee-level and office-level cutover activities. Critical success factors included:

• Minimization of business interruption
• Agreed upon prioritization of integration activities versus other ongoing projects within IT

Results

The IT infrastructure integration was completed on-time, on-budget without any disruption to individual users or business operation across two offices and more than 75 employees. Specific accomplishments included LAN integration (via VPN), HR system integration (to PeopleSoft), email migration (from on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server and POP to cloud-based Microsoft BPOS), file server migration, desktop PC refresh, and a new global print solution.