| | MARCH 20268IN MY OPINIONERP POST MERGER INTEGRATIONS: STRENGTHENING YOUR CORE TO MEET NEW DEMANDSBy David Harmon, Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Oil States InternationalIf you have ever attended a well-hosted MBA program or similar business education class, you may have experienced a learning and collaboration phenomenon where ten or so teams set out to evaluate a particular case study and return to share findings based on their collective experiences. For attendees paying close attention to presented solutions, they walk away with more than their team analyses and the strengths or findings of all ten teams ­ collectively raising the knowledge of everyone in attendance. Every successful post-merger or acquisition (M&A) integration offers new and relevant perspectives about your industry, business operations, and related systems excellence. From my personal experiences, these topics have ranged from new customer and marketing strategies, philosophies in engineering excellence, and a wealth of manufacturing and field services strategies to best serve the market in booming and competitive times. IT leaders have the opportunity to help generate value and collectively raise the bar for enterprise business processes when integrating a recently acquired company. M&A transactions comprise arduous multi-discipline tasks to complete due diligence and the transaction itself ­ this is before the labor-intensive process begins to integrate the newly acquired company. If M&A integration is not properly managed and handled carefully, it can be full of risk and disaster on both sides, but when managed correctly, it is an opportunity to expand and strengthen your system and technology offerings, in addition to the intended capacity, product, service, or asset purchase.Industry Driving Forces & Market ConsolidationWith increasing pressure for de-carbonization in the industry, increased attention on ESG initiatives, the need to reduce the cyber security footprint, and the latest market pricing pressure to ultimately reduce cost drive us further into the depths of our information systems and related data sets. In January 2022, Haynes and Boone reported 293 David Harmon
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