[Maria Peres Panicker]

For those involved in post-merger integrations, what are the most important KPIs and reporting mechanisms included in your PMI playbook to track integration progress? Have you found any metrics that were particularly effective (or ineffective) in identifying issues early?

[Carolina Palacio Posada]

For me these are the 4 most important

– EBITDA (abs)
– Synergies found
– EBITDA Margin
– EBITA Margin

[Joncarlo Bairos]

Maria, Carolina’s financial measures are the ones the board will judge the deal on, but they’re lagging. By the time EBITDA margin moves, the cause happened months earlier. For early warning I’d add a few measures that come straight out of the due diligence work:

– Retention of the named key-employee list from HR DD, tracked against the retention plan dates (often payments at around 6 and 12 months). Losing two people from that list tells you more than overall turnover does.
– Revenue from the top accounts identified in the commercial DD’s ABC analysis, plus churn among them. If customer dependency was a DD finding, it should be a PMI metric.
– Progress on the post-closing action list. The legal DD session suggested a destination table showing where each finding landed in the SPA; the items marked “fix after closing” are easy to lose without an owner and a date.

The one I’d be wary of is “percentage of integration tasks completed”. It can show green while the people and clients who carry the value are quietly leaving.

[Author]

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