Acquiring a company is an exciting challenge for any entrepreneur, but it’s also very risky. How can you turn around a struggling business? Or, even more difficult: how can you boost the performance of a company that’s already doing well?
Generally, an audit of the IT system as a whole (its effectiveness, performance and capacity to evolve) is included in the review of the production tools—alongside accounting, financial, legal, tax, HR or industrial audits. No more, no less.
I’m acquiring a company… Why should I care about its IT systems?
The information system (or IS) encompasses all the hardware and software used by a company. It drives the company’s operations. The information system is at the heart of business processes: it determines how every department works, structures management, and organizes production and administration. In short, it’s one of the main levers for future performance gains, and it would be unthinkable not to take a close interest in it.
And yet, it is often underestimated by prospective buyers…
My company is not / not very IT-enabled
One example among many: sales performance. The CRM brick of the ERP software is a solution designed to better organize your business processes. Where your salespeople used to manage their prospects the old-fashioned way, they will now have a system in this software tool to organize their follow-ups, allowing them to significantly increase their sales: up to 30% more revenue! With a good CRM, you can have better pipeline management.
My company is already well equipped with IT....
Why modernize your IT system?
But if your company is already well equipped with IT, it is just as urgent to look at the issue. IT is evolving extremely quickly, and what was still impossible a few years ago is probably more than feasible today.
Take multi-site operations as an example. If your company has several locations and was computerized about ten years ago, it is very likely that it was forced to think about its processes on a location-by-location basis. Today, with the advent of the Cloud, processes can be designed in a much more global way, opening the door to new ways of organizing and collaborating!
We could multiply the examples endlessly: mobility, for instance. Your sales staff didn’t have a smartphone or tablet 10 years ago… simply because they didn’t exist yet. Whereas today’s software (the good ones, anyway) is designed to be used on these new devices.
