Linking business intelligence systems after an acquisition

It takes real time to link the IT from two large units, as part of a gigantic integration project. By rapidly linking information on decision-making systems we have been able to start our technology rationalisation.Putting together business units, or buying businesses, immediately poses the question of how to link IT systems. When a company like ours, Vinci Energies, buys an entity of medium-size - up to €500 million sales - we are normally able to quickly deploy a smart integration scenario, with the alignment of company information from the new group. 

But this does not apply when we merge with a company of equal size to us, as was the case in 2010 with the merger of our company with Cegelec (we have turnovers of €4 billion and €3 billion respectively).

The size of the issues to deal with, including the adherence to continued successful operational processes around IT, prevented simple integration in which two entities migrate applications.

As we defined the strategy, we had to ask key questions, most notably whether the staff in both companies had an immediate need to communicate and interact. The response was yes, because the two groups carry out similar activities and often in the same countries. We had to redefine quickly the territories of local managers and also put different teams in the same buildings. In this environment, the demands on the IT director are very high.

Better visibility after acquisitions

At the heart of IT, we defined a plan, identifying every step in the short term: renegotiation of contracts with suppliers, linking networks and redefining the limitations of enterprise resource planning systems. Having achieved these first steps, we knew that the task of actually converging our ERP systems awaited us. 

Today, over eight major applications exist at the heart of our group. To consolidate these applications would normally require four to six years of work. In order to achieve results more quickly, we relied upon a unified business intelligence system, which overcame the range of transactional systems and gave us a single view of data.

We began by linking our financial information down to the finest level at the heart of the group. Vinci Energies has 1,500 data siloes, across nearly 800 activities. By a system rather like Russian dolls, we have a mechanism that provides a view of the business down through the different levels of the company. 

Meanwhile, a similar project was carried out for our purchasing, in order to have a better view of expenditure and monitor more rigourously our use of framework contracts. We also have a project around common human resource indicators, covering 65,000 staff.

Begun in 2012, this ERP rationalisation project was achieved for the main part in 2013, and affects around 1,500 users. Our aim was to favour graphical indications of the most important data, and to give the maximum freedom to users around analysis. This is the real measure of a business intelligence project: providing true value to the daily activity of users.