When businesses merge, the E-Business team must adapt
Earlier this year, the Amerock Cabinet Hardware brand within our corporation was merged into our business unit already consisting of Levolor and Kirsch to create a combined Global Business Unit called “Decor”. The Decor Business Unit rolls up under the Home and Family Group of Newell Rubbermaid as outlined here.
What’s exposed when businesses merge
Previously, Amerock was grouped under a different Global Business Unit and run independently of operations at Levolor and Kirsch. The merging of these business units has presented an interesting challenge from a website strategy perspective. The challenges are not unique to us and the purpose of this post is to not outline the specific challenges we faced but rather to focus on the high-level areas that mergers and acquisitions will eventually uncover:
Business processes, software platforms, job responsibilities, and online strategy must adapt to the new environment.
Enterprise E-Business must be scalable
I am fortunate to manage a team of people who are eager to take on new challenges and responsibilities. What we quickly discovered as it related to our Online Platform was that it had all been built around a single business (blinds & shades). This meant some of the software was specific to business processes unique to Levolor and Kirsch but more specifically, our business processes were very tied to Levolor and Kirsch.
When Amerock was infused into the mix, we had to re-engineer several areas (listed below). I won’t go into how we modified these processes but at a high level, these were the core areas impacted:
- Marketing direction for website product positioning - Different products with different consumer segmentation from a whole new group of marketers
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) management - Different product marketing = different marketing budgets to fund SEM efforts.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) A critical part to online strategy, but without product experience it’s difficult to do proper analysis on popular industry key terms.
- Web Analytics reporting - Omniture makes this easy to manage, however we discovered some very business-specific customizations that were generalized for better scalability
- Online customer satisfaction – Usability and information architecture are largely measured by analytics and online feedback. The E-Business team translates these insights into actionable items for continuous improvement.
- Online product catalog functionality Marketing and/or selling blinds & shades online is different than cabinet hardware
- Product Data Management - Who provides product data, who loads it onto the site, who manages updates?
- General site updates – Educating a new group of marketers how to manage website updates
- Testing & QA – Testers previously familiar with blinds & shades products are now responsible for testing a website completely foreign to them. This mean much more detailed testing & training plans.
Enterprise E-Business must function on repeatable processes
I cannot stress this enough particularly in the past few years in working in a Fortune 500 environment after coming from a small business of 20-25 employees. The enterprise is too massive for any one person to “know it all” so processes must be rigid, repeatable, with good people employed to manage through the processes and modify the processes when they identify deficiencies.
Tribal knowledge is acceptable in small business and is what enables small business to be agile. Tribal knowledge contaminates the enterprise, especially in the E-business arena. If an enterprise process cannot be repeated by more than one person without significant “hand holding,” then it is not a repeatable process. A merger or acquisition will quickly expose deficiencies in processes.
Scalable, repeatable processes does NOT equal inflexible online experience
Perhaps one area where IT folks get it wrong most often is deploying a scalable, repeatable process that limits creativity (particularly as it relates to an online experience). Scalable and repeatable processes must inherently have a mechanism for dealing with unique business requirements and the ongoing management of these “exceptions.” This is all the more reason why the E-Business/IT group needs a seat at the (business strategy) table. Without knowing the direction of the business, it is impossible to anticipate every possible scenario and build scalable, repeatable processes that will last.
[... Earlier this year, the Amerock Cabinet Hardware brand within our corporation was merged into our business unit already consisting of Levolor and Kirsch to create a combined Global Business Unit ...]