Operational excellence

Scenario A

As part of integration, the M&A Lens provides guidance on the integration of major operational aspects (depicted in Figure 1) and more. Besides these operational processes, companies should look at other integration aspects, like project priorities, resources, skills, and culture. If the acquirer has AWS technical knowledge, they should lead the integration with AWS services. The acquirer should create a cost-effective plan for AWS migration with minimal disturbance to their end customers. The M&A Lens provides guidance to achieve operation process migration per AWS prescribed best practices.

Figure 1: Model for AWS-aware buyer and on-premises seller

Operational excellence plays integral part during mergers and acquisition because of the following:

1. It helps identify synergies between the combining companies. By analyzing the operational processes of both companies, areas of overlap and duplication can be identified. Eliminating these can improve efficiency and reduce costs. Operational excellence helps quantify the potential synergies and cost savings from process integration.

2. It ensures a smooth integration of operations. The merging of two companies often involves integrating systems, processes, people, and cultures. Operational excellence provides a structured approach to identify core processes, standardize and optimize them, and implement them across the combined organization. This helps avoid disruption and maintain business continuity during the integration process.

3. It aligns goals and improves governance. As two companies come together, operational excellence helps clarify organizational goals, establish key performance metrics, and strengthen governance practices. This alignment and improved oversight are essential to realizing the potential value from a mergers and acquisitions deal.

4. It helps customer migration to the new platform with minimal impact to the end customers and extract benefit of cloud native technologies.

The M&A Lens guides customer regarding all of the preceding aspects, as well as specifics like:

• Management of application inventory

• Processes to mitigate and recover from AWS scheduled and unscheduled events

• Process implementation for security events

• Best practices for an AWS CI/CD pipeline

• Configuration management

In summary, operational excellence brings discipline, rigor, and a continuous improvement mindset to the mergers and acquisition process. This helps identify and capture synergies, integrate smoothly, reduce costs, align goals, strengthen governance, and sustain ongoing optimization.

In case the seller is AWS-integrated and the buyer is on a non-AWS platform, a similar approach can work. In this case, the AWS team can work with seller, who can take the lead for cloud integration.

Scenario B

In the case that both the buyer and seller are on AWS, we recommend best practices for multi-account governance, including setting up AWS Organizations. Consider setting up AWS Control Tower, which orchestrates multiple AWS services on your behalf while maintaining the security and compliance needs of combined organization. Additionally, consider resource tagging and integrating workloads to support end customers of the combined organization.

Figure 2: Buyer and seller are both on AWS

Here are some best practices for integrating operational excellence when conducting a mergers and acquisitions deal involving companies on AWS:

• Consolidate or organize AWS accounts and reduce redundancy. Merge separate AWS accounts and resources from the acquired company into centralized accounts controlled by the parent company. Eliminate duplicate services and resources.

• Standardize infrastructure as code (IaC) and configuration management. Both companies should be using AWS tools and processes like AWS CloudFormation templates, AWS Code Pipeline, and configuration repositories to deploy and manage infrastructure.

• Integrate monitoring, logging, and alerting. Unify monitoring systems, logging pipelines, and alerting mechanisms into a single platform that provides visibility across both companies.

• Consolidate support models, including Control Tower service control policies (SCPs) by using alerting, and then enforcement. Determine how responsibility for supporting the combined infrastructure and applications are handled across development and operations, site reliability engineering (SRE), and support engineering teams to remove redundancies. The goal is to drive operational efficiency by standardizing across people, processes, and tools as much as possible during integration.