Post-Merger Integration in the Chemical Industry

Merger Integration + Culture Change + Facilitation

How we brought together employees from both sides of an acquisition to align ways of working and strengthen customer-focused collaboration

Initial Situation

Following two major acquisitions involving approximately 20,000 employees in total, a leading global chemical company with a workforce of around 97,000 faced the challenge of integrating the acquired businesses into its existing organization.

Employees from both acquired companies needed to familiarize themselves with the acquiring company’s organizational structures, corporate culture and established ways of working. At the same time, employees of the acquiring company had to build effective working relationships with their new colleagues.

Both groups needed to develop a shared understanding of how to collaborate and address customer needs within the newly combined organization.

Challenge

Successful integration required more than organizational orientation. Employees from both sides of the acquisitions brought different experiences, perspectives and established working practices.

The challenge was to help employees of the acquired businesses navigate their new organizational environment while enabling both employee groups to develop common approaches to everyday business activities.

In particular, customer-focused collaboration provided an opportunity to connect cultural integration with concrete business requirements.

Solution

As part of a long-standing engagement with the global chemical company, a senior viadoo advisor (Klaus-Peter Wagenführ) designed and facilitated a series of workshops supporting the integration of employees from two acquired businesses.

Project Example 1: Organizational and Cultural Integration

Workshops in Basel (CH) with employees of the acquired business focused on understanding the acquiring company’s organizational structures, corporate culture and ways of working.

Additional joint workshops brought together employees from the acquiring company and the acquired business to develop a shared understanding of customer-focused collaboration.

Project Example 2: Aligning Customer-Focused Collaboration

In a separate acquisition, joint workshops involved employees from both the acquiring company and the acquired business.

The workshops explored how to identify customer needs and translate them into relevant products and services. This provided a concrete business context for bringing together different perspectives and developing shared approaches to collaboration.

What This Project Example Shows

These projects illustrate how facilitated workshops can support the human and organizational dimensions of post-merger integration.

They demonstrate how structured dialogue can help employees of acquired businesses find their place within a new organization while bringing together colleagues from both sides of an acquisition around shared business objectives.

By connecting organizational orientation and cultural alignment with customer-focused collaboration, such interventions can help translate integration objectives into practical ways of working.

This approach complements legal, financial and transactional M&A activities by addressing the people and organizational dynamics that shape collaboration after closing.

The contribution focused on the design and facilitation of integration workshops within the wider integration processes. It did not include overall responsibility for the post-merger integrations, and no claim is made regarding measurable transaction outcomes.

As we naturally take the confidentiality of our clients seriously, we anonymize our success stories. However, the cases are real.