We were engaged to assist a Lloyds Insurance company with an acquisition & integration of an other underwriting company, there were a number of challenges to overcome with the key aspects outlined as :-
- De-couple & integrate the new business from their current “mother ship”
- Integrate services so the organisation can operate as “One entity”
- Co-locate all of the UK staff into a single London office as both entities had premises, but neither had enough space to easily accommodate the other
- Integrate the business functions and consolidate platforms
Transitional Services Agreement
We assisted the company with the implementation of a TSA (Transitional Service Agreement) so they could provide access to systems & services from the large parent organisation throughout the migration.
We reviewed the hardware & software used by both organisations and assisted with the migration strategy & planning.
Consolidation & Integration
We provided technical resources to assist with the accommodation issues and working with the business heads, we worked out a scheme to provide temporary accommodation to consolidate business groups and then a building refurbishment and move to flexible workspace to maximise one of the properties and house all of the staff with the option to move to hot-desk solutions if required in the future.
Technical Transfromation
The new business utilised Citrix for access to their environment, so this provided an opportunity to retain access to their core business systems and services, but with the ability to transition over to a laptop based environment.
Email was transitioned to Microsoft 365 for both organisations and this enable access to single inbox for the users in either environment
Sharepoint was used for collaboration and document storage for the combined business, although limitations were found when dealing with the large archive’s of documents which included very long file names, deep nesting of directories and special characters embedded in the files names / emails.
Standard Laptops were deployed with Auto-pilot and standard software deployment, giving the flexibility to keep the business operating under covid restrictions.
Office Refurbishment
We assisted with the IT aspects of the office refurbishment, with some re-modelling, one of the offices could be converted to support the combined business, through the use of flexible working desking, MS Teams collaboration and telephony and smart spaces, such as phone booths, meeting pods, breakout spaces, interactive whiteboard & collaboration spaces, the business was provided a highly functional workspace.