Case food services – carveout and merger

The challenge

A Nordic food services company acquired a Finnish food services business. Before the agreement was signed, the seller had worked for several years to gradually harmonize the information systems across divisions. As a result of the carveout agreement, the buyer had to separate all the applications they used from the seller and rebuild the inhouse ICT infrastructure they relied on. The transition service agreements (TSA) for these typically varied from 6 to 16 months. This was followed by a harmonization challenge within the buying company.

How Midagon helped

Midagon provided the initiation phase program manager, 2 project managers (ICT and business applications) and an architect to serve the carveout program. The separation of business applications covered both SaaS and other service agreements, and system implementation with various partners as well as the seller. Geographically it covered Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Estonia.

Interfaces, network infrastructure, identity management systems and support tools were separated, and on-premise server platforms migrated to a new data center. Within the buyer, the applications used were listed, overlaps detected, and a comprehensive harmonization plan created for the following steps.

Results achieved

Midagon's project management covered 8 systems related to HR management, time management, or payroll, and 8 systems related to financial management, contract management and operational reporting, as well as the integration platform. The task became more challenging when the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread. It caused a significant decrease in revenue for the business relying heavily on lunch restaurants, and subsequent temporary layoffs and low availability of personnel. Despite the challenges, all the deadlines dictated by area or system specific TSA were kept and the go-lives were in time and successful.