If your company recently acquired a new company who uses salesforce or in the process of Merger and Acquisition, one of the challenges is to have a strategy for integrating the new salesforce org with your existing Org. For companies who already have multiple orgs, the challenge is more complex to identify the right approach to deal with the existing org. We always get requests from executives who want to see one view of the pipeline, orders from all orgs and help the sales team to do upsell and cross-sell.  😳  How do you deal with such a problem? My post here would help you with some guidelines to make the right decision.

1. Identify the final outcome with the new org for Merger

One of the challenges I have seen architects or admins do is to start creating solutions on the Org strategy without understanding the exact outcome the company wants to achieve with the merged org. Once you have a discussion with the executives and the stakeholders for both orgs, the questions to ask them will help you with the right strategy.

1. Will there be one centralized sales leadership for all the companies to manage pipelines?
2. What would be the key metric used to determine the success of the Org Strategy to measure success? Is it upsells, cross-sells or new customer acquisition from the Merged company?
3. Do we need one view for reporting across all orgs in terms of pipeline, marketing, service and orders?

These questions would help you to formulate the right Org Strategy.

Solution Options

Once the outcome for the management is defined, here are some solutions which can work on integrating this external org to your Org.

1. Hub and Spoke Model – In this pattern, you would create or identify one centralized org as your main org and have all the orgs integrated around this for easy reporting. The key things would be a strategy for syncing accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities across all orgs.
2. On-demand integration– In this scenario where the external org is an independent business unit, you can create an on-demand integration strategy which would allow your current org to integrate with your external org real-time or batch mode on demand for reporting reasons. This works well for public traded companies which do quarterly reporting and the batch jobs pull in data on a demand basis and prepare for reporting.

Solution Discovery Prior Implementation

Once the solution is clear, here are some steps which you can start which would help you to prepare for the implementation.

• Define the current state of salesforce orgs across both companies.
• Define a baseline org for each company if using multiple orgs.
• Identify teams responsible for Org Merges across both companies.
• Review business process and identify common process, unique process across both companies.
• Evaluate data quality across both orgs and look for bad data, duplicates.
• Review governor limit excesses across Orgs prior and post-merger
• Identify unique users, common users across both orgs and have a migration plan
• Define security for current state and future state merged org.
• Define ownership of records like accounts on both orgs and evaluate territory management features.
• Watch out for potential Gotchas

4. During Implementation

Once the solution has been finalized, here are some tactical items which you can do and plan for during implementation.

• Create cut off dates on when one org goes live and plan to stop data entry on the merged org.
• Have a strategy for creation dates and modified dates on records.
• Have a plan for managing delta loads after initial merger.
• Create a consolidated security plan on the merged org and have a plan to combine profiles, roles, permission sets and sharing rules.
• Identify data quality metrics on accounts, contacts, opportunities, and leads and have rules to identify master records.
• Create mapping records with potential external ids to identify merged record with the original record.
• Map users from both orgs and have a plan to migrate all users from destination org to master org.
• Create contingency plans to handle inactive users from destination org.
• Handle record types on both orgs and ensure picklist values match record types on the merged org from destination org.

5. Things to consider

With my experience of merging multiple orgs, here is the list of potential items which you need to watch out for gotchas.

• History tables like case history, opportunity stage history may not be migrated completely.
• Watch out for triggers, apps which can reduce the time for data load.
• Create an archive strategy for large volume records to reduce timeline on the merger.
• Reports and dashboards will need to be updated after the merger.
• Create a naming convention for migrated components like workflows, process builders, folders etc. from destination org.
• Create duplicate rules to handle or flag duplicates.
• Do a mock run on full copy sandbox to judge timeline for the merger.
• Review integrations and ensure systems with the system of records are merged prior to sfdc merger.
• Have a plan to handle opt-in, campaign subscribers with different marketing automation tools and ensure customer master subscription channels work.

To summarize, during merger and acquisition, you would want to consider the following things.

1. Define the final outcome the business wants with the merged organization org.
2. Do a deep discovery which would allow you to identify a solution which involves security, data, deduping strategy, users and business process integration across companies.
3. Have a contingency plan to handle exceptions on data and data quality issues.

I have a final strategy deck which I would be happy to share with you guys which would help you with this. Please feel free to post your comments or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for the updated deck.