Allen CIO works with private equity companies with manufacturing acquisitions in their portfolio. Our simple yet amazingly effective playbook allows us to take technology to the next level at every one of your acquisitions. It is our belief that the single largest opportunity to transform a manufacturing company is to
The Problem
- Successful manufacturing companies tend to run super lean, which typically means IT is stretched thin, resulting in untapped opportunities, not just in IT but in every department in the company.
- Great technology playbooks don’t exist. While there are standards, like NIST, the software selection, implementation, training, and documentation are left to interpretation.
- Left to their experience and education, an IT leader may think they are batting a “10” in an area like backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. The news is littered with multi-billion dollar companies that find out the hard way they did not know what constitutes a “10.”
- Because “you don’t know what you don’t know,” an IT department doesn’t realize that they have weaknesses
- Amazing opportunities exist that have high ROI across every department in the company, but what are they, how can they be easily implemented, and how can they be measured to prove their success in driving change?
- Most companies evaluate IT by their ability to be a responsive and intelligent help desk, sadly this is a small portion of the responsibilities that they have and while they typically report to the CFO that individual lacks the training and experience to properly manage everything that IT needs to do.
The Solution
In summary, most manufacturing companies have an incredible amount of low-hanging fruit with exceptional ROI that doesn’t just lower risk and increase productivity; inside these opportunities is the potential to increase EBITDA through lower expenses and higher revenue, better experience for their customers and a culture shift that everyone across the entire company embraces.
This solution’s foundation is creating a team of IT leaders from every single acquisition. This is effective because IT is very similar across all manufacturing businesses. Four pillars address all of the problems identified above.
- Scott Smeester founded a company many years ago called CIO Mastermind that helps educate and coach IT leaders monthly.
- These leaders need to be part of a facilitated discussion to build world-class playbooks to take back into their departments.
- Assistance is provided by the PE selected (Interim) technology operating partner (that is us), who helps guide the individual IT departments in applying the playbooks. This can be assistance in automation, outsourcing, documentation, project execution, and training.
- Governance principles, intimately tied to the playbook, ideally need to be done by someone outside the company. That someone can be a member of another acquisition company.
The result is that the IT department of a newly acquired manufacturing company will rejoice at the team resources that are available to them!
