Operational Changes

April 04, 2021

by a searcher from University of Oxford in Charlotte, NC, USA

For those that have acquired a business... what one operational change did you implement that has had the most impact on your business? What was the operational change and how did it turn out (short and long term)?

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Reply by an investor
from The University of Chicago in Honolulu, HI, USA

Again, with the caveat that it depends on your business, specific situation and especially on your people, but the biggest change made that has had the biggest impact has been moving the majority of our day-to-day operational systems from local, on-premise systems to cloud-based systems. We did this in 2016, but waited about 6-9 months after acquisition to first fully understand the day-to-day operations. It paid off almost immediately as it not allowed more flexible working arrangements our people enjoyed, but it vastly increased visibility to all kinds of information in a very efficient manner. A lot of SME still do a lot of day-to-day stuff on paper or manually, so moving to a more automated, cloud-based system for things like inventory and production management, accounting, etc should not be underestimated but the payoff is huge. Plus, when COVID hit, we didn't have to spend much time at all re-configuring workflows or locations because we had already been doing some remote work for a good length of time.

Reply by a searcher
from The University of Michigan in Hyderabad, Telangana, India

The acquisition that I am currently working on, we have implemented three major operational changes, all of them with an offshore back office:
1. A market intelligence team that qualifies leads and passes them on to an onshore team when the lead is warm
2. A software support team to significantly enhance client delight in using our product
3. A video/graphics team for supporting one of our flagship services

Re-engineering processes requires stakeholders to fully buy into the concept and put energy into it. If you get your operations team vested through various incentives, they themselves will come up with the ideas.

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