The Challenge
Intek Plastics, a manufacturing company focused on growth through acquisition, needed a more efficient way to manage post-merger integration projects in order to realize value from their investments as quickly as possible. Their previous approach relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets, creating critical challenges that slowed integration progress and delayed break-even:
- Inefficient project management that often resulted in missed steps and delays
- Limited visibility into project status and progress
- Difficulty tracking dependencies and priorities across integration workstreams
- No standardized way to manage project resources across different departments
The Process
Under the leadership of Project Manager Caleb Sandahl, PMP, Intek Plastics evaluated approximately 20 different software solutions, including specialized M&A platforms. While other options focused heavily on pre-merger due diligence, Intek primarily needed post-merger integration management including:
- A better solution for managing complex, cross-functional M&A projects to ensure fast time to value from their investment
- Visibility into resource and capacity levels to avoid bottlenecks causing project delays
- A way to centralize data to provide real-time reporting on project and portfolio status
After evaluating the options, Intek chose Prism for its comprehensive project portfolio management capabilities. Implementation was remarkably swift – within weeks the Prism PPM platform was being used to manage M&A integration tasks including IT integrations.
The Solution
The implementation of Prism PPM has delivered significant improvements in Intek’s post M&A integration projects:
- Enhanced Visibility and Collaboration
- Provided real-time visibility into project status and staffing across all initiatives
- Cross-functional teams are aligned on priorities and related dependencies
- Project updates are immediately visible to stakeholders
- Improved ability to track dependencies and prioritize tasks across IT, HR, finance, and executive teams
- Developed repeatable templates for future M&A work
- Established clear workflows that can be customized for different types of acquisitions
- Eliminated the problem of missed steps that was common with spreadsheet-based tracking
Unexpected Benefits
With Prism PPM showing strong results, there is growing interest from other departments looking to more efficiently manage projects and improve project governance.
“I’m getting a lot of excitement built up because of Prism PPM, and I’ve got people knocking on my door all the time asking, ‘Hey, can we do this?”
The success of this implementation has positioned Intek Plastics for more efficient future acquisitions with standardized processes, better cross-functional collaboration capabilities, and a scalable project management framework.
As Intek continues its growth-by-acquisition strategy, Prism has become a crucial tool for maintaining operational efficiency across the expanding organization to ensure they reach and exceed breakeven on their capital investments.
“The overall difference is that we have that visibility to work together as a team. Prism PPM has created more momentum toward getting things done on time and ensuring things don’t get missed.”
Caleb Sandahl
PMP, Project Manager, Intek Plastics