CIO — Corporate acquisitions can immediately impact your company's growth and revenue, but they may have an even bigger and more immediate effect on your IT team, which has to find the right strategies and technologies to mesh the existing and new companies together as one.

That, of course, doesn't always happen easily or quickly, especially in key IT systems such as your Supply Chain Management (SCM) infrastructure.

Tate & Lyle, a food and beverage ingredients company, knows that conundrum all too well. Although the company acquired another business four years ago, the two SCM systems are still not fully-integrated. By next summer, that will finally happen, but it has definitely taken time to accomplish, says Bill McClure, the company's vice president of business process management.

Maple Leaf Foods, which makes and sells chicken, pork, baked goods and other products, knows the same kinds of pain, says Rob Dombkowski, the senior director of operations and food safety systems. Maple Leaf has also grown through business acquisitions, the company has acquired 14 different Business Planning and Control Systems (BPCS), as well as eight different Warehouse Management Systems that were being used by the new additions. "A global template is needed for future acquisitions," Dombkowski says. "Our scalability was maxed out."

McClure and Dombkowski both recently shared their stories at an SAP Supply Chain Management Summit held at SAP's U.S. headquarters in Newtown Square, Pa., and described the trials and tribulations of making multiple SCM systems work together.

Their messages were clear — when your company acquires new businesses, the real work is truly only beginning for your IT department.

At Tate & Lyle, the strategy is to merge multiple existing SCM systems into one SAP system in an effort called Project Genesis, McClure says. Genesis began in January and is scheduled to go live next February. "We have a really disparate group of systems today," he says. That causes big problems because different divisions are then working with different sales, marketing and revenue numbers because they're all using their own data. "Today there is collaboration going on, but unfortunately, they're not always the same numbers. That kind of led us to this project. "

One of the key goals of the new unified SCM system is that all the different divisions will be able to see their own business metrics as well as view how their own numbers affect the whole organization, McClure says.

While the new integrated system continues in the deployment phase, an operational model is also being built to ensure that the system meets the needs of its users and customers, he says. "This really is at the heart of the organization."

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