After One of the Largest Mergers in the Industry, a Critical System Needed Immediate Attention
A publicly traded building materials distributor had just completed a major acquisition that more than doubled its size. With integration activities stretching well into the following year, a business-critical sales compensation system was showing the strain of the transition.
Industry: Building Materials Distribution
Size: ~$6B in combined annual revenue post-acquisition; 15,000+ employees
Ownership: Public
Business Challenge
At the center of the problem was a custom application used to calculate and process compensation for the company's sales force. The system was running on aging infrastructure, had a single sign-on solution that needed to be replaced, and was integrated with HR and payroll systems that were themselves being migrated as part of the merger integration. The tool ran monthly batch processes with direct interfaces to payroll. Any failure was visible and consequential.
The technical team that understood the system had limited capacity, and the integration with the existing payroll platform was being replaced by a new system. Changes to one platform cascaded into others, and no single resource had the combination of business analysis depth, development capability, and project management experience to manage all of it at once.
Application running on aging infrastructure with SSO, integration, and data quality issues
Monthly batch payroll runs creating zero tolerance for system failures or integration breakdowns
Concurrent payroll platform migration requiring coordinated changes to all downstream integrations
Post-merger M&A integration IT projects requiring dedicated business analysis and project management support
Planned datacenter migration requiring the system to be moved to a new environment without disrupting production operations
Our Approach & Solution
CIO Source engaged across three sequential statements of work spanning nine months. In the first phase, CIO Source engaged to quickly develop deep familiarity with the environment, replace the SSO solution, and establish stable support processes for the monthly batch runs. The team managed integration triage and troubleshooting as issues arose from upstream and downstream systems.
As the engagement evolved, the scope expanded to include business analysis and project management support for M&A-related IT projects, reflecting the broader integration demands on the IT organization. In the final phase, CIO Source provided project manager and architecture oversight for the migration of the system to the company's primary datacenter, coordinating resources across teams, managing prerequisites, and maintaining status reporting throughout the project.
Business Results & Outcomes
Stabilized the environment to eliminate disruptions to critical business processes
Supported the payroll platform migration and all required downstream integration changes so that employees received timely compensation
Provided leadership for integration projects to ensure M&A value was realized
Successfully managed the system datacenter migration to reduce cost and increase reliability
Executive Takeaway
Post-merger IT environments are unforgiving. Systems that need to keep running are often the least documented and the hardest to change under pressure. CIO Source provided the specialized technical and project management capability to keep a critical compensation platform stable, support a concurrent payroll migration, and deliver a datacenter move, all during one of the most complex integration periods the company had faced.