10 Reasons INTEGRATOR Beats a Spreadsheet

1

difficult

Spreadsheets are a general purpose business tool primarily designed for financial analysis; they are poorly matched to the needs of M&A management.

By their nature, spreadsheets require substantial and ongoing effort to design, create, distribute, update, collect, consolidate, roll up, chart, analyze, report, format, print, communicate, and maintain.

Easy

e•know INTEGRATOR is designed from the ground up to accelerate post-merger integration. It has all the features and power you need, and none of the extraneous general purpose features you don’t.

The right tool for the right job lets the user focus on the work and speeds up the process by eliminating the extra manual overhead inherent in general-purpose spreadsheets.

2

DisPersed and Inaccessible

Every team member’s spreadsheet is a private data silo inaccessible to every other team member — and to the management chain — most of the time. 

Independent spreadsheets dispersed across dozens or hundreds of individual PCs are inherently “invisible.”

Centralized and Accessible

INTEGRATOR gives distributed access to centralized data. Since the data is all in one place, the critical interrelationships of tasks and projects are crystal clear, providing management high-quality information for mission-critical  decisions.

3

Out-of-Date

Spreadsheets can never present a current view of progress because the only up-to-date data is out of reach on individual PCs. Management is constantly vulnerable to their out-of-date information. 

Real-time

INTEGRATOR is real-time: all changes instantly ripple through every report, leaving no delay between an update and its visibility to other managers. With this instantaneous display of activity, progress, problems, and results, senior management is never blind-sided, and can make timely mid-course corrections.

4

Time Wasting

Spreadsheets incur huge time and productivity penalties — distributing, collecting, updating, consolidating, formatting, correcting, and validating. Managers often spend entire days out of every month compensating for these spreadsheet shortcomings, leaving them with less time for their real jobs.

Time Saving

INTEGRATOR lets management spend its time managing the business, not the tool, by eliminating all of the major spreadsheet bottlenecks.

5

One-Way

Team members are not uniform about keeping their data up-to-date because spreadsheets don’t actively facilitate updates, much less let affected team members know about important changes or events.

Interactive

It’s easy for team members to keep their data up-to-date, and easy to know when something else important has been updated because e•know INTEGRATOR e-mails a personalized project list to each team member, prompting the user to enter updates and new projects. When new projects are assigned to a team member, the system e-mails them with the details.

6

Unwieldy

Lack of communication and cross-team coordination slows down the process and reduces synergy capture — and the bigger the job, the worse it gets.

The spreadsheet burden grows with the number of team members as the number of spreadsheets that have to be collected and aggregated expands.

Scaleable

With e•know INTEGRATOR, any size effort remains easily coordinated, leaving management in control.

The system consolidates data from 1,000 team members as easily as 10. So, dozens or hundreds of team members spread across the country or around the globe? No problem.

7

Error Prone

Faulty data leads directly to sub-optimal decisions, and consolidating hundreds of spreadsheets is a recipe for introducing errors and slowing the flow of information.

Accurate

With INTEGRATOR, you know the information you’re using for mission critical management decisions is accurate and up-to-date. There is no consolidation step to introduce errors.

8

Insecure

A spreadsheet in the possession of the wrong individual is readable, leaving security completely at the discretion of the participants.

Imagine a team member’s laptop containing your crital merger data is stolen at an airport, or cached e-mail attachments are retrieved by a hacker from a server. The risks are enormous.

Secure

INTEGRATOR provides total control over information access, so you know that sensitive data is only seen by the appropriate team members.

Furthermore, INTEGRATOR data is encrypted and stored on tested and verified secure servers. Your data is safe from theft.

9

Unsupportive

Making changes to team structures or projects adds more confusion and burns cycles on clerical-level tasks, because spreadsheets offer no managerial help at all. Such updates, including their communication to the teams, are completely manual.

Supportive

e•know INTEGRATOR provides centralized management of teams, team membership, project and team assignment. New projects, new synergy goals, etc., flow from the PMO directly to the responsible team and / or owner.

10

Opaque

Spreadsheets must be aggregated and massaged to give senior management the reports they need. Management has no ongoing top-down visibility of activity, progress, results, and accountability.

Transparent

e•know INTEGRATOR provides total, continuous top-down visibility at coarse and fine levels of detail. Aggregate and detailed activity, progress, results and accountability are totally transparent.