It's the Details

In 2018, Enreach was a PE-backed consolidation of several European software providers in communications and carrier services. Voiceworks in the Netherlands formed the nucleus. Swyx in Germany was one of the more important acquisitions into that group. My brief, from September 2018 to August 2019: integrate Swyx Germany and Voiceworks Germany into the system and product world of Voiceworks NL. Project sponsor was the CTO — also a board member of Swyx.

Three development sites belonged to the integration: Swyx in Germany, Voiceworks in the Netherlands, Voiceworks in Málaga. Three synergy streams were pursued in parallel: sales, operations and customer support, and product synchronisation — the goal being for both companies to offer the same portfolio.

What makes post-merger integrations so unevenly successful is usually not the C-level strategy. It is the operational details that either work or stall the whole programme. This case is the most honest confirmation of that observation I have seen in twelve months.

When I started, one of the large consulting firms held the mandate. We were preparing a presentation to the steerco — the full C-level of the new entity.

The strategy in the deck didn't work, in my view. It was framed at an abstraction layer at which the structural friction between Voiceworks NL, Swyx DE and the development sites underneath went invisible — the very friction the programme would later get stuck in or break through.

I told the consulting firm's engagement manager. His answer, in substance:

Don't get distracted by the small stuff.

My answer:

It's exactly the small stuff that decides success and failure.

With the strategy question reframed, the integration ran along three streams in parallel.

Operations and customer support — the easiest stream. The integration was additive: Voiceworks NL and Swyx DE served different customer bases with overlapping products. The merger expanded support capacity without either side having to lose staff. When something is integrated rather than reduced, political friction is low.

Sales — the middle stream. Sales motions, pricing lists and cross-sell logic between the countries had to be aligned. The ERP roll-out for sales and finance — deliberately limited to one country, to keep complexity inside the steering window — made the commercial data side consolidatable.

Product synchronisation — the honest part. The aim was for both companies to offer the same portfolio. Cross-sell into the existing customer bases was the growth argument of the entire PMI thesis. That synchronisation didn't work as planned. The reason was neither technical nor organisational. It was customer-structural: Swyx's largest customer was a competitor of substantial products from the rest of the Enreach portfolio. The moment cross-sell suggestions would have moved in their direction, that would have called Swyx's strategically most important customer relationship into question.

We honestly reduced the stream to what was feasible: product-architecture convergence for the customers where there was no competitive conflict, instead of a blanket synchronisation. That was less than planned. It was also the only thing that respected the commercial reality of Swyx's main-customer relationship.

The licence server under the desk. The sharpest conflict of the twelve months played out where nobody expected PMI friction: in the development sites. Operations was easy (additive), sales was medium (political). Development was hard — on two levels at once.

Level one was operational. The development team in Germany built good products. But parts of the implementation were short-thought-through: the licence-issuing system ran on the computer of a single product manager, under his desk. If the computer was off, the colleague ill, on holiday, or simply not at the office — no new licences could be issued. An entire productive supply chain hung on one desk.

We lifted the server into a controlled environment, mapped it cleanly, made it failover-resilient. The operational layer was tidied.

Level two was political. The transparency that became visible after tidying — how things had really run, which decisions had been short-thought-through, which silent assumptions had carried the development steering — was not initially welcomed by the development team and its leadership. Tidying is the smaller half of the work. Making visible what wasn't visible before is the larger — and it is always political, because it exposes performance assumptions that had not been exposed under the old regime.

1. It's the small stuff. A PMI strategy at C-level isn't won or lost in the steerco. It is won or lost at the layer where a licence server sits under a desk and depends on a single employee. Whoever writes an integration strategy without working through that layer writes a strategy that looks good in the steerco and breaks in delivery reality. A consulting mandate that doesn't make this layer part of its scope is too expensive for what it delivers in a post-merger phase.
2. Cross-sell assumes the existing customer bases aren't in competition. Before cross-sell synergies are set as growth drivers in a PMI thesis, a competitive geometry of the existing customer bases belongs in the diagnostic. Where customers of one company are competitors of products of the other, the cross-sell path is blocked — and no integration methodology will change that. That diagnostic is two weeks of work. It is often only done when the synergy figures are already in the dealbook.
3. Transparency in the development organisation is the hardest synergy — because it doesn't save costs, it changes assumptions. Integrating operations is additive and therefore politically easy. Integrating sales is medium: pricing and pipelines get harmonised, but it doesn't fundamentally change the performance logic of individual sellers. Integrating development means exposing the silent operational assumptions sites had been running on — the licence server under the desk, the architecture diagram never updated. Whoever leads that exposure without damaging the relationship to the site has delivered the synergy that doesn't appear in any deck and that actually carries the programme.