The First 90 Days: What Separates Successful Integrations from Costly Ones

By Ian Alexander, Ripple Consulting

The deal is signed. The announcement is made. And then the real work begins — which is usually when organisations discover how much they didn't plan for.

I've led integration programs across eleven Asia-Pacific markets. I've been the person accountable for making sure the business keeps running while two organisations become one — through system migrations, workforce transitions, regulatory complexity, and in one case, a global pandemic that shut down the borders we needed to cross to get the work done. What I know about the first 90 days of an integration is that they matter more than most people expect, and that most of the mistakes happen before Day 1, not after it.

The common assumption is that integration is mainly an IT and HR problem. Get the systems talking to each other, sort out the org structure, and the rest follows. That's not wrong exactly, but it misses the thing that actually determines whether an integration succeeds: whether there's a single, clear operating model for how decisions get made across the combined entity before anyone is under pressure to make them.

In the early days of an integration, everything is uncertain and everyone is watching. Teams want to know who's in charge. Functions want to know whose process wins. Markets want to know whether the global plan accounts for their local reality. If the answers to those questions aren't clear, people fill the gap themselves — and you end up with eleven markets doing eleven different things, which is how a clean integration becomes an expensive one.

What separates the integrations that land well from the ones that don't usually comes down to three things. First, a single point of accountability that sits above the workstreams and can make calls when they conflict — because they will conflict. Second, a planning process that takes local complexity seriously rather than assuming the global template will apply everywhere. Third, the discipline to track what's actually happening in each market, not just what the status report says.

The first 90 days set the tone for everything that follows. If the governance is unclear, the issues will stack up. If the local teams don't trust the process, they'll route around it. And if nobody is willing to escalate the hard problems early, they become expensive ones later.

If you're heading into an integration — or you're already in one and something feels stuck — the question worth asking is whether you have the right operating model in place, or whether you're relying on goodwill and momentum to carry you through.

Goodwill runs out. Momentum stalls. A clear operating model doesn't.

Ian Alexander is the founder of Ripple Consulting, an independent advisory practice specialising in operational transformation, M&A integration, and ESG strategy. He has led major integration and separation programs across the Asia-Pacific region, including the successful integration of a joint venture across eleven markets and the operational separation of a multi-billion-dollar consumer health business.