Accelerate value creation through strategic technology solutions
Maximizing returns and maintaining a competitive edge are key to private equity value creation, but technology-related challenges can be a major hindrance to achieving these goals.
RSM addresses these challenges with comprehensive strategies and solutions that are tailored to a PE firm and its portfolio companies’ specific needs and goals. By overcoming technology barriers, PE firms can focus on enhancing efficiency, facilitating compliance and driving growth and overall value creation.
Transform technical debt into operational gains and business growth
Technical debt represented by outdated legacy systems and information technology infrastructures is often marked as high-risk when identified through due diligence or portfolio IT assessments. Legacy systems are usually costly to maintain and difficult to integrate with modern cloud and artificial intelligence platforms, leading to potential system outages, data loss and security vulnerabilities. They can reduce business agility, impede capability to innovate and delay value realization.
The lack of appropriate technological support across business processes affects efficiency, quality and the ability to grow at the same pace as the competition. Focusing post-acquisition strategy on investing in fixing a fragmented and poorly integrated technology landscape can enable operational synergies and scaling capabilities. While initiatives such as integrating disparate IT systems, centralizing data management functions, implementing robust cybersecurity and facilitating compliance with evolving data privacy regulations can be complex and somewhat intrusive to the business, these efforts may lead to secure, data-driven decision making that can positively affect EBITDA.
A good grasp of the latest technology trends and solutions and how they can be applied effectively to a certain industry, company size and culture is crucial for gaining a better understanding of the available growth levers and maximizing enterprise value. Many elements of growth (e.g., speed to market, geography and customer penetration) are now driven digitally via good data, analytics and AI. While growth through digital transformation may be harder to underwrite in the base-case scenario during due diligence, it is imperative that it be fully understood and included in the upside case at a minimum.
