The situation
A PE firm acquires three regional contract manufacturers serving the automotive and industrial sectors as the foundation of a buy-and-build platform. The acquisition thesis: consolidate supplier spend, improve plant utilization across the combined facility base, and exit at a meaningfully higher multiple than the blended entry price in four years. Each of the three targets runs a different ERP system with years of accumulated customization and inconsistent master data. The synergy model is built on management representations about overlapping supplier relationships that the data room materials alone cannot verify.
The solution
M&A Intelligence deployed sandboxed Knowledge Fabric namespaces for each target, architecturally isolated from the acquirer’s production systems. Entity resolution ran across the combined supplier base and confirmed 34% addressable spend overlap. A synergy estimate locked at close became the immutable diligence baseline tracked monthly throughout the hold.
Within 24 hours of close, the Words and Music Match capability compared diligence representations against post-close actuals and surfaced two material variances — working capital peg methodology and customer contract assignment provisions — both addressed through mechanisms already agreed in the purchase agreement.
The Data Migration capability governed the ERP consolidation. Source profiling surfaced custom business rules and inconsistent material masters before any records moved. Dual-namespace reconciliation ran continuously during the cutover window. The Trust-Scored destination became the production Knowledge Fabric namespace from go-live.
The Asset Twin capability deployed across all manufacturing facilities. Predictive maintenance replaced calendar-based schedules on the highest-utilization production lines.