When two companies combine, the systems have to combine with them.
I run the program side of acquisition integrations: absorbing acquired entities into the system of record, migrating the platforms they came in on, and sequencing Day 1 readiness so payroll runs and the books close on time. Across more than 15 acquisitions, Workday to Workday, legacy ERP to Workday, and Salesforce and ServiceNow migrations on their own or alongside the ERP work.
15+ acquisitions integrated.
No two deals arrive the same way. The architecture changes. The discipline does not.
Two Workday tenants becoming one. Organizations, security, business process frameworks, and integrations reconciled into a single environment without breaking what already runs in production.
An acquired company on a legacy ERP or HR system folded into your Workday system of record. Data converted, mapped, and validated so HCM, Financials, and Payroll come up clean.
A standalone Salesforce or ServiceNow estate migrated or consolidated, on its own or alongside the ERP work, so the front office and service layer move with the deal.
How I run an acquisition integration.
An ERP integration is a business transformation wearing an IT costume. Five things decide whether the combined company runs clean on Day 1.
Establish the tenant strategy early
The architecture decision sets the entire timeline. You have to decide early whether to consolidate the acquired company into your existing enterprise tenant, hold them in separate instances for a while, or build a new unified environment. If you consolidate, a pristine GOLD tenant for the build phase is a critical early milestone. That isolated environment lets the team map configurations and start build work without corrupting production data. Every week spent not locking this down compounds into delay later.
Map and harmonize the data
Acquired companies rarely categorize data the way you do. Cost centers, job profiles, and financial dimensions will conflict. You need a workstream dedicated to data translation. Do not assume a clean one-to-one mapping exists for core HR or financial data. Clean, validated data has to be ready before you enter the test cycles, or those cycles get wasted fixing bad data instead of validating system workflows.
Govern the testing
Testing is not a checkbox. It is how you protect business continuity. Define clear entry and exit criteria for unit testing, end-to-end integration testing, and user acceptance testing. Make sure the acquired team participates heavily in every cycle. They are the only ones who understand their legacy data and their edge-case business processes.
Align change and process
The acquired employees are losing the systems and processes they know. Identify power users from the acquired company early and bring them into configuration and testing, so they champion the new system to their peers. A technically flawless deployment still fails if the end users reject the new way of working.
Run cutover from a command center
Go-live takes military precision. The cutover plan needs minute-by-minute sequencing for data extraction, system lockdown, data loading, and validation. Once the system is live, a well-resourced command center triages issues. It stays active through the most critical early milestones, especially the first combined month-end close, and stands down only when system stability and user adoption metrics are firmly met.
Going deeper on acquisition integrations
Three field notes from more than fifteen of them, on the money, the people, and the milestones nobody budgets for.
The acquisition closed. The integration is where the deal is won or lost. →Two companies, one tenant: what nobody budgets for →
An acquisition integration is a business transformation wearing an IT costume →
Integrating an acquisition?
Whether it is Workday to Workday, a legacy system folded into your ERP, or a platform migration on its own, the program discipline is the same. Put independent eyes on it before Day 1.