Case Study
UST helped IDP Education with post-M&A global organizational design and implementation strategies
OUR CLIENT
For more than 50 years, IDP Education Limited has been helping students manage processes for studying abroad in Australia, New Zealand, North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. IDP operates more than 190 offices in 35 countries and employs approximately 2,200 educational counselors.
THE CHALLENGE
Cross-cultural change management—Needed to seamlessly merge organizational structures and processes
After IDP acquired Intake Education, an international education organization, IDP’s leaders wanted to efficiently blend the cultures, people, processes, and technologies of the two organizations as quickly as possible, including operations in seven countries new to the IDP organizational footprint. To lay the foundation for strategic, long-term growth, the post-merger integration and change management effort needed to generate immediate operational synergies whilst creating a cohesive structure with well-designed processes and technologies across the net-new organization.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Applying best practices for cross-cultural change management after M&A
With a focus on governance, collaboration, and strategic planning, UST guided the organizational and system integration effort to ensure consistent operations across all aspects of the new, combined IDP-Intake business entity. By building an effective governance framework for the post-merger integration, the successful engagement resulted in:
- A cohesive organization—By following a thorough, well-designed change management and communications plan, key leaders from both organizations effectively promoted teamwork, collaboration, and productivity among employees to create a single, cohesive organization.
- Consolidated assets—Our program managers aligned closely with workstream sponsors, the country leads, and regional working groups from both IDP and Intake Education to consolidate overlapping leases and duplicate office equipment, technology licenses, and partner assets.
- Streamlined processes—By tapping into key departmental leaders and business-level subject matter experts in clients, customers, marketing, finance, legal, compensation, HR, operations, and technology, we helped align business units, policies, and procedures so the net-new company could operate as a single, streamlined business entity.
- A standardized IDP technology and data footprint—Automations accelerated Intake Education’s data migrations and ensured underlying architecture, core business systems, and data sources were aligned and functional. Early engagement and thorough planning also helped ensure the IT systems were localized in the seven countries new to the IDP organization.
THE IMPACT
Post-merger integration laid groundwork for rapid growth
Thanks to effective program governance, meticulously layered with steering committees, regional working groups, business-level subject matter experts, and the like, there was accountability, alignment, and thorough communications at every step of the post-merger integration.
By developing and executing a comprehensive reorganization and change management framework, IDP now has the foundation for rapid growth as a new combined business entity, especially in the seven new countries (India, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand, Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria) within their 35-country organizational footprint. The company now has the scaffolding in place to quickly absorb acquisitions in the future.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/strategy-implementation-operations