Evidence, not anecdotes.

The Outcome — for the Economic Buyer

A post-acquisition IT integration spanning 43 global sites and 9 IT workstreams carried a five-year estimate nobody could defend. Monthly forecast governance turned it into a four-year commitment a CFO could initial. $16.06M came off the integration cost baseline, and the contingency band compressed from 15% to 5%.

Problem

The deal closed. The estimate did not.

The acquisition of AGRO Merchants Group handed a global cold-chain operator an IT integration spanning 43 global sites and 9 IT workstreams — ERP, warehouse and transportation systems, infrastructure and operations, cybersecurity, customer EDI, and IT SOX compliance. The five-year integration estimate carried a contingency band wide enough to hide the real number, and the external deal team that had priced it was already rolling off.

The complication was structural, not cosmetic. The acquired estate ran on a fragmented web of legacy warehouse, transportation, and ERP configurations — much of it near technical retirement and still carrying live warehouse operations. Transition Services Agreement deadlines dictated the migration pace whether the numbers firmed up or not. Recent cyber events had exposed control gaps with regulatory consequences attached. And the teams expected to execute the integration were the same teams running the warehouses.

Every month the forecast stayed soft, integration spend competed with deal value — and nobody could say by how much.

Process

A3's principal owned the IT PMO forecast and portfolio governance layer — installing the apparatus, then handing the client's teams the controls:

• Monthly IT finance forecast process. Every workstream re-estimated on a fixed cadence until soft estimates hardened into commitments. No estimate survived on inertia.
• CIO status reporting cadence. Weekly and monthly executive streams kept sponsors and steering committees working from one version of the truth.
• Stage-gate governance, systematized. An EPPM deployment standardized enterprise project planning, tracking, and reporting; formal gate reviews with business cases replaced ad-hoc, siloed funding decisions. The SAP Enable Now platform carried business readiness, so cutovers landed on trained teams rather than memos.
• Five cost-reduction drivers, worked in sequence: reuse of the existing transportation management system over a new enterprise instance; WMS site infrastructure streamlined and purchased early enough to leave the critical path; a cybersecurity roadmap re-ordered so the highest-impact controls landed first; license reuse and disciplined scope pruning; and roadmap compression from five years to four, built on repeatable site-rollout templates.

The turn was not a rescue. It was the month the forecast stopped moving.

Payoff

• $16.06M integration cost reduction (Americold/AGRO) — removed from the integration cost baseline through systematic re-baselining, not deferral.
• Contingency band compressed from 15% to 5% on the integration cost forecast — integration risk priced down by forecast discipline.
• A governance apparatus that outlived the engagement — forecast process, reporting cadence, and portfolio system, with site rollouts templated into a repeatable M&A playbook.

The detail that stands for the whole: by the final phase, site cutovers ran on templates. The integration had become a production line, not a project.

The Outcome — for the Economic Buyer

A newly merged Fortune 500 packaging enterprise carried two IT operating models, duplicated platforms, and an intake culture that had never said no. Portfolio governance, TBM discipline, and automation oversight converted opaque spend into a governed operating model: $12M in annualized structural savings, $10M+ in cost avoidance, and 325,000+ labor hours reclaimed under governed automation.

Problem

Two legacy IT organizations arrived at the merger with different instincts — one iterated through proofs of concept, the other moved only on full business cases — and neither could see the other's spend.

The merged estate carried redundant platforms and overlapping SaaS agreements accumulated across legacy organizations. Project data lived in two systems of record that did not reconcile, so program financials required double keying — and still disagreed. Reporting differed country by country; there was no single source of truth for what ran where, or what it cost. Demand intake had inherited an "always say yes" culture: an unconstrained queue that had quietly consumed delivery capacity. And robotic process automation was scaling faster than its guardrails, accumulating consumption cost and audit exposure with every new bot.

A $70M IT&D capital plan was moving through that fog.

Process

A3's principal directed cross-portfolio ePMO governance, TBM strategy, and automation oversight:

• TBM (Apptio), operationalized. Quarterly tagging cycles categorized spend by region, segment, and investment type — exposing SaaS overlap and dark spend, and giving finance leadership CFO-grade visibility.
• Vendor and license rationalization. Enterprise-agreement consolidation, hard renegotiations — including conversions from static seat licensing to consumption-based models — and proactive application decommissioning that held license growth flat.
• Integrated demand management. An eight-stage lifecycle from intake through screening, business case, prioritization, greenlighting, and monitored execution — codified in the Portfolio Management Playbook and operationalized on the ServiceNow Strategic Planning Workspace: intake, standardized scoring, stack-ranking, and dependency-mapped roadmaps in one system.
• Strategy alignment. The OKR Management Tool mapped the governed portfolio directly to corporate objectives, so every funded initiative carried its strategic rationale.
• AI Governance & Enablement. Guardrails installed around the RPA and workflow-automation estate while it scaled: pre-approval risk evaluation for every automation, with benefits tracked post-implementation and validated by IT Finance.

Resistance was predictable and real. Leaders read governed capital lists as shrinking empires; business-funded teams argued secure budgets exempted them from intake. The turn came on the floor, not in a deck: facilitated "Walk the Wall" sessions took cross-functional leaders through the pipeline step by step, surfaced the double-keying wound, and committed the system integration that eliminated it. Buy-in followed the fix.

Payoff

• $12M annualized structural savings (Smurfit WestRock) — operating-model change and portfolio optimization, not one-time cuts.
• $10M+ cost avoidance — renegotiation, rationalization, and proactive decommissioning.
• 325,000+ labor hours reclaimed — software bots and unified digital workflows scaled under governance.
• A demand portfolio the enterprise can defend — surfaced, scored, and prioritized in one system, with the "always say yes" era formally closed.

The detail that stands for the whole: every bot in the estate now carries its own pre-approval record and a benefits number IT Finance has signed. Audit-ready by construction, not by archaeology.