Services
One firm. Three governance disciplines. Documented results.
Post-Merger Integration
The integration budget you signed off on can be made to hold.
Integration costs are written at close and rewritten every quarter after.
At deal close, the data room archives and the deal team dissolves. The integration team inherits a five-year estimate built under time pressure, wrapped in a contingency band wide enough to hide eight figures of risk. Without a forecast discipline that firms those numbers up, the band never narrows — it just gets spent.
A governance layer that turns estimates into firm forecasts.
A3 installs the integration financial-control machinery:
- Monthly IT finance forecast process. A repeatable cycle that re-estimates every workstream, driver by driver, until the numbers firm up and the contingency band compresses.
- Executive reporting cadence. Weekly and monthly CIO status streams that keep sponsors and steering committees aligned on cost, scope, and sequence — no surprises between cycles.
- Portfolio system deployment (EPPM). Standardized enterprise project planning, tracking, and reporting so integration status is read from one system, not assembled from decks.
- Workstream re-baselining. Systematic review of every technical solution approach against reuse, scope pruning, and timeline compression opportunities.
The Americold/AGRO record.
- $16.06M integration cost reduction — the 5-year baseline estimate of $69.10M compressed to a 4-year firm forecast of $53.04M.
- 43 global sites, 9 IT workstreams — full-scope integration governance across warehouse, transportation, ERP, infrastructure, and cybersecurity domains.
- Contingency band compressed from 15% to 5% on the integration cost forecast — risk priced down through forecast discipline, not optimism.
The five drivers behind the reduction.
The $16.06M was structured, captured, and held through monthly PMO discipline across five documented cost-reduction drivers:
- Updated integration solution approach — onboarding the acquired estate onto the existing transportation management system instead of standing up a new enterprise instance.
- Streamlined WMS infrastructure — optimized deployment plans and hardware specifications for global warehouse-management standardization.
- Prioritized cybersecurity roadmap — front-loading the highest-impact controls (MFA, SSO, PAM, IDS/IPS, SOC, EDR, DLP) while deferring lower-priority operational spend.
- License and scope cost avoidance — reusing and extending existing software licenses; pruning redundant technical scope.
- Timeline compression — re-estimating and compressing the integration roadmap from five years to four.
IT Governance & Cost Discipline
IT Governance that pays for itself in structure, not slides.
Your IT budget has a shadow ledger.
Enterprise IT spend accumulates dark spend: overlapping SaaS, redundant platform tooling, enterprise agreements priced for an org chart that no longer exists, and run-rate costs that crowd out build investment. TBM tooling alone doesn't fix it — reports without governance change nothing.
Meanwhile automation and AI agents are entering the environment faster than the guardrails that should govern them, converting efficiency programs into unpriced audit risk.
Operationalized cost governance, not another assessment.
A3 installs the discipline layer between IT finance data and executive decisions:
- TBM cost forensics (Apptio). Operationalize reporting to expose SaaS overlap, standardize the integration stack, and de-duplicate redundant portfolio tools — unit economics that name the dark spend.
- Run-to-Build ratio enforcement. Shift investment mix deliberately, with budget controls that hold the shift.
- Vendor and license rationalization. Consolidate enterprise agreements, renegotiate proactively, and decommission applications before their renewal cycles bill you again.
- AI Governance & Enablement. Audit-ready guardrails — decision rights, access controls, and compliance boundaries — installed around RPA and agentic automation so scale never outruns control.
The Smurfit WestRock record.
- $12M annualized structural savings — operating-model changes and portfolio optimization, not one-time cuts.
- $10M+ cost avoidance captured — hard vendor renegotiations, software rationalization, and proactive application decommissioning that kept license growth flat.
What actually gets installed.
- Apptio operationalization: reporting wired to decision forums, not dashboards for their own sake; SaaS overlap detection; integration-stack standardization.
- Application Portfolio Management: preventative decommissioning cadence that holds software and hosting growth flat against legacy license escalation.
- Contract governance: consumption-based licensing models negotiated where usage data supports them; enterprise-agreement consolidation across duplicate vendor services.
- Automation guardrail design: intake and approval architecture for bots and agentic workflows, with audit and compliance checkpoints defined before deployment, not after.
Strategic Portfolio Management
A portfolio is a set of promises. Governance is what keeps them.
Hope-based roadmapping is a capital allocation failure.
Ungoverned demand dilutes execution capacity across low-impact requests. Prioritization happens by volume and volume happens by politics. Roadmaps drift from ledger reality, dependencies surface as delivery failures, and the strategy the portfolio was funded to serve becomes a slide nobody reconciles against.
A demand pipeline with rules, tooling, and teeth.
A3 installs the Integrated Demand Management operating model:
- Portfolio Management Playbook. Standardized rules of engagement for capital investment and enhancement demand — fit-for-purpose governance, end-to-end visibility, dependency management, and strategic alignment, with a defined dollar gate that keeps low-impact requests out of the project pipeline.
- Strategic Planning Workspace (ServiceNow SPM). The demand portfolio surfaced, scored, stack-ranked, and roadmapped in one system — real-time planning data instead of quarterly archaeology.
- OKR Management Tool alignment. IT objectives wired to corporate strategy so every funded item traces to a goal that leadership recognizes.
- AI Governance & Enablement. Automation demand governed like every other investment class — scaled where returns are proven, guardrailed before deployment.
The Smurfit WestRock record.
- 325,000+ labor hours reclaimed — RPA scale-up and ServiceNow workflow consolidation executed under portfolio governance, with audit guardrails in place.
- ~90% schedule/budget adherence sustained across governed portfolios (operational adherence baseline).
Inside the Integrated Demand Management framework.
- Demand gating: formal "Project Demand" classification above a defined combined Capex/Opex threshold; simplified low-overhead routing below it — execution capacity defended by rule, not by meeting.
- Prioritization mechanics: consolidated backlog with standardized scoring; list, Kanban, and hierarchy views; manual stack-ranking authority reserved to portfolio managers.
- Roadmap and dependency mapping: execution windows, milestones, and predecessor/successor dependencies managed on a live timeline with tracking-mode progress overlay.
- Planning lenses: sponsor-lens and portfolio-lens views so funding conversations and delivery conversations use the same data, cut differently.
- Benefits escalation: a defined process for surfacing risks to intended outcomes before they become variance.